Garden Variety
Posted: July 26, 2013 Filed under: Gardening, Growing, Health and Wellness, Local Food, Uncategorized | Tags: beet greens, bloody butcher, chocolate mint, Farmer Ben, Food, gardening, healthy-living, local food Leave a commentAs promised, here is a Garden Update.
First: All of the rain we’ve gotten has made gardening a challenge. Simply put, we just had too much water!
The plus side of all the rain? We have ha so many greens!
lettuce, Swiss chard, beet greens.
On repeat, Beets and greens, Swiss Chard, more lettuce (oak leaf, I think?)
The potatoes have also exploded… Farmer Ben got a little excited and dug up one of the plants… when the rest are ready, we’re going to have to clear out an entire closet to store them…. but there’s something about home-grown potatoes. So good.
These will be perfect in breakfast burritos.
Our scallions, chives and dill are taking over. We also had a ridiculous amount of cilantro, but we had to pull it and dry it because of all the water.
Chest High Dill… this has been pulled and is now drying.
Some of my favorite things….
Our peppers and eggplant are only doing so-so…it’s going to be sheer luck if we get a big yield this year. But we have gotten a few jalapenos.
The tomatoes (my favorite) were off to a rough start but have since flourished. I can’t wait until they all ripen! We even got a couple of random plants that popped up. Score!
The corn, beans and squash are coming along. Ben is a big fan of the three sisters method, as you can see. We planted a red corn (bloody butcher, I think) for drying and a later season bean.
Teamwork in Nature
The garlic seems to keep coming back, but we’re not sure how. It’s a survivor.
Garlic and Carrots…and more squash.
The chocolate mint won’t leave.
Chocolate mint jungle. There is no way to kill mint or to remove it from your garden once it’s been planted: In other news, this has all been pulled and is now being dried for tea.
Our sauce tomatoes (Paisanos) are doing the best out of all the plants. We’re going to be making a LOT of sauce in the next couple of weeks!
tomato jungle
Farmer Ben and I had a lot of winter squash this year and we put the seeds in our composter. Well, sometimes when you do that, you get mystery plants that take over half of the garden…
This squash plant?
First we thought it was zucchini, then we thought and 8-ball zucchini…then an acorn squash. Now we think it’s a pie pumpkin. Whatever it is, we are going to have a lot of them.
Can you guess what this is?
Our beets and greens did pretty well. The beets were small, but so tasty and we got a huge yield of beet greens (and to be honest, that’s my favorite part anyway).
Beets… and more squash.
Again, our beans seem to be doing pretty well, and they provided the perfect shaded area for our lettuce.
Bean Tee-Pee
We also had Swiss Chard come back this year. Not that we mind because we both love it.
A box of Chard
Here are some more photos of our mystery squash. Does anyone know what kind it is? Again, we are narrowing it down to pie pumpkins… but we could be wrong.
And last but not least, here is our potato jungle. I think potatoes are the my favorite item to harvest and it looks like we are going to have a lot of them.
So there you have it… Farmer Ben’s been working really hard, and although the garden isn’t exactly as we planned it out this year (random squash, Swiss chard and tomato plants, mint take-over), we are enjoying the fruits (err…veggies!) of our (mostly his) labor.
We’ve also been able to share with our friends and loved ones, which is an equally amazing feeling.
What are you growing this year? Did you have any mystery plants? What challenges are you dealing with in your garden?
Happy Friday!
