There's something about having a baby that just sucks the time out of your life, so the garden blog has been a bit on hold, but I did take some pictures through the summer of the harvests so I figured I'd share that. This season was amazingly amazing! Nearly every plant did not only well but exceptional. The only ones that didn't was the squash, watermelon, and lima beans. Check out the rest:
A good panoramic shot of my 256 sq foot garden. Still space to expand.
These turned out to be volunteer mini pumpkins. I think I harvested about 10 little pumpkins, two are surviving this day, although they are edible, I've just used them as decoration.
Zucchini grows pretty fast. This one was neglected while I was in the hospital having a baby, but it was still tasty, it hadn't grown too big or tough yet.
Wound up harvesting 40 ears of corn, many stalks produced two ears! I've never had that happen before. Some were picked a little early because the corn ear worms were really bad this year.
Just growing, before things grew out of hand. I had a hard time keeping my plants in the beds this year they got so big.
During peak growing, this is a pretty typical day to day harvest.
Corn ear worm. The kids had fun finding them, they came in quite an array of colors. Thankfully while it was gross finding them, they didn't decimate the corn and so I still had lots of yummy corn to put away in the freezer.
My sunflower got huge this year, look at what a hot mess the rest of the garden is, it was growing out of control and trying to recover from birth I could not get a handle on it.
This was the potato yield of three plants. I didn't think it was that great.
Then I pulled up the rest of the plants and in total weighed 15 lbs from 3 lbs of seed, So I think I did ok despite not doing anything but just planting them in the ground.
The first cantaloupe of many. So many cantaloupe and they were all huge!
After I took out the russet potatoes and squash, the ONE sweet potato plant took over, It's still out there growing and I can't contain it anymore. I don't know anything about growing sweet potatoes but I think you're supposed to dig them up and cure them when the plant starts to die, so I've just let it be alone, maybe in November I'll harvest it.
I even got a couple of gigantic figs to eat! MMM These are brown turkey figs... coupled with the persimmons my mom brought back from my grandma's house in Louisiana, it's a southern treat for these fruits that are a very rare find in grocery stores.
The kids love to help shuck corn.
For a while I had handful after handful of asparagus to eat. Next year is going to be even more awesome. I finally just stopped picking asparagus because I was tired of eating it!!
I had so many tomatoes I canned in total more than 2 dozen pints of salsa and another half dozen of spaghetti sauce.
The brown marmorated stink bugs were HORRIFIC this year. I desperately wanted to give away tomatoes but they were basically decimated by those terrible bugs, so I had to can the tomatoes, they were ugly but still edible.
My biggest tomato was a Cherokee chocolate. It was so yummy. I produced my biggest tomatoes ever this year, lots of really large slicers and I wasn't even aggressive about pruning. See more tomatoes and the mini pumpkins on the table in the background. That was spillover tomatoes. My counters are FULL.
The cucumbers came on a bit later than the tomatoes, but they got eaten up, my kids love cucumbers.
Another sampling of cantaloupes. They were SO sweet and juicy. You just can't find em like that in the grocery store. I was pretty sad that the watermelons didn't work out. The cantaloupe plants choked them out they grew so much faster.
And there you have it, an amazing Spring/Summer garden. I never did get out and plant okra, I'm sure it would have been mind boggling how well they would have done, I was just too exhausted and sleep deprived from caring for a newborn, Keeping up with picking and eating/canning the existing produce was all I could do.
