I LOVE MY GARDEN

Misc varieties of lettuce, and some wee little carrots in the bottom of the pic. As you can see, I'm doing square foot gardening, so plants are put in much closer together than they would be in a plot garden. You get a much higher yield per square foot than any other way. I still have some thinning to do, though.


Our raspberries we put in a shady location on the side of the house. I'm looking to get a few more varieties to plant elsewhere, and will be removing the railroad ties.



Noah is planting his strawberries. All the children help in the garden, and they all have the "favorite" things they like to grow and care for. Noah LOVES strawberries. You should have him do the strawberry dance for you sometime.




You can see that we have broccoli in pots (5 ) and also some in the bed. They were all planted at the same time, but the broccoli in the pots are far outgrowing the ones in the bed. They are even bigger now and growing their broccoli heads. This is our early season crop planting bed. It is 8' x 4' and is 12 inches deep.

What we've been doing in the garden...

We have plans to put in at least 5 more raised beds to accomodate all of the plants we have started in the greenhouse. We have about 7 varieties of heirloom tomatoes (including purple and yellow tomatoes), as well as "Stars and Moons" watermelon (has really cool yellow splotches on the green rind that look like stars and moons). I'm also growing quinoa this year. You can add the leaves to a salad or meatloaf or whatnot for Vitamin C, or allow the seed heads to dry, and it becomes a grain that you can eat like oatmeal. SO EXCITED! I'm SO weird, I know. We've planted multi-colored carrots, 2 kinds of peas, spinach, radishes, 3 kinds of onion, various types of lettuce, and a lot of broccoli. These are all in our early season box, which I'm including pictures of. In our greenhouse, waiting for the other garden boxes to be built, we have MANY varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, canteloupe, zucchini, crookneck, and of course... PUMPKIN! We've grown several dozen varieties of flowers from seed, as well.




We have put in grapes, black raspberries (from Grandma Fortune in CA), and blueberries (something new), and have started a new herb garden (echinacea, sage, basil, peppermint, so far). In addition, we have several semi-dwarf fruit trees in pots, and plan to add a few new ones. I still need to get my compost bin built and functioning. Adam now works for Wal-Mart in the gardening section, and he brought me home 8 tomato plants that they were going to throw out as they have a tiny bit of frostbite. These are their really expensive tomatoes, so I was giddy! No dozen roses for me... you can bring me vegetable plants ANY DAY! Okay - enough talk. These are pictures I took almost 2 weeks ago, so the garden is even bigger and better now, but its dark outside, so I'll post more pics later.