Showing posts with label Garden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Garden. Show all posts

Garden

Posted by My Heart Song

9/10/2018


I love that our garden is still producing a harvest. 
Still green beans to enjoy for supper many nights each week. And a handful of tomatoes to toss in a salad too. 

Gardens go on producing long after the bulk of the work work of planting, weeding, tending is done. I love that!

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Butterfly

Posted by My Heart Song

9/4/2018


My children were recently fascinated with a butterfly in our yard. It needed "an ambulance," my 4-year-old declared. It wouldn't fly and was barely moving.


Like a butterfly veterinarian, my 15-year-old daughter mixed up some sugar water to feed it and used a toothpick to help unfurl its curled up tongue. Then they placed it near our "butterfly bush" on the yard, which attracts lots of butterfly friends.


This is science at its best!

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Garden

Posted by My Heart Song

10/21/2016


We had a garden this year. We tried square foot gardening. We had green beans, sugar snap peas and a few tomato and pepper plants. We then ripped everything out and planted some fall crops of green beans and lettuce. Those are producing right now, giving us some yummy veggies to keep for ourselves and to share with others. 

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Garden

Posted by My Heart Song

6/15/2016 



 We decided to do a garden this year, in a different way than ever before. We're trying square foot gardening.


So my husband built two boxes, both 8 x 4 feet. 
Grandma R used her truck to deliver a load of dirt. Everyone helped unload the dirt. 


What's more fun for kids than being asked to play in dirt?!


We have now planted cucumbers, green beans and sweet peas - all started from seeds. They are sprouting now. You'll see in the pictures that we have a soil mixture that includes vermiculite (the little white, snowball looking pieces) which helps with hydration. 


We also planted some starters of tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini and we filled the other spaces with flowers.

The advantages to square foot gardening include no-weeding! Though one disadvantage is the upfront cost for building the boxes and filling them with a good soil mixture (including compost, vermiculite, peat moss and black dirt).

So this is our big experiment for this year. 
We will keep you posted on the harvest!


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Garden Update

Posted by My Heart Song

7/18/2013

Our garden is producing! We've had an abundance of green beans and cucumbers in the last few days. Prior to this, we had lettuce (which we harvested from May all through June and into early July, when it started to turn bitter). 


Cucumbers on the left, sprawling out, providing lots of shade for those big cukes to hide. Sweet corn on the right of the picture. 


Sweet corn on the left, starting to tassel now. Tomatoes in the middle - none to harvest yet, but starting to come in. Green beans on the right - coming in strong now.


Broccoli is getting eaten up by beetles, so I don't know how much of this we'll be able to harvest. Next are turnips. Then some peas, which we planted late and aren't ready yet.
 
In addition to the vegetable garden, we've got some beautiful flowers blooming right now too. I love strolling around the yard when these beauties greet me!


We have multiple rose-of-sharon bushes/trees that are in full bloom right now.


Some marigolds that line the perimeter of the garden.


My favorite hydrangea in the foreground, with big pink and lavender blooms. Behind is a stargazer lily that is just stunning right now, with a few more blooms ready to pop in the next few days.


Cosmos in various pink shades.

The way that the flowers come to life just encourages my heart. The beauty of creation makes me sing with gratefulness that I can be alive to experience it!

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Garden Update

Posted by My Heart Song

6/7/2013

The garden. 
I personally have been doing very little work with it. Despite my absence, it's doing just fine - thanks to my husband, who faithfully tends to it. 


In the last week or so, we've enjoyed lots of fresh lettuce and radishes. The radishes are already done and their spot in the garden has been cleared out! They grow fast - we planted them in mid April and before mid June they were totally harvested and done! My husband and daughter enjoyed eating them in salads and we shared dozens of them with other friends and neighbors.


Everything else is growing well. The broccoli looks like it will be ready soon. Same goes for the turnips. Bean plants are shooting upward, ready for a trellis to climb. Corn is on target to be knee-high by the 4th of July... or taller. 

Our garden remains a source of joy to our family. My daughter is enjoying helping Daddy with it more and more. Sharing the harvest is one of the best things about summer - a great opportunity to bless neighbors. And of course we are able to enjoy the fruits of our labors at the dinner table as well. It really is a joy!

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Our Garden

Posted by My Heart Song

5/23/2013

Spring is here, which means our garden is planted! It has been for a few weeks, actually. We started some things indoors but planted everything in the outside garden a couple weeks ago. 


We've planted garlic, lettuce, rhubarb, radishes, turnips, two types of beans, two types of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and corn. Most of these are repeats from what we planted last year, but we there are a few new items too.


Almost everything is coming up already, which means it looks mighty tempting to all the rabbits we have in our area. We put the fence up to help with that and so far, so good. 


We wanted to try our hand at a few "edible landscape" plants - so we planted a few of our veggies in our flowerbeds around the house. Well... we may end up moving those back to the fenced-in garden because the bunnies have found them to be cage-free and helped themselves!

 Our entire family is involved with our garden. We find it enjoyable and relaxing, as well as rewarding as we harvest what we have grown. We all take part in planning, planting, watering, weeding, etc.

I will continue to give updates on the garden as the weeks go along.

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Garden Update

Posted by My Heart Song

9/24/2012


 Our garden is nearing its end. It's bittersweet, really. We've all enjoyed different aspects of gardening. In this picture, you can see that the corn is completely gone - on the far right. And the far left had the cucumbers, which are now completely done also. In between we have the plants that are still producing.

Here's what we've harvested one day recently. We had three big cantaloupes. I still harvest green beans every 2-3 days and get enough for one meal. Our cherry tomatoes peaked a week ago but are still producing a good amount.

Our first-year garden experiment has been a success in every way. We've grown a lot of food that we've enjoyed during the summer as well as stored some away for winter. We've learned what grows well in our type of soil and what doesn't. We've all learned that it takes a lot to make a garden grow - our hard work of tilling, planting, weeding, watering, and harvesting. Not to mention God's part of the equation!

 These last two pictures don't really have to do with our garden, but with our backyard in general. 


Here's a silly squirrel on our bird house.


My daughter saw a hawk on the neighbor's deck one day and took this picture. Neat!

I know that we are blessed to have a big enough yard for a garden and to have creatures around to enjoy and study too. We are trying to be good stewards of what we have, to use it for good, to learn from it, to share with others.

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Garden Update

Posted by My Heart Song

9/13/2012 

It's the middle of September already. Some of our garden veggies are done, while others are still going strong. 

Our green beans surprise me by continuing to produce very well. Green peppers are doing well also. But our biggest current producer: cherry tomatoes. We pick at least one bowlful daily and sometimes more. We share these with anyone and everyone!  And we still have enough left over to enjoy snacking on them all day and adding them to a salad with supper.

No picture of the cantaloupe, but we've eaten a few more of them recently and still have a handful getting close to ripe in the garden.  

No picture of the broccoli either, but it continues to produce very small heads. I cut these off every few days and more grow back. What I harvest is not even enough for 1 serving, so we eat it with other veggies too. 

Thought for next year: consider planting the broccoli in a flower bed around the house. It's a big green leafy plant that looks similar to sedum, in my opinion. Around the house would take less space in the garden - it is a big plant, with very little that's edible - and it's hardy enough to grow in any soil. It doesn't have to have the tilled in, compost-rich soil in the garden. 


Here's broccoli. 

Here's sedum - low to the ground in this picture, but does grow up taller too.


My philosophy - why plant just nice-looking plants if you can plant nice-looking plants that are also edible?! I'll keep that in mind as I plan next year's garden.  

The cucumbers made it through last week. Now the plants are turning brown, shriveling up and dying. My daughter hates to see them stop producing - she loved to eat cucumbers straight from the vine, skin and all, as a snack while she was playing outdoors. 

We found this tree frog in the garden on more than one occasion this summer. He's tiny - half the size of my thumb - and lives on my green bean plants. 
 
I plan to share at least 1 more update, along with some overall lessons learned from our experimental first-year garden.  

Happy last-days of Gardening!

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Garden Update

Posted by My Heart Song

8/29/2012

We continue to get a good harvest from our garden. 

Here's my daughter with one day's worth of harvest last week. Lots of cherry tomatoes are ripe now. The green beans are still producing, though nearing the end. We've had a few more green bell peppers ready to pick. And cucumbers... do we ever have the cucumbers! I picked 20 in one day last week. 

And I found this ENORMOUS cucumber hiding in the garden, who was obviously overlooked for quite some time.

My husband had fun turning him into Larry the Cucumber, from Veggie Tales.

We harvested all of our corn last weekend, cutting down all of the stalks. That half of the garden now looks mighty bare. We bought some corn at the local farmer's market to supplement what we grew and then spent a day processing all of the corn.

Two pots boiling.

Then the cold water bath and set to dry. 
Then cut it all off the cob.
Then into quart-size freezer bags it goes.
And now we can enjoy sweet corn all winter long! 

I've been processing the green beans little by little throughout the summer, so we will also have green beans to enjoy this winter. 

With all of the cucumbers, I decided to try some quick recipes for making pickles. They turned out ok but I will need to do some research before next summer - if we grow this many cucumbers again, I will definitely learn to make pickles. But it's been nice this year to have enough to give away to neighbors and friends and even sell a few at the veggie stand we've set up in the yard a few times.   

Happy gardening!



 

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Garden Update

Posted by My Heart Song

8/21/2012 

Our garden continues to produce. Every day or two we harvest a good amount of green beans and more cucumbers than we know what to do with. Note to self: add "canning supplies" to Christmas list with intentions of making pickles from next year's cucumbers. 

Our sweet corn was ready to harvest this week. We have been eating a few ears off and on, but this week we picked the rest of the corn. One day I blanched 36 ears, which produced 6 bags of approximately 3 cups of corn in each bag. Those are in the freezer for enjoying this winter. Then last night I did another 20 smaller ears that produced 3 more bags. The corn is very sweet and tastes delicious! 

We also have been eating cantaloupe from the garden this week. Fresh from the garden is WAY better than store-bought!

We have a lot of cherry tomatoes which are slowly turning from green to red. They are a great snack while I'm working in the garden. :-) And every now and then we have a few green bell peppers ready to pick. 

Our green beans seem to be almost done producing. They've done really well, giving us a dozen or more bags for the freezer in addition to fresh beans to eat at many meals in the last month.

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Garden Update

Posted by My Heart Song

8/8/2012 

Bountiful harvest. 
That's the only way to describe our garden at this stage. 


Our tomatoes are starting to turn red. Picking those is a wonderful job for my son - "only pick the ones that are red." 

My kids (and niece Isabelle, in this picture) help pick some of the goodies.




Every few days we harvest about 6 cups of green beans and anywhere from 6 to 12 cucumbers. The green peppers are also doing well, getting about fist-sized.


Our sweet corn is just getting ready to pick - we enjoyed some deliciously sweet ears last night for supper. Our cantaloups are just about ripe, but not quite yet. There's still a little green behind the webbing... when that's gone is when it's ripe.

Last Saturday my daughter and niece (age 10) set up a veggie stand in the yard to sell the cucumbers and peppers to passers-by. They made $16! We may have to go into business selling our veggies! 

At this point, my biggest tip for next year's garden - make it bigger! Everything seems to be on top of each other at this stage. It makes it harder to find the veggies, most of which are hidden under leaves. We'll see about setting aside more of our yard for the garden in 2013.

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Garden Update

Posted by My Heart Song

8/1/2012

Time for another garden update. Yesterday was our biggest garden harvest yet - 6 cups of green beans, 2 banana peppers, 2 green bell peppers, and 5 large cucumbers. 

To walk through the garden... well, it's a bit out of control. The cucumbers have taken over and cover the ground entirely in their section of the garden. The cantaloups are the same - hard to even find a place to step there.  

We have had much more moderate temps lately and rain has fallen about every-other-day. The garden has loved it all and is growing very well. 

We have a few cantaloups that will be ripe soon. 

We have corn that is almost ripe. We've tried a few ears but they aren't ripe yet. 

We have a lot of tomatoes on the vines but they are staying green. When they ripen, we'll have plenty of those to share.

The beans and peppers just keep coming. We've been eating green beans a few times a week and I've been blanching and freezing the rest. 

Lesson from the garden: yes, there is a lot of produce in the garden, but also there are a lot of bugs. Recently when I've been picking veggies, I've gotten bitten by bugs and spiders. So although it's warm out, I'm sporting a light jacket to cover my arms as I reach over, under, into, and through to pick those veggies.

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Garden Update

Posted by My Heart Song

7/18/2012
 Our garden continues to give us a harvest. 

This week we've been eating plenty of green beans and a handful of cucumbers. 

My kids really like cucumbers. I peel and slice them down the middle. Then the kids dip them in ranch dressing and gobble them up.  

My daughter picked some of the green beans. She came running inside to show me the "natural velcro" that she found. The green bean leaves stick to clothes, like velcro. See the two stuck on her shirt? 

Gardens are such great places to explore and discover. The kids enjoy helping weed and water and pick. It's fun to be the one to discover the longest bean or the biggest cuke... and then eat your discoveries! 

Happy gardening!

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Garden Update

Posted by My Heart Song

7/11/2012

Our garden is producing its harvest and what a delight that is to witness!

Here's a shot of the garden from an upstairs window of our house. Everything is growing well, so lush and green.


Our lettuce is done now. We've dug what was left out of the garden. 

Our sweet peas with edible pods grew well but we found that we didn't really enjoy eating them. We did eat some. We shared some. And those are done now and also dug out of the garden. 

Currently we are enjoying the green bean harvest. Every-other-day we pick enough to have with our evening meal. They are delicious. 

Our cantaloups are growing bigger day by day.  We also have very small peppers and cucumbers starting to grow. It'll be another week or so before they are ready to eat, but they are coming along nicely.

Our corn varies quite a bit, with some just knee-high and others much taller. Here my daughter is with one of the tallest stalks.

I had a few flowers given to me on Mother's Day. We planted those in the garden amongst the veggies. Love the splash of pink and purple in with all the green. 

 My purpose in posting these updates is two fold. You get to see the progress (and be a vicarious gardener, if you wish) and I have a record (including pictures) of how the garden did this year. That will come in handy next spring when I'm planning the garden and look back at my tips, tricks and suggestions from this year. 

That's my mid-summer garden update.

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Garden Update

Posted by My Heart Song

 6/26/2012

 

Our garden has EXPLODED in the last week or so.  
  

 We have more than a dozen heads of lettuce ready to harvest. Needless to say, we've been eating salad with almost every meal. And we've shared a lot of lettuce with neighbors as well. Our own suggestion to try next year: stagger the plantings by a week or two and see if that will spread out the harvesting so we're not eating lettuce constantly for 1 week and then it's done. Better to make it last for several weeks, if we can. 
  


  

Our sweet peas are doing very well. They are flowering and small pods have formed. We've snitched a few, but they aren't big enough or sweet enough to harvest yet. 
  

We have a small fence around the garden. It has been sufficient to keep bunnies and other critters out of the garden, so far. Slugs are our biggest enemy, eating holes in our lettuce. 


Our beans have really shot up, but there's nothing to harvest yet.



Our corn will likely be knee-high by the 4th of July. 

  No pictures of the cucumbers, tomatoes, broccoli or cantaloup but they all are coming along. 
We haven't lost anything yet!

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