Veggies #1

About a year and a half ago I decide I had to have a vegetable garden.  I pushed at the idea until Robert bought in and we ended up creating two raised beds.  Now we are in the middle of our second summer with home-grown vegetables and I’m not sure how I did without them!

Our first summer we put in 2 tomatoes, 3 peppers, green beans, onions, carrots, and zucchini.  We filled in the rest of the beds with herbs and planted corn on the other side of the backyard.  The tomatoes were yummy, the peppers OK, green beans a complete flop – looked pretty but were inedible.  The zucchini went crazy, we still have shredded zucchini in the freezer from last September.  The carrots were not so great, but the green onions did very well.  The corn, like the green beans, was inedible, but I think we left it on the stalks too long.

For our Fall planting we put in more green onions, lettuce, and broccoli.  The broccoli did well.  We should have planted more!  The lettuce was good but we put in so much of it that we ended up with more than we could eat.  Found out the hard way that we shouldn’t leave lettuce in the ground too long, the bugs moved in big time!  I’ve never seen so many earwigs and spiders!  Yuck!  Who wants to eat lettuce full of bugs – not me!  I won’t be planting more lettuce.

Now we have herbs, zucchini, green onions, peppers, and tomato in the garden.  The tomato has taken over.  I’ve begun referring to it as ‘the monster vine.’  One plant is now between five and six feet wide!  It has so many tomatoes on it I can’t count them all.  Yesterday’s harvest was eight tomatoes.

Yes, that’s one plant.

Yes, that’s an eight foot by four foot bed.

No, I’m not watering anything in this part of the yard except the vegetable beds.

There’s a water shortage on people!

The zucchini are also doing well.  We have two plants in this year and will hopefully have fresh squash into October.  More photos soon of the rest of the veggies.  But here’s some of yesterday’s bounty.