Garden Update

Our garden is just booming!  Of course it took off when we had to be out of town so we came back and had some veggies too overgrown to eat.

We've had zucchini every night this week - we've done 3 different types.  We finally have eightballs coming in and will have stuffed eightball this weekend - I'm looking forward to it!

Last night we had our first cabbage along with the squash.  It was very tasty!

We (I say "we" but it's really "he") got the sprinklers up and running before we had to be away and they are working just great.

Cooler Week

This week has been cooler, though drier (until today - 100% chance of rain today, AND I'm writing with rain drops on my glasses from just getting back from the bus stop!).

Yesterday, Mike went to a local nursery and bought our pepper plants (green bell, red bell, pablano and jalepeno), herbs, tomatoes for the actual garden box (the ones in the greenhouse will be patio tomatoes), but he could not find eggplant!  Last year we never found the pablano peppers - which are my very favorite.

It is pouring down rain, so we won't get those planted today.  It's also cooler today - might not even get to 60 degrees.  Odd for Georgia in late April!  Usually we are already getting the pool ready by now, but we are barely in the 70's, if at all lately.

I am very excited to report that my turnips are already coming up!  They are the fastest and the first summer plant to harvest!  (We have lettuce, broccoli and cabbage as well - the broccoli may be ready to harvest next week and the cabbage is coming on as well!)

Unfortunately, we are very weed-ridden this year.  We did not have the time to re-do all the boxes with fresh soil, so the weeds are just rampant.  Mike bought something - not sure what - to try and deal with it, so I will report what and how well it works as we go!

I'm very excited about our garden this year!  I'm hoping we can keep up our work on it.  May is always a really busy month and this year we have a college graduation to deal with on top of the usual elementary school events, plus a high school child ready to take her driver's license test if I can just manage to get her to a DMV to do it!  Gah!  Sometimes the garden just doesn't make it for all the things we have to do, but we are really going to try!

Planting Day

Yesterday was planting day!  Mike and our daughter Riley got out there and got most of the seeds planted!  We still need to buy actual plants (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant) and get that box ready as well as clean out another bean box.

Here is my planting log:

And here is the 2015 Garden Map:

And here are the pictures from yesterday's planting:

Our 2015 Garden

We are soooo running behind this year.  I haven't done ANY pictures, though Mike has been outside working hard.

He has up his new greenhouse which he got for his birthday last year.  He has tomatoes and artichokes coming up in there, though I don't think they are near ready to plant into the garden yet.

He has replaced and re-mixed soil in most of our boxes.  We had great plans for changing out some of them, but we are so far behind, I don't think that will happen.

We ate lettuce from the garden last night and had our first salad of the season with our own produce!  We have broccoli and cabbage growing.

We hope to get everything planted today.  It's been the first day in over 2 weeks with no rain predicted, so we need to get out there.  I'm actually glad we didn't get out there earlier as I think all the seeds would have rotted with the amount of rain we've had!

I promise I will start posting pictures on a regular basis.

I'm excited to begin our garden season!

2013 - What happened??

This year has been a whirlwind.

First, the weather has been weird.  It was cold and wet a lot longer than last year.  It was already in the 90's last year by the end of April.  We haven't hit 90 here yet this year.

Second, it was a graduation year, so most of our spring was tied up in getting the house ready for all the family and friends coming in for that.

Still, we did manage to start our garden.  I just didn't take the pictures or document it like last year.  And because of our time issues, we didn't get the tomatoes staked, so they are a sprawling mess.  Our beans didn't come up - due to the weather - so I'm not sure what we will have in that department this year.

We have had lots of lettuce, though.  So we have been enjoying garden salads.  And all of our squash is now coming in!  Dinner last night was summer squash and zucchini 8 ball squash:

And we have tomatoes that are green and turning red, jalapeno peppers, green peppers almost ready to eat! We planted cucumbers, turnips (oh, those are ready as well), okra, carrots ... oh, and we've had spinach come in as well.

Our cherry tree is really going to town and we will have a good crop of blueberries (if the birds don't eat them!).  I ate our first blackberry yesterday.

So, it has been eventful, just not documented - or well kept.  The garden looks a mess this year.

I just wanted to post since we have produce coming in.  We will be doing some freezing of the squash (of course it all comes in at the same time, no matter how we try and stagger planting dates!).

I will endeavor to post more, but I make no promises.  Hopefully next year will be a better year!

Harvest Time

Boy have we had the veggies rolling in!  We've had so much that we spent most of Sunday freezing our produce!  We have another batch of pole beans to pick and a lot more turnips to get in as well, but it's been raining for two days.  Bad for harvesting, but the garden is loving the wet weather!

This is just part of the harvest!  We have really been enjoying the fresh veggies!  You can see we also have blackberries and another batch of strawberries is coming in as well!

The freezing went really well, too.

2 pots going - one for the blanching and one full of ice water

I used a basket for the blanching - it made it easy!

After they are blanched and cooled, they drain

We used our foodsaver to get all the air out of the bags

Ready for the freezer!

We did pole beans, bush beans and yellow squash! 

And the garden is just looking great!

I expect we'll have corn soon!

So the garden is doing just great!  I will keep you posted!

Another Batch!

As I said, we are getting swamped with squash!  Tonight I'm going to fry it (last night I boiled it) with onions and some bacon for flavor.  I'll make the turnips as well.  It also looks like we have enough beans for a small batch - I haven't picked those yet.  It's already hot and sticky out there.  We have several jalapenos ready to pick as well.  Lots of tiny green peppers, too!  Our cucumbers are blooming away so I hope to see some of those forming soon!

Our snap peas just didn't make this year.  We moved the box they were in and apparently they didn't like the new spot.  Disappointing.

The pole beans are covered in blooms, but no baby beans on them yet.  Our spinach is overgrown.  It sure was tasty when it was younger!

Here is today's batch of squash and turnips.  There are a lot more out there that are just about ready to pick!  Maybe I'll freeze some this year!  There is nothing like fresh garden veggies in the fall and winter!