Sunday, September 12, 2010

Bounty

I was so happy (and kinda surprised) when our garden grew ALOT of food!
I'm not trying to brag because I think maybe gardens just grow easier here than some other places. But we are definitely doing this again. We had lots of lettuce, spinach, cilantro and basil until the weather turned hot and they 'bolted', going to seed. We've had delicious tomatoes every day (and still getting more)! We have so many jalepenos, which I know we won't use all of. We got many loads of squash, cucumbers, and enough onions to last us for several more months at least... and the food from our garden has been so flavorful! We got about a dozen mouthwatering cantaloupes. The tomatoes are so sweet. And my eyes water so much when cutting these onions.



All the kids (except Preston) got very good at cutting veggies up for meals.



The kids love to go out and pick food from the garden, and for the most part they have been careful to only pick food that is ripe.
They wanted me to take a picture when 2 yellow squash were grown together:



The things that did not do as well as I'd like in the garden were:
-peas (just didn't get much of them for some reason)
-brocolli and cauliflower(I found out too late that I should have folded the leaves over the tops of the cauliflowers)
-carrots (we got lots of carrots, they just don't taste that sweet. I let them grow longer than required to see if they would get a "riper" taste but they didn't. Maybe my soil is not a carrot's favorite.



My little broccoli:



We were also able to get even more food from the CSA farm that we joined. It was so nice to become friends with them and I learned so much about organic gardening just from asking questions. (I didn't use any chemicals on my garden) We also got several foods that we'd never had before, such as white eggplant, husk tomatoes, mulberries. We went to various farms around here to pick food, such as PEAS, since we didn't get many of those from our garden...



APPLES!


CHERRIES!



BLUEBERRIES!





It was a lot of fun to get food from our own backyard garden and from these other farms. Its a good thing that each farm we went to had the policy that you can eat as much as you want while picking! That's all that Preston did!

4 comments:

Amber said...

That is awesome!!! Fresh garden food is the best! I love the bubble blowing. Very cool.

Joel and Lisa Wagenman said...

YUMMMMM! Congrats on a successful garden! I think most of the fun is figuring out how to do it better next year... so good luck with your broccoli and cauliflower! I wish we had room for a big garden like that... (sigh) some day... :)

Lucinda said...

That is awesome your garden did so well! Maybe next spring I'll feel up to gardening again - mom said she would help me. Enjoy your harvest!

Anonymous said...

I loved reading about the fun you guys have had gardening and going to the farms! Congratulations on your success!