grow my own vegetables

I am so excited about spring and my garden!! I have some newspaper pots done and sowed some spinach seeds. I am going to do 2 crops of spinach this year, one in the spring and one in the fall. Last year I waited till summer to plant and a lot of my spinach bolted to seed because of the heat. We still had quite a bit and I was able to freeze bags of it, which was nice during that scare last year. We eat spinach at least twice a week so I would like to grow enough to freeze at least that, plus what we will eat during the growing season. That’s a lot of spinach! I will devote at least half of my garden to spinach during the spring and most if not all of my balcony pots.

Here is what I have planted so far. I sowed these on 3/7 and they are growing well:

Some of the veggies in the container garden on the balcony.

I still have peas, I can’t believe it! Peas don’t like hot weather. I was just about to pull these plants up and plant some more beans, but since I still have peas I’ll leave them down for a while. Right next to them is turnips, the greens are VERY good. I have about 10 freezer bags of turnip greens, yum. I’m planting more peas in the fall.

Front view of the garden, check out the squash in flower in front! Woooot!

Corn plant, early-June. Check out the big Xtra bucket! That stuff was cheap I almost want to use it again ha ha ha. But now I am a die-hard 7th Generation convert.

I sowed these from pinto beans I got at the grocery store!! They are growing well, Yay!

The blackberries are growing well and they are delicious!

Me sitting on one of my ‘pondering’ stumps. I like to sit out there in the early morning with a nice cup of tea and ponder the true nature of space and time..and gardening.

My sons beside the garden, kinda weeding. :)

the apple tree went into bloom last month and we have little apples! It’s too early to eat any though, they are very sour at this point. By the end of the month they will be green apple sweet.

Pic of the corn on July 5th. It’s hard to tell in this pic but the talles one is over 4 feet tall!

Long view of garden, check out the corn.

So far in June I have had tea from my mint plant, lettuce in a salad, basil and parsley in pasta home-made pasta sauce, and some spinach from my garden with noodles and light seasoning. yum!

Tonight we had some green beans and peas from the garden lightly steamed and mixed in black beans and rice for dinner. OMG they were so good.

All my stuff is coming up so well, I think I will be able to have something from the garden almost every day!

I have pea pods! and my mint plant has spawned 3 baby plants! I took one off and put it in a container on my balcony. I hope that mint takes over the whole patch on the side of the garage where it’s at. It’s just exciting times around my yard!

I have pods on my green bean plants now. This is so exciting! I took some pics with my phone but my network is not letting me send them to my email, aaarrrgh. I have got to get a digital camera, I still haven’t replaced Brian’s that I broke a while back.

I have been gardening for a while now but this is the first year I’ve gotten so involved with it and watched it so closely. Anyway, I am on cloud nine because of my beans, ha ha. Just wanted to share!

My husband’s cousin’s wife gave me a cutting from this mint plant they had growing around their farm (they bought an old amish farm that had a lot of good stuff growing on the land). I planted it far away from my garden on the side of the garage, because mint plants grow like weeds, they take over. She was not sure what it is and I can’t find my plant-identify book (from when I took botany many moons ago). It looks something like this:

except it is thicker and the leaves are fuzzier. Any ideas? it smells like wintergreen or spearmint but not quite, though I’m leaning toward it being spearmint of some kind. It has gotten so big it fell over and I had to stake it, and it has runners!! I may just let it go and take over that side of the garage. I am anxious to make tea with it.

My in-ground garden in May 2006 before I added a border. The container garden is up on the balcony, pics coming soon!

We found some old roof tiles at the back of our garage, left over from the last time the garage roof was done years and years ago. I decided to used them to border my garden.

Long view of garden with roof tile border. This month I extended the garden about 5 feet to the right, so it’s L-shaped now. I will have pics of that soon. I needed more room since I planted so much, LOL.

http://scienceandsarcasm.blogspot.com/
http://earthhomegarden.blogspot.com/
http://mondragon.livejournal.com/115895.html
http://davesgarden.com/
http://tangledbranches.com/blog/

I decided not to get all worked up about it. I asked him nicely to move them and he said ok. Then I asked him when and he said, maybe tomorrow. I said well I had plans to work in the garden today, would you do it now? this was earlier today about an hour before we had to go to my cousin’s graduation. He said no, and not later today either. So I said look, I’ll just move them into a big pot and then you can transplant them later at your convenience, ok? He said ok.

So I moved them into a big pot and transplanted some of my peat pot veggies into the garden, okra and spinach. My spinach is getting really big. Then I hoed some ground in another part of the yard for my cantaloupe and honeydew melon patch.