As the weekend gets started, I thought I’d share a few pictures from my abundant, organic garden. That’s right: no pesticides have been used in the maintenance and care of our home garden, and we used organic soil to nourish our plants. Our garden is a bit small as far as vegetable gardens go, but our cucumber and tomato plants are growing, growing, growing! Below are a few pictures showing my veggie plants’ progress as well as a few gardening lessons my husband and I have learned so far:
1. Build a bigger garden. While my husband has childhood experience with keeping and tending a garden, he’d forgotten how much space a cucumber patch takes up. When we returned from Connecticut and saw these cucumbers spreading over the raised bed and into the grass, we noted that next year’s vegetable garden needs to be big enough to accommodate all of the plants.
2. We can grow actual vegetables! Yeah, yeah, that’s the point of keeping a vegetable garden, but as a new gardener, I was excited to see the fruits of our labor are actually edible!
3. Vegetables present pretty blossoms before the vegetable itself grows on the plant. Pictured here is a pepper plant’s flower.
4. Our peppers.
5. Our raised bed garden. Yes, it is a bit small and overwhelmed by the large cucumbers. Also, our tomato plants are raising the roof, literally! My gardener friend suggested that these tomato plants are not receiving enough light and are therefore reaching tall and high for the sun. I’d love more feedback about growing tomatoes. We may consider growing other plants next season if we’re not giving our tomatoes the right light environment.
6. Green tomatoes. Annabelle picks them and eats them. I guess unripe tomatoes are yummy in her book.
7. My hydgrangea. Earlier this season my hydrangea was not doing so well. I would water it, not water it (fearing that I was giving it too much hydro-love), and then threw my hands up, which is what I do when I don’t know what to do. But all of the sudden, my beautiful little hydrangea is showing all her glory. Next season I hope to add more hydrangeas to our landscaping because a) I admire their beauty, and b) I need to learn more about nurturing these little flowers (perhaps a metaphor for child rearing too?).
Stay tuned. More gardening pictures to come!
{ 4 comments }
My hydrangea advice is: water! Sometimes I have to water mine twice a day, because they lose so much moisture throughout the day. Clearly they wouldn’t be good for areas prone to drought.
I’ve finally got some green tomatoes, too! Do you have any red ones yet? Or does Annabelle eat them before they get a chance at ripening?
You can train the cucumbers up a trellis for more space. I practice a form of intensive gardening on my small plot – it’s called square foot gardening. I’m training quite a few plants up a trellis. My plants are large and healthy (although I’m not harvesting much, yet, I got a late start). This is my first year with intensive gardening, so we’ll see how it goes, but I’ve been an organic gardener forever. The key is in the compost – good soil = good crop.
I agree about the training the cukes. I have some stakes if you want them, you can still tie them up if you want. As for the tomatoes, they need a good amount of sun, but if they’re producing fruit and not getting leggy them I wouldn’t worry about it. I think they need a good 4 hours of direct sun/day.
I am so jealous! Your garden looks beautiful! We are starting ours up in the early fall when it cools down a bit.
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