The Garden

Wow! Summer is flying by! I've been so busy making cakes and taking care of my gardens that I keep forgetting to take enough pictures and post them. I'm way behind on keeping up with my cake pictures from the past two months, so while I'm collecting those I'll talk about my first real gardening season.

We had our yard landscaped right around the end of May, and had our landscaper put in a couple of long raised beds in our backyard. Each bed is 3'x20', so I thought this would be plenty big enough to start with. I started my seeds inside at the end of March, planting plenty of everything thinking that some would die or get eaten by bugs, or whatever, so I would end up with a couple of everything. Well, it turned out that pretty much everything did really WELL, and I had to make a home for about 18 tomato plants (even AFTER I thinned them out in the starters!), about half as many pepper plants, brussels sprouts, marigolds and herbs. Again, I transferred them all to the beds thinking some wouldn't make it due to the wind, bugs, critters, or whatever, but pretty much all of them DID. So I gave a bunch away to neighbors and coworkers to have their own gardens started, and kept as many as I thought the space could handle. Now, three months later, it's STILL too crowded, and we're debating whether to try for a winter garden or if we'd have to add more beds. I guess this is a good problem to have? Here's some pictures:

Here's the garden in the back yard. Behind our yard is a huge field of soybeans.

This is me cutting some of the Swiss chard. I started it directly from seed in the garden at the end of May, and it grew like crazy. We just cut a couple of leaves from each plant at a time and it's still plentiful. I think it should keep on sprouting through fall until frost. I also planted spinach just to the left of it, and some mesclun mix which have both done fairly well. (see the Romaine heads just to the right?) The spinach is starting to taper off, I'm guessing because of the heat. Should I start some more seeds to have for fall? We've been eating lots of salads and spinach-ricotta pizza this summer!

One of the sweet pepper plants. It started growing its first pepper right about the same time the first tomato started growing, on July 17th (can you tell I was excited?). Can you find the pepper? I also have poblano peppers growing. They're all blooming flowers like crazy now, and there's probably at least a dozen of each kind sprouting. No more $4.99/lb at the grocery store!!

This is my treasured first tomato sprouted of the season. =) I was wondering how so many tomato blossoms would ever get pollinated when there weren't really any other flowers around, but apparently I had no idea. Now this same tomato is still green and big enough to fill my hand without my fingers wrapping all the way around, and there's a few dozen others just like it!! These are heirloom brandywines, and I'm also growing romas that are sprouting by the half-dozen (!)

I spend a decent amount of time in the garden, but probably no more than what I spend grocery shopping every week and it's way cheaper. This was taken when I was finished staking the brandywine tomatoes (they're almost as tall as I am, and pulling the stakes over now). Guess I've got a little more than a green thumb.... =D