Garden Progress

This year's garden challenge has been the drought.  Our rain barrels were basically empty and it took quite a while to get them full again.  Even though we've had more plentiful years, we're not doing too bad this year!

This was one day's harvest!  Yukon Gold and Red potatoes, green beans, pickling cucumbers on left, zucchini and slicing cucumber on right, banana peppers in front.

I have a few carrots left to pick, but these are the majority of them.

I tried some tricks on the tomatoes this year and I think we'll get a good harvest from them!  I trimmed the bottom leaves so none touch the ground.  I pinched off any suckers, and I laid some grass clippings down around the bottom.  These are the Amish Paste heirloom variety.

Brandywine heirloom variety.

Cherry tomatoes have yet to turn red, but there are some there!

Bean plants are still doing well.

I canned 3 full quart jars from this group of beans yesterday.

Slicing cucumbers, Amish paste tomato, black beans, and pickling cucumbers.

Pickle relish.  Everything here was grown in our garden...pickling cucumbers, red and green pepper, onions, and garlic.  It made 2 pints of relish this morning.

A view of one part of the garden. We've got a mammoth sunflower growing in the one bed!

I planted this Brandywine tomato here (right corner) thinking the rhubarb wouldn't re-grow (since I relocated it from the other side of the house), but this is the strongest I've seen this rhubarb plant!  I'm still getting some tomatoes on the vines, but it might have been bigger had it not competed with the rhubarb.

I harvested this off of our other rhubarb plant and froze it.

Tomato plants are growing tall.  In hindsight, I probably should have done the asparagus on the northeastern border of the garden as it always grows so tall and shades out some of the other plants.

We harvested lots of raspberries!

Washed them, put them in the food processor with some honey, and dried them in the dehydrator to make a raspberry fruit leather.  We shared some with our next door neighbor and their son loved it!

Letting the potatoes, onions, and garlic dry out before storing.  I need to read up some more on onions, because I'm not getting very big ones and they are finished growing pretty early on.

Out at the garden at my parents' house.  Banana peppers are doing well!  Disregard the decaying one on the ground.  We had a deer or some critter bite one off the plant.

Lots of jalapenos getting closer to harvest!

We have one eating pumpkin, two jack-o-lantern pumpkins, and 4 cantaloupe growing! 

You can see the eating pumpkin under the leaves there.

The corn just never got off to a great start, so I'll be happy with whatever we get!

These were the first silk hairs to appear on a stalk.  This was about a week ago.

You can see them near the bottom of the stalk next to the tallest stalk.

I checked the garden today and found silk hairs on more of the stalks and this one here shows a corn cob forming!

My mom bought some Marigold seeds that we planted around the perimeter of the garden when we planted everything.  It helps to keep the low-lying critters out and definitely looks pretty!