In the Garden

Our garden had been an adventure and a half. No one told me your first year is hard. But as I am lovingly reminded by the hubs, "[I] need to ask before I start things." Someday I will learn that lesson. Our garden seems to flourish in the beginning. It was literally a jungle. But our very green and luscious jungle was not producing fruit due to the very rainy and rather cool summer. Thankfully stuff decided to bare fruit, eventually. 

Our yellow crookneck squash was booming for a while. We had so much we were eating daily and giving it away! That was fun. 

We got a pretty good amount of green beans too! The kids ate our garden fresh beans SO much better than they ever have the store bought ones.

Our peppers have done wonderfully. Because this was our first garden, I don't plan well, and we weren't completely sure what we were getting into we have had peppers for months without the necessary tomatoes to make salsa....So we tried drying the peppers...we gave some away. I even got to pickle jalapeños while the Gee's were here!! That was a new and fun experience. Devin and Ryan approved and I am glad because we will need to do it again here in a couple of weeks.  

Around the beginning of August our garden decided to die. We discovered it had been infested by squash bugs...the kind you don't discover until your plant is dead and they have already infested every other plant around them -- type of bug.

 

I know this picture doesn't make much sense but the middle where it is black...that is where the plant goes into the ground...that black spread across all the vines. 

Yeah, that was a very sad day. So we lost our crazy fast producing crookneck; our butternut squash; and sadly our watermelon and cantaloupe. We were so excited for those melons!! We let them stay on the vine as long as possible but the watermelons weren't quite there. They have a great texture, just not a whole lot of flavor. The cantaloupe didn't make it at all. They were still too small and started rotting on the vine....like I said, "sad, sad day."

When we were planting the garden Lucy spilled some carrot seeds at the top of the green bean row. We tried to pick most of them up and plant them in the right row, then kind of forgot about them. A few weeks later we had this lovely patch of green coming up out of the ground! I'm glad we didn't mistake them for weeds because we have had some really good carrots come from her little mishap!

This is where she spilled...

See them popping out of the ground?

They were on the small side, but we needed to check to see if they were big enough to harvest...like I said we are a little clueless!

She was beyond ecstatic! And still is every time we go get some more of her carrots :) Can you spy Devin's handful of green beans in the background?! 

Even through the unfortunate turn of events for our garden we have had many good things come of it and we have learned SO SO SO much! 
~I learned that lettuce grows into trees!! Who knew?? We weren't pulling the whole head out, just the leaves off and it kept growing..I think right now our lettuce is almost 4 ft tall. 
~Tomato plants get way too big to keep upright. Ours are enormous and seem to do better now that they have all fallen over.
~Bunnies will eat all your lovely little peas leaving you absolutely nothing....I'm only a little mad about that one!
~And you need to treat for squash bugs and know what to look for and when to prevent infestation...
~Among many other things :)