Garden Beginnings

The plan . . .

The help . . . 

And now . . .

tomatoes, marigolds, and lovely daisies

squash, lettuce, spinach, flowers, peppers, basil, green onions, carrots, cilantro, and parsley

first fruits!

Garden Update

I promise our summer is more exciting than garden updates, but the garden does show fun, significant change. And we enjoy looking back on the pictures. So here is where we were as of last week!

If you look really closely, you'll see that the bottom half of many of the plants are dying. We deduced, with the help of a few tomato experts, that we had a fungus on our hands. (It just seems cruel that the word "fun" is in fungus!) Dave found a fungicide and we had to wait a week before harvesting again. Hopefully the rest of our tomatoes will still ripen nicely!

Not sure you can see them, but the abundance of cherry tomatoes have been so much fun. Sarah loves to pick these and prefers to eat them before we get inside. Since they seem to be rather perfectly throat size, she has learned that she has to share with Daddy. He eats half of it for safety, as well as to eliminate the juicy pop. Sarah found that scary!

The watermelon vine likes this spot. Baby blueberry bush is on the right.

Hi, baby watermelon!

I picked a ton of parsley this week...and you can't even tell that I touched the plant. So. Much. Parsley. Our parsley meal of the week was tabbouleh.

We are trying a new freezing method- the "parsley log." In theory, this is now a dense, frozen hunk of parsley from which we can slice as needed. Well see how it works!

Garden Update

A photo tour of the garden since the last update. (Most recent are first.)

The haul this morning. Can you guess what didn't come form the garden? :)

Overflowing parsley. When I see people buying it at the store I always wish for a way to give them some of ours! The basil is also growing back after I picked it clean for a couple of batches of pesto and freezer storage. Thanks for the good ideas!

A couple of new peppers. (We ate the one on the left for dinner tonight.)

"Say cheese" face. (I think she looks like Josiah in this pic...)

She is fun :)

Proud of our harvest.

After picking, she wouldn't put them down. This was coming back from the mailbox.

And when I finally had her put them on the counter, she was ok with that for about a split second. Then we had a teachable moment :)

First baby watermelon. This guy is a little bigger than a softball now. While he is growing nicely, we have been told that the first frost will come before it ripens.

Tomatoes starting to ripen!

The very first picking.

It took a couple of months, but the watermelon vine finally took off.

Parsley earlier on.

Baby pepper.

First turning tomatoes.

Vines are loaded!

The first pepper we picked- the first real fruit of the garden!

Garden Update

The garden is coming right along! We are especially excited about the flowers, tomatoes, basil, parsley, and our one green bell pepper. Does anyone have any suggestion for what to do with a ton of parsley and basil?

This pepper was on the plant when it went in the ground. It is grocery store size now!

Sarah likes to pile her rocks around the flower bed...and sometimes play in the dirt between this bed and the blueberries.

Lots of cherry tomatoes!

It is pretty!

This bed isn't doing as well, but has an abundant supply of basil and parsley.

Our first big tomato!

Garden 2012

pretty flowers, big tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, a watermelon, a rogue potato, and one of our two blueberry bushes in the background

lettuce, another watermelon, parsley, basil, and 4 kinds of peppers

We hope that the marigolds will keep some of the bugs away!

The lettuce was our only "from seed" crop. Some came up!

On Friday, June 1st, we planted our garden. The Cooks helped clean and prep the raised beds in early May and the Howells helped plan and plant in late May/early June. We look forward to keeping you updated throughout the summer!

Tomatoes!

This post was written on September 4th and has been waiting for the picture to be uploaded to the computer.

The tomatoes have (finally) really taken off. Many have been chewed on and some were thrown around by Irene, but enough have produced that we were able to give our first produce away. Yay! More than any other thus far, these tomatoes, our final fruit, are bringing much joy to our home.

Green bean win

Here is our first green bean crop! Since this photo, we have had another picking about the same size. Our little row has given us much joy.


Now we are waiting for our huge tomatoes to turn red!