Garden Harvest

This is the first year we've had a real garden. We've tried a couple of other times, but didn't really get it done. Last year we started a bunch of plants inside, but never planted them outside - not sure what happened there. This year we planted everything outside and just let 'em grow. It worked, which always amazes me. Side track: I love living in agriculturals areas where you can see acres and acres of food growing. I miss the area we used to live where we could go from one town to the next and go from cherries, apples, apricots and peaches to more apples, grapes, asparagus, corn, wheat, potatoes, green peas, sugar snap peas, lima beans, carrots, and so much more. I also dearly miss the intersection of Road 9 & Road K, where a super nice hispanic family grows a huge U-pick garden that you can just wander around with a 5-gallon bucket and get peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, melons, etc. for a great price. Where we live, there's still quite a bit of agriculture too, so I still feel great about it. We have potatoes, onions, mint, watermelons, cantalope, strawberries and more that's grown in the general vicinty. It's fabulous.

Anyway, back to our garden . . . it's not the prettiest garden because it's surrounded by weeds, which is actually good - hides it from the neighbors! :) No, our neighbors wouldn't bother our garden anyway. But, we have at least 15 watermelons growing- so exciting. There's one honeydew melon that is pretty close to being ready to harvest. There's a couple of cantalopes. We have harvested tons of cucumbers - those things grow like crazy. We have had many carrots. Our tomatoes are ripening well. We have some yellow pear tomatoes, which are not much bigger than cherry tomatoes and we have a couple of cherry tomato plants too. We grew peas, which we thought were pretty much done a while back, but there were lots of new ones on one plant the other day. Our corn is doing great - we have some popcorn plants growing too. We have some strawberries and grapes growing. The strawberries are really getting going now and the grapes are new this year and will be a few years before there's really good grapes, but there's some on there now that are tasty, just not that many. I don't necessarily like gardening for a hobby - but I love having a garden and I think I can get used to the idea of having to take care of it so that it stays healthy.

Last Sunday morning, this is what I harvested:

I made up my own pasta dish - tri-color bowtie pasta, chicken, peas and carrots from the garden. It was seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, italian seasoning and thyme (lots of it). It was tasty! No picture because I ate ALL of it!

So, we go out to the garden every couple of days to pick stuff. There's always tons of cucumbers, so I need to get some pickles made - hopefully today. I harvested this very intersting carrot the other day. I am not sure what to say about it!