Making A Meal

We always joke that this is our snacking garden, that there isn't enough food at one time to make a meal.  Well, we were slow in getting there but we made it happen.  We just eat all of the greens together!  I can't believe that we didn't think of that sooner.

So, here are all of the veggies that we would cook together and add to our meal. There's broccoli, snow peas and Chinese broccoli.  They all go well together and you end up with a veggie medly.  We steam and then saute with garlic. YUM!  We were on a roll and didn't buy veggies from the store for a long while. It feels so rewarding to eat from your own garden.

Harvest Time! - A Closer Look

Mini Peppers

Snow Peas

Kai Lan or Chinese broccoli

Harvest Time!

We've harvested a few things here and there so far, but this is the first real harvest.  A big bowl of home-grown goodness!  We picked broccoli, spring onion, peppers, tomatoes and chinese broccoli...a little bit of each one.

Fall Garden 2012 - 2013

Although there was a gap in the blogging, we actually did plant a fall/winter garden, so there was no gap in the gardening action around here. This is the bed to the right.We started out with 1 large variety tomato plant (maybe Big Boy or Better Boy), 2 eggplants, 9 brussel sprouts, a row of boc choy from seed, 2 red pepper plants, a row of scallions from seed, a row or two of Chinese broccoli from seed and peas running up the trellis, also from seed.

What's left?

Well, neither of the eggplants made it which is so weird since in the last garden they were OUT OF CONTROL. The plants got woody stems about 2 inches thick at the base and actually got so big that they bent the heavy duty tomato cages used to hold them up.  Now?  Nothing, the plants hardly grew at all before just wilting away.

There are only 3 or 4 brussel sprout plants left out of the original 9.  A bunch of 'em were dug up early on by some wildlife looking for a good time, we think maybe cats. 

Those are our major casualties, everything else is just plugging away.

Here is the raised bed on the left. It was planted with 2 cherry tomato plants, cucumbers, onions, garlic and broccoli.

 Everything is still here and growing except the cucumbers, they got white powdery mildew early on and didn't make it. They barely got half way up the trellis before fizzling out. That mildew is just too much to keep on top of!  It attacks early and never really goes away, you can just try and control it. One little slip up though and BAM, the plant is covered.  Seems like cucumbers are just too much work down here in this zone and I doubt that I'll be planting them again.


Overall, this garden is super exciting for us because we have new things to grow! I love to watch how plants grow and vegetables form, so it's been fun. New to us are the broccoli, Chinese broccoli, boc choy, brussel sprouts, onions and garlic.

Passion Flower Love

Volunteers

Every year in Dad's garden he would have "volunteers" come up. He was the first person I ever heard refer to self seeded plants as volunteers. I've since heard just about every gardener use that term.  When I was young I thought that he was so clever for coming up with that......but maybe it's been around a while. In my mind anyway, he gets full credit. Up above is a lettuce volunteer next to some scallions.  We didn't plant any lettuce seeds at all so these are seeds that dropped from the last garden and germinated by themselves.

Here is a tomato plant that volunteered to sprout on it's own. I'm quick to pluck these guys out though because I read that the fruit is not great from a tomato that's come up like this. Not sure if there's any truth to that, but since space is an issue in my little raised beds, it had to go.

More lettuce of  a different variety. These I'll let grow because they happened to come up in an area that's not a space issue.

Garden Update - Couple Weeks Ago

 I'm a little behind on the posting, so this was the garden a few weeks ago.   I remember aiming for March 17 as my planting date but I'm pretty sure that didn't happen. I'm not quite sure how old the garden is, maybe 4 weeks total?   So let's say this was the garden at 2 weeks old. In the top pic you can see the pickling cucumbers starting to go up the trellis and some seeds coming up. Boy those scallions look scrawny!

 This box has the strawberries on the far end with the lemon cucumbers. I over seeded the cukes and I think every single one germinated. I probably should thin them out but I hate doing that, if it sprouted, I wanna give it a chance. I may regret that when the bugs and diseases start running rampant and everything s packed so close together. 

 Speaking of bugs, something has been nibbling on the eggplant already. A little leafminer damage as well, that's the white wiggly lines.

Here are the lemon cukes. Surprisingly hardy with thick sturdy stems in such young plants. The regular pickling cukes are usually falling all over themselves at this height.  Lookin' good!

And of course the marigolds that I started myself from seed. Saved $10.00 by saving my own seeds and starting them on my own. Marigolds are SUPER easy and well worth doing yourself. Interestingly, I loved the flowers that had an orange center and dark red/orange border so I only saved seeds from those specific flowers. And look what I got, everything but the one I saved!