The Garden Update

We have potatoes!!!  They are decent sized potatoes but would have been larger if I had planted them correctly.  I will correct all errors made this year and next year will be a bumper crop.  I'll also have a root cellar by then and have a place to store them.

Call Mike if you want some potatoes.  They are just fabulous when lightly coated in olive oil and baked in a metal pan at 450 for about 45 minutes.  Then just dust with sea salt......mmmmm good!

This is the pumpkin patch.  The weeds also came up from no where and surrounded the garden.  I've decided I really don't care about weeds as long as they are not hindering the growth of my veges.  It's actually less work if you let them grown really tall- and then pull them out.  I might have pulled a weed in the same spot 3-4 times and this way I only pull once in that timeframe.  

Next year I am also planting clover in between the vegetables and choose a nice short weed that I don't even have to pick. 

Pumpkins flowering.  Lots of bees buzzing around this morning.  

I can say that we'll have plenty of pumpkins and we'll be setting a date for a pumpkin picking party.  Say that 6 times really fast.  Pumpkin picking party.

The red lettuce is gorgeous!  And delicious!  We went over to a friends house for dinner friday night and we had a salad that was almost 100% fresh from the garden.  I need to do carrots next year as that was the missing ingredient.

More Swiss Chard, Romaine lettuce and asian greens.  I'm not so sure about the asian greens-- they are even more spicy than arugula.  

I really don't understand how cabbage can be so cheap at the grocery store.  I've spent about $10 in seeds and soil and I'll be lucky to get 5 cabbages.  There is finally a little ball of cabbage starting to form!  The only thing harder for me to grow was eggplant.  I still have not gotten an eggplant to grow.  Maybe next year.

I harvested 4 varieties of beans.  I'll pick them off the vine and let them dry out for another few days.  Then we need to find a tool or machine to help separate the dried beans from the shell. 

Although I'm sure that there has to be something out there that is smaller scale than those links.  Ah Mike just gave me a better link.

Edamame!  Almost ready to pick.  Emily is soooooo excited!  

Although Emily who is a notoriously picky eater, just ate noodles with my homemade tomato sauce today.  The sauce was made today and the only ingredients were: fresh tomatoes and basil with a dash of salt.  That's it.  YUMMMM!   I was going to jar it up - but everyone ate it up so I had no more left to jar!  2 weeks and the serious canning begins.  

Baby watermelon!!  I've never grown watermelon so I was suprised to see how different it grows from pumpkins.  I should have put more straw around the watermelon as the weeds took over and I had to spend 2 hours today clearing a path for the watermelons to grow.