How does your garden grow?

Things are coming along in the garden!

Firstly, and thankfully, the strawberry season is coming to a close. We have pints and pints of strawberry jam, canned and frozen. We have cleaned and hulled berries individually frozen and bagged for the winter. We’ve had our fill of strawberry shortcake and fresh strawberries for breakfast, lunch and supper. And, as an added bonus this year, we were able to sell pints and pints of strawberries at our roadside stand!

The asparagus is also fading away:

We’re starting to pick snow peas now. As usual, they’re so good right off the plant that only about half the peas make it up to the house – the rest are consumed al fresco in the garden! Here’s a photo of our second planting.

We picked a small bunch of golden chard and had that sauteed with a chopped garlic scape (just learned what those are this year – it’s the little seed pod that appears this time of year on the garlic shoots) with dinner last night.

We’ve been eating tender mixed baby lettuce nearly every day!

There’s some romaine, too:

The corn is about 6 to 8 inches tall now. There are about 200 plants that took this year, so that should keep us well fed and leave plenty for freezing!

The cantaloupe and watermelon have sprouted – they were planted most recently in some extra space we had leftover.

We’ve picked patty pan squash and chopped it up in pasta salad last night – crunchy good! This picking in this photo might go on our pizza tonight!

Here’s a baby, still on the vine:

The giant butternut squash plants are looking healthy. These butternut squashes, called “Argonaut”, end up on average 15lbs or so when mature! And they taste fantastic! People teased us about them at first, but not after we gave them one to try!

The zucchini and cucumber are going slowly. I think they need a bit more water.

Zuke:

Cuke:

This will be a lovely winter carnival squash:

I weeded the carrots last week and I think they’re taking advantage of not having to compete with the weed roots and they’re doing great!

The beets are flourishing, too. We’d better pick some soon!

The snap peas are maturing, but it will be a little while before they’re ready to pick. Someone picked one yesterday to sample – the peas are SO sweet!

And the beans are finally looking nice. For some reason, the beans we’ve planted for the past two years in didn’t do so well this year. We over-sowed with some Italian green beans, so between the two varieties, we should have plenty of green beans.

And our grape vine is LOADED with tiny grape clusters! It’s pretty amazing, because last year we got ONE bunch of grapes!

The rhubarb is down there, too – 3 plants. But it’s too sad looking to show you(!) Suffice it to say, it’s still alive – a first for me to have it live 2 seasons in a row!

The onions continue to grow – we have 3 varieties, sweet, yellow and red. We just did some MAJOR weeding, so that should make them quite happy!

I have some celery in for the first time, but it’s goin
g pretty slowly.

And the eggplant is doing well, but no blossoms yet! Last year we put it in when it was a bit younger, and the flea beetles did a number on it. This year it was more mature and survived, plus we put way more in, so we may actually get a few eggplants this year!

Here’s our biggest green pepper…the plants themselves are looking great!

The tomatoes are finally perking up. Here’s one row:

Here are some of the larger ones:

and some cute little cherry style:

Last – the potatoes…white and yellow are looking good – not all of them sprouted for some reason, but we should get a reasonable amount of potatoes.

And the sweet potatoes are coming along just fine. I think we have about 40 vines that survived the initial planting.

I think that covers it! I actually didn’t realize how many different things we have planted until I did this little inventory! And that doesn’t include all of the herbs we have up here by the house and all of the flowers that went in this year out front AND the apple trees that are bearing fruit for the first year!

What a blessing to have a part in bringing this place to life! And to be able to feed ourselves from our garden is a most incredible blessing! Even though my thumb and forefinger tips are sore nearly black from pulling weeds, I wear the stains proudly, though I’m not sure why they say people have green thumbs, mine’s definitely more black!