Summer Garden Update

Here are a few pictures of the garden from the last month or two.

In the picture below the long bushy row is our potatoes, both Yukon Gold and some blue ones.

In the cages are some bell pepper starts, and the little row on the right are tomato starts, that we got cheap as it was kind of late in the season for starts.

We planted a 50' row of sweet peas, but only about a 12' section grew, but we enjoyed what the Lord did provide.

Below are our zucchini just starting to grow, and we are now overrun with them.  We had numerous volunteer plants come up as well, and one of those is the largest plant we have.

Below is Lily in front of a volunteer, that is not even getting watered it is going crazy!

We planted a 15'x15' patch of sweet corn and only had 6-7 plants come up, and they were swallowed up by weeds as I counted it a lost cause with so few plants.  Last year they grew pretty well, but in a different spot.

Here is one of our first bell peppers.  We may only get a dozen or so.  We really would like to have a bunch of plants so that we could cut them up and freeze them to be used later.  Maybe next year we will get our seeds started early enough.

This is a tomato on Ethan's plant.  He is always looking for the big Beef Steak tomatoes.

Our blueberry bushes did pretty well this year, we could probably use another 15-20 bushes.  We still ended up going to a u-pick to stock up for the year.   Now I just need to learn how to prune the bushes.  If you know how, stop on by!

NOT OUR GARDEN

THIS IS WHAT I PRAY OUR GARDEN WILL LOOK LIKE SOMEDAY

This is the garden of my dad's cousin, and it is gorgeous.  He sent us home with a huge handful of chard.

So, currently we are eating romaine lettuce from our garden and it seems to be doing well.  We still have some turnips growing, a couple of sunflowers, some sweet meat squash, and possibly some acorn.  Our tomatoes are starting to turn from green to orange, and our green beans are climbing.  The slicing cucumbers are climbing their trellis, which is very exciting and we had one the other day, it was delicious.

While on vacation a deer blew through our fencing.  My first trip through the garden when we got back I noticed that the green beans appeared to have been nipped off about 4' up, and then I noticed our raspberry canes were just stalks with all the leaves gone.  Then I found the massive hole in the fencing.  Our fencing is a 4' high metal fence with the deer netting taking it up to about 7', and so far this has worked pretty well.  Although the deer netting is so fine sometimes I wonder if they can see it.  Ethan asked "why do they call it deer fencing if they can jump through it??"  Good question!  Another reason they were able to take advantage of our garden was that the motion sprinkler "Scarecrow" battery was dead.

Zucchini overtaking our kitchen island.

Hash browns.  Some of the potatoes were sliced by the shovel and would not store well, so we cooked them and then shredded them to be frozen and used as hash browns later.  No that is not mold, that is our blue/purple potatoes.

Something we did differently with the potatoes this year, is that we did not water them at all.  We did mound dirt on the one long row, and put some straw around them, but that is it, and they seem to have grown pretty well.  Potatoes are not one of those huge cost savers, by growing your own, but they are fairly easy, and fun.  The kids have been working off and on all week to dig them up.