Recently Garden Activity

Here are a few photos from my garden taken in the last week.

One of the first normal sized tomatoes we have.  It's about to turn red and I'll get Hubs to harvest it tonight when he gets home from work.
We have lost at least 4 other tomatoes to a deer who has discovered our garden.......

More telltale evidence of the deer.  Our garden is not deep so he can lean in from the short fence and reach the bean vines on the deck railing and chomp away at them....

The tomato plants are dying back now and the Summer squash plants are getting powdery mold and also dying off but the morning glory vines are still going great guns.

The collard plants are doing better now that other plants are dying back and giving them more sunlight.  The Japanese beetles seem to have fled as well so the new collard leaves aren't being eaten, meaning there may actually be something to harvest of them come the first frost.  ;-)

The front flower bed has been growing like gangbusters!
You can see in this shot that we have tomato plants in that bed.  We didn't plant tomatoes in there this year.....they are all volunteers!  And they actually have tomatoes on the plants now so if the bunnies and the deer don't find them, we may get some to turn red and harvest.

We planted Coleus as well as that are those spikey flowers(can't remember what they are called)in this photo in this bed this past Spring.
We planted those same spikey flowers last year in here as well.
Well we could have saved some money not replanting these spikey flowers this year since they seemed to have reseeded themselves and we have TONS of these spikey flowers all over this bed!
It's very vibrant and colorful out front this year.

The Coleus as well have gotten HUGE in the bed this year.  Some of the leaves on these plants are as big as my head!  That's what lots of sunshine will do for ya......
The Coleus has finally gone to seed out here and I may try to collect seeds this Fall and start my own plants next Winter.

Just a close-up of some plantings.

The first normal sized tomato harvested on Friday...........

My mater and bean face....what I picked 24 Aug. but hadn't shown yet.....lolz

Another big squash I picked last Wednesday.....Hubs picked another smaller squash on Sunday but he didn't take a photo of it for me.....

More green beans last week...........

And yet another handful of beans later in the week.....

The harvest total is a bit off since Hubs hasn't been weighing the produce he picks and I don't have the paper I write the weights on up here with me.  My guess is we are up to 12 lbs.?

I haven't been outside in 3 days due to the foot issue and I really want to get out there and check things out.
Maybe tomorrow.

Sluggy

 

Garden is In....Better Late Than Never Edition

We finally got the gardens planted about 10 days before the company started arriving last week. It was STILL May but just barely!
I am pretty worthless when it comes to digging and planting.  It's all I can do to harvest.
#1 Son wasn't here long enough to dig up my gardens this year and Hubs had been laid up with medical issues so we are late getting going this season.

I took this photo about a week ago.....

 It's green beans(vining)in the back row and radishes in the front row.
Hubs says the middle row is collards but I am not sure of that.  It's a 20 foot row and he planted it heavily.  I didn't think I had enough collard seed to have this much sprouting!lol

We'll see later on what he actually planted I guess.

No photo of the front yet but it's tomato plants, yellow squash and colorful bell peppers.

And here is what I've got going on the dog run.....

I've tried to get rid of this eyesore on Craigslist but no one seems to have the cash to take it off our hands right now.  Since the male beagle passed away, the female just doesn't want to be out there in the good weather.  So it sits unused taking up real estate in the backyard.
So I have hung gutters on it.

I'm copying my friend Brenda in Maine.....

These are the salad gutters hanging on her shed from a couple years ago.

I can't nail gutters onto my shed(besides, it doesn't get enough sunshine anyway), so I used the dog run and we wired them on.

And the greens are starting to come up now......

We've got a 3rd gutter piece to hang up yet and plant.  What's great about this is I can harvest without killing my back AND it keeps the resident yard rabbits out of my salad!
At least until they learn to scale chain link fencing....

So now we are keeping the dog run.
Might have to expand this gutter thing and hang some on the back end of the run too.

Sluggy

Picking Time!

I actually got myself and #2 son up and out in the yard while it was still relatively cool this morning(relatively=82 degrees + 90% humidity).

So we picked collards......and picked......and picked......and picked.......you get the idea.
We made some space in the bed so that the winter squash has room now and the marigolds can see the light of day.  There are still shoots coming off & more growing out of the collard plants, as we just 'thinned the herd' and didn't pull up the plants.

Then we moved on to the leaf lettuce......this photo is about a week old so imagine even MORE lettuce.lol

And here is what we picked....

We don't use any pesticides here(except for the soapy/garlic water spray)so my collard leaves may not be pretty but they are organic and healthy, bug holes and all!lol

I'm going to attempt to keep track of what we get out of the garden this year so I'll be keeping a running tally on the blog here.

1st Collards harvest(a couple weeks ago)was 13oz.-it was only 8 leaves.
Today's Collards harvest was 9lb. 15.8oz!
The leaf lettuce today weighed in at 1lb. 1.6oz.

Garden Harvest Weight Total to date....11 lb. 14.4 oz.

Sluggy

The 1st Harvest.....Ahead of Schedule

Well I ventured into the outdoor oven yesterday(aka the backyard) and harvested our 1st veggies from the garden.

I had brought the nephew over to swim so he helped me cut the stalks I couldn't reach....

A pile of Collards!
Pretty meager for our 1st harvest but it's a start.....
I've never picked anything this early in the growing season but the extra warm weather all of June has hurried things along in the garden this year.  This is my first year growing Collards.
The smallest of the leaves was well over 18 inches long.

I had bought a bag of Collards to augment this batch since I knew I wouldn't have enough to cook a whole pot this time.  They were mighty good and if the bugs don't eat too much before I need to pick them again, I'll have another large pot worth to cook.

My mom loved her some collards.  My father hated the smell so she was forced to wait until he went out of town on business overnight to cook them.  She cooked them old school with fatback, potatoes and cornmeal dumplings, like her mother had fixed them.  I never developed a taste for cornmeal dumplings so I cook them with bacon inside of fatback and leave out the potatoes too.

I saw Paula Deen make fried wontons stuffed with cream cheese and collards a couple of weeks ago.  Now the frying part makes me drool but collards and cream cheese?!?!
Doesn't quite sound right to me.....lol

So what has your garden produced this week?


Sluggy