The constant gardener

I take pictures of my garden like I do my children.  I relate to gardening in a similar way that I do to raising my children, actually.  Part of the reason I only like to garden starting from seeds, rather than starts, is because I just feel so proud that I helped these big, beautiful vegetables grow from a tiny, little seed - (although the fact that it saves a TON of money using seeds instead of starts doesn't hurt).  And after the week I've had with my boys, I'm thankful that if I tend the garden and make sure it has enough water, protect it from slugs, weeds, and fertilize it - it pretty much IS going to produce what I think it will..... can't say the same about the boys right now.  (That's my NEXT post). 

Anyway - the early summer salads of fresh lettuce, green onions, radishes, and peas were lovely - and the STRAWBERRIES!  Let me tell you about the strawberries!  Bumper crop this year - colander after colander of these.....

Come to think of it - I just realized I haven't bought any vegetables in almost 4 months - gotta love that.  

Skipping ahead a couple months, below is a picture of what I harvested out of the garden this past weekend...

Every year I learn something new about gardening - which means every year I get to be better at it.  In previous years, every time I would thin the starts, whatever I moved always died.  So this year I decided I wasn't going to thin and just see if it would make a difference.  I learned that yes, yes it does make a big difference.  I didn't get the bumper crop of zucchini or pumpkins this year like I did last year.  I got some, but not the same.  And some things still grew - but grew in miniature without room to grow properly.  Lesson learned.  

The new additions this year were celery and broccoli - and both will be back again.  Ronny and I had to pick our mouths up off the floor when all 3 children asked for seconds of broccoli the first night we ate it.  It really does taste significantly different than store bought.  

Some veggies grew better this year than ever before - the corn certainly has.  I think we're going to get TWO meals worth of good, sweet, perfect corn - huge success for down here.  The green beans that I've tried to grow all 3 years finally produced this year without getting eaten by slugs or chipmunks.

I finally got a great deal of basil to grow outside (usually it's my inside basil that I use).  It was interesting to me to feel the difference of the leaves from the basil outside and inside.  The outside basil leaves were a good 7 times thicker than inside basil leaves - that's how much hardier it has to be to survive outside.  But I channeled my inner Italian and turned it into 6 jars of homemade pesto.... 

I'm still waiting on a few veggies that I hope will have the time to ripen before the first frost - cherry tomatoes, peppers, artichokes, and luckily we do have 5 pumpkins going strong.  Five mature pumpkins is always my goal - one for each member of the family.