Out of Control!

Rather than doing things I should be doing (like cleaning, packing for the upcoming missions trip, making snacks for our 2 pool parties this week, etc.), I'm going to blog about my garden. I must say, I'm quite proud of her. She looks totally and completely out of control! I like to think of her as "full and happy." This year's garden is twice the size of last year's.

In this year's garden, I've planted:
- Several varieties of tomatoes

- Zucchini

- Summer Squash

- Green beans

- Cauliflower

- Lettuce

- Green pepper

- Strawberries


My green beans are rockin' it! We already have gotten enough for generous portions at 2 meals.

I'm expecting a decent bounty of Zucchini and Summer Squash. Someone should've warned me how crazy big these plants get! I'm sure I put too many in my garden!

My tomato plants seem to have gotten a disease called Septoria Leaf Spot (totally self-diagnosed.....by me, not the plants). I've eaten one cherry tomato and there are numerous green tomatoes on the vines, but unless I get this situation under control, it could be a smaller crop this year.

I have one beautiful head of lettuce. The seeds for lettuce are super small. I actually attempted to start some of my garden from seeds this year. The Zucchini and Summer squash did great from seeds. Green beans, eh, not so much. I ended up buying some plants as I wanted a good amount of green beans this year. I had tried to do some lettuce from seeds, but my sweet darling son Tate (also known as Tatezilla - destroyer of all things) found my seedlings in their earliest stages when I had brought them indoors to avoid frost and dumped some - my lettuce being the main casualty. One little lucky seed of lettuce survived as it was unknowingly tranplanted by Tate into another container. I wasn't sure if it would amount to much, but I'm thinking this has salad written all over it!

The strawberries got into the garden in June, with the hope that next year we'll actually see some strawberries from them. Oh, and Momma Strahm gave me a rhubarb transplant that seems to be doing well in another area of our property.

Cauliflower. They've gotten big and I have way too many plants of them, but we'll see if they actually produce anything. I'm optimistic.

And I've got one little pepper plant which I got on a clearance sale. I couldn't resist. We'll give peppers another shot even though they were very disappointing last year.

If we had plenty of land, I would totally be one of those people with a HUGE garden and freezing and canning things like crazy. But for now, this satisfies.