have a garden

Tomatoes, tomatoes everywhere, and all of them to eat!

I have half a million cherry tomatoes in the back yard! So many that I was able to freeze several cups the other day of them. Quick way to freeze whole cherry tomatoes: dip them in boiling water for 10 or so seconds until the skins are loose.

My zucchinis aren’t as prolific at the moment, but my pole beans have caught up. Bush beans taste better, but I’ve found the pole beans to produce more, and I’m not fussy, anyway.

I have picked exactly ONE cucumber, lol!

My sunflowers are an easy 10 feet tall. I think one borders on 12 feet. It’s hard to say for sure now, though, because they are so top heavy they are drooping downwards. No wonder; the blooms are 18 inches across!

No peppers and a few eggplants so far, but I have picked corn! One day Gabriel and I were out dodging grasshoppers and I ate an ear of corn raw, right then and there! I didn’t expect it to be so sweet while raw!

Tommy tells me they aren’t very good, but I’m more of a vegetable person than he is so…

Tonight Gabriel and I gathered a decent sized zucchini, a whole bunch of green bush beans – and Gabriel picked himself a green cherry tomato which he shoved in his mouth. All of the seeds and juicy insides spilled down his shirt. He looked so pleased with himself!

My mom sent me an email the other day, that goes like this:

Just wanted to say that it gives me pleasure to look out of my kitchen window and see the sunflowers and the yellow flower heads of the zucchini or whatever it is….it looks nice to see the growth and how tall they are and ‘life’ out there.

How sweet of her! (I should point out that we live on the same property, but not in the same house. We rent a comfortable little home we call the apartment from my family.)

I surprised myself with just HOW much I enjoyed having this garden. It was one of those things where I KNEW I wanted it, but in the past my green thumb isn’t so green. More like shriveled and yellow, lol! But I guess I’m not so bad a gardener after all. That’s a wonderful feeling.

I have blueprints in my head for a MUCH bigger garden next year. I won’t go into it all… That’s what next year is for! :D

A few days ago, Gabriel and I shared the first of the strawberries from my everbearing strawberry plant. A few days after that, we ate the first of my green pole beans right off the plant together.

For two days I was unable to go out to check on everything and when I finally got out on Wednesday, I found five of the most massive zucchinis that I didn’t even know were there! I hooked up our fish scale with a plastic bag and weighed them. The largest clocked in at 2.2 pounds with the other four ranging from 3/4 to 7/8’s of that.

When Tommy and I cook, we add zucchini to pretty much everything now. Pasta, rice, salads, soups, cereal – wait, no, not that!!! lol

I’m going to freeze a ton of it (grated, cubed, sliced, probably even whole) and use it for later on. If I grate it, I can use it for breads, cakes, muffins, pancakes, probably even cookies! If I knew how to pickle, I could make relish, pickles, jams… Zucchini is a very versatile vegetable, and I reiterate what I said before about world hunger…

My corn has tassles now, my sunflowers are like seven feet tall!!, I have small pumpkins and what I think and hope are the start of my cantaloupes. My bush beans have little white blossoms and my cucumbers have start shaped yellow flowers. So far my peppers are still tanking, but July was quite rainy and cool, and peppers like it hot ‘n humid. Maybe they will catch up through August. (July, to the Native Americans, was aptly known as the Thunder Moon.)

My broccoli and cabbage all died when I tried to transplant it. :( It just withered right up. I don’t know if I moved it before it was big enough or what, but none of it survived, so no broccoli or cabbage this year. There is always next, though!

My tomatoes are literally weighed down with all of their produce. I have both cherry tomatoes and the larger kind, currently very very green. My onions are getting very tall, my dill and basil are great, and my eggplant is carrying on.

I’m really looking forward to Gabriel’s expression when we bite into a huge, red, juicy tomato. What a day that will be!!

I picked the very first zucchini two nights ago! (Gabriel used it as a toy in the pool, however, but that’s besides the point.)

I’ve got about a million more coming, so I expect that very soon I’ll have so many zucchini I won’t know what to do with them. Zucchini is a great veggie, though, and one of my favorites. I need to ask my grandma for her recipe for zucchini bread.

But judging from the size of my plants… I have to wonder if zucchini isn’t the answer to world hunger!

I also have pumpkins! I saw the blooms starting to open about a week ago, and now I see little yellow bulbs started. They are supposed to be HUGE pumpkins, at 100-500 lbs! I’m eager to see how big they get without extra fertilizer, as I used almost pure aged manure for the bed, and I wonder how much of that will contribute to their growth.

Did you know that brocoli and cabbage seeds look identical? I started some cabbage and broccoli from seed at the beginning of July and I think they are big enough now I can transplant them to the garden. They worried me a bit in their germination period, as the broccoli were old seeds… I think like 2 years old! And I spilled some of the cabbage seeds, too, but everything is coming up wonderfully… Then my cat, Mooka, went and scratched in them and bent them all over, and I thought for sure they would die! Next day, they were perky and reaching for the sun, so all is well there! (Now I just have to make sure that the cabbage loopers don’t get ‘em!)

I’m going to plant them with the alyssum, and I intend to plant some garlic nearby, too. Hopefully that will keep them pest-free.

I went out and chopped down the largest patch of lemon balm this morning… That stuff is nuts! You give it an inch and it takes a mile! I have a HUGE cluster drying in our bedroom, and the rest I fed to the goats. AND THERE IS STILL MORE! I left that, though, as it is still beneficial and if I need the space I can cut it down later, too.

I planted more onions one evening and they are starting to come up. My peppers are a concern, as they are not growing. I have many plants that don’t seem to be doing anything… I have one yellow banana pepper, and one green pepper, but that’s it. The others seem to have withered up to nothing.

I have a baby eggplant and plenty of blooms, however, as well as baby tomatoes on the way! The few that I have that are ripe, Gabriel likes to rip off the vine and stuff in his mouth. Earlier today Tommy sat with him and Gabriel smushed cherry tomato into his daddy’s arm. Heeheehee.

I also cleared a spot for the grape vines, and those have been planted for a while now. My sunflowers should start to bloom any day and I can hardly wait!

I could mark this as done, but I’m enjoying writing updates too much!

Last Thursday my mom, two little siblings, Gabriel and I were at Wal-Mart. We went to check out, but there was only 2 cashiers available (excluding the express). The one cashier is known for being grumpy, so we went with the other, who happened to have ever so slightly a shorter line.

I had picked up some of the discount perrenial flowers – a periwinkle, a purple mullein, and something else which I’ve forgotten…. along with a nice smelling basil plant. As we were loading up the belt, my mom goes “Oh, Lauraly, that’s not periwinkle!”

There was something growing in the pot, but it wasn’t what I was going to buy! So I told the cashier, who said that she had periwinle at home that she was planning on just throwing away because she had SO much of it! My mom was buying ferns, and she said she also had ferns that she was going to toss. She invited us out to her house to get all the perrenials that we wanted, and wrote her name and phone number down for us, telling us to call us Saturday.

So Saturday we called her up, and drove out to her beautiful home, complete with a small army of buckets. We got the periwinkle, the ferns, and a ton of other items, like star of bethlehem. I don’t even know what they are all called!

We were very thankful to get all of those plants, and she was just going to toss them anyway. It worked to both of our advantages! Serendipity!

I admit I still need to plant them… I’ve been working and been tired and busy when I’m not sleeping! My grandma brought me more tomato plants, and last week I bought a small herb garden, some discount pepper plants; red, green, banana and hot peppers! and a few flowers I really wanted – a poppy, phlox, carnation… At least my peppers, poppy and phlox are in the ground!

And I planted more sunflowers… I have this dream of a field of sunflowers, and although I’d have to till up our entire backyard for that, a small patch of just sunflowers will delight me no end.

May was unseasonably cold. It was ridiculous! I had garden fever, and my hands were tied!

Thankfully… I’ve finally been able to plant!

Using the “Companion Gardening” method I read about in Sally Jean Cunningham’s book, I arranged our garden plan so that organic gardening should be possible.

I am not finished planting – I still need pepper and tomato plants, bush beans, peas, most of my herb seeds, lettuce, radishes, cucumbers and onions. I did get to plant my 3 Sisters: corn, pole beans and zucchini, sunflowers, nasturtiums and pumpkins along with my charentais (sp?) cantelope I ordered special from rareseeds.com

I’ve recently returned to working full time nights after a year of maternity leave, so I didn’t want to overwhelm myself, get exhausted, and then burn out.

My energy level is good, though, and so far what I’m aiming for should be attainable.

I also have two blueberry plants (somethibg I have ALWAYS wanted!), a grape vine, a rose bush, white coneflower, St. John’s Wort, Alyssum, Foxglove, morning glory and water melon planned yet. I noticed that the Rose of Sharon plants my grandmother gave me are starting to get leaves, too.

Such abundant life!

I want:

a vegetable patch
an herb garden
some watermelons, canteloupe and srawberries would be nice, too!
a butterfly garden would be nice, but I’m trying not to get too carried away – I don’t have the world’s best green thumb.