I know I haven't been blogging much recently. I've got plenty of things keeping me busy. Just one of those things is my garden! This is the first year I did a garden and I guess you could say I started out with a pretty good sized one. Lets see, I planted about 6 cucumber plants (a few seedless plants and a few regular), 8 tomato plants (four plum and four beefsteaks), four bell pepper plants, 3 Jalapeno pepper plants, 2 habanero pepper plants, meadow mint tea, 6 basil plants, parsley and oregano. Here are a few pictures I took back in July when my garden was just starting to grow. The bush on the right is mom Friedrich's blueberry bush.
This is the view from the other side of the garden:
My little herb corner:
I transplanted just a few (maybe about 10) tea plants from my parents house and look how fast they grew:
This is a picture from today, I can't believe how everything is growing so big!
Quite a difference huh?! I had to stake up all my pepper plants except the habaneros, because each one fell over at some point from the weight of all the peppers growing on them.
My cucumbers are currently growing like crazy! For the last three days straight I've gotten 5 a day and before that it was more like 2 or 3 a day. Needless to say we've been eating so many cucumbers I think we might turn green!
Jon's Jalapeno peppers also took off a week or so ago. They are slowing down a little now but he's already gotten a few quart sized bags full of them - some of which I froze, some Jon made into a super-spicy-hot pepper spread, and some he just fries or grills to eat with whatever we're having for dinner.
The rabbits keep eating most of my tomatoes that turn red - which luckily hasn't been many so far - so tomorrow I'm going out to buy chicken wire to put around the garden so they can't get in. I'm hoping to make tomato sauce so I can't have all my tomatoes being eaten!
Earlier this week I cut down almost all my basil to make pesto sauce for freezing. There's already more basil growing! A few weeks ago I also cut some to dry for filling my spice jar. I guess 6 basil plants was a little too much :).
Ok, this post about my garden is getting pretty long but if you'll bare with me I have one more thing to tell about. In the early days of my gardening this year there were about 4 or 5 trees growing right outside the one corner of my garden. Some of the trees were as tall as our house so unfortunately they were providing way too much shade for my plants - which all needed full sunlight. So my wonderful husband cut them down for me one Saturday. Here are some pictures:
He secured each tree with straps before sawing so that when they fell they wouldn't fall on top of my garden:
Some of the smaller trees he drug away but there were also a few that were really heavy so he used his mom's car to drag them off:
What a difference that made in my garden! I'm so thankful for Jon's help and his willingness to do all that work for me! I would never have been able to do it without him.
