The Garden

So, our garden is doing pretty well. We quite enjoy going out to check on it (and snacking on some little tomatoes, sugar snap peas, and strawberries while we’re out there). We have a cute little watermelon that is starting to grow on the vine at the top of the fence. And lots of tomatoes are getting ready to ripen now. We harvested almost all of our broccoli all at once, since it was getting ready to flower if we had waited longer – I don’t know if we’ll do broccoli next year or not – it seems like a lot of plant for a small amount of food, but then again, it did grow well and it tasted good. We’re still waiting on the carrots and beats. And we’ve been pretty surprised that the pumpkin plants haven’t produced any little pumpkins yet, since we’ve got 3 plants that have each vined about 4 feet tall and are covered with flowers (and there are always lots of bees in them, so I assume they’re getting pollinated). Don’t know about that. The squash plants haven’t produced any squash yet, and I’m really hoping they do, because that’s probably what I’m looking forward to most from our garden. The basil is still yummy – the lemon basil is good in chicken dishes and actually does taste like citrus, and we like the other types of basil on our pizzas. Most of our strawberry plants have stopped producing, but there are a number of plants in the middle that are still producing, and the strawberries on them are nice and big, like the ones you get in the grocery store – I’ll have to look back at my notes to see what type we planted in those spots. So far, a couple of the early-bird tomatoes, some of the grape tomatoes, and the heirlooms have started to ripen – and yesterday I had the first of my favorites: yellow pear tomatoes. And the cucumbers and zucchini are doing quite well. We also have a bunch of really large banana peppers on one plant that we probably need to harvest and figure out what to use them for. But I’ve learned that planting bell peppers from seeds in the spring isn’t wise – I have two little bell pepper plants out there that are each about 2 inches tall, and I doubt they’ll be big enough to get any peppers from before winter. So I’ll know to plant pepper plants instead of seeds next year. Oh, and the eggplants are kind of funny looking – one of them is about 6 inches long and it’s skinny, not really eggplant-shaped. But I’m sure it will still taste good. We’re still waiting on the onions, garlic, and potatoes too. I think you harvest potatoes in the fall, but I’m not sure about onions and garlic. So much to learn when you first start gardening. (Oh, and the black raspberries aren’t really in our garden, they were growing along the back fence, and we even got a nice number of berries from them for a few weeks until the squirrels and birds remembered they were there).