Garden Tour

So, today some pictures of my garden.  It's doing rather well this year, and I am very proud of it, and hopefully it will produce enough to be considered a good garden year.  My goals for the year for the garden are to produce enough green beans, broccoli, and hopefully corn.  This year, since my garden has failed to do well in the past, is more of a test run to see how well I can garden, and to see how much I need to grow to be able to feed my family.  Last year I bought corn from a local farmer, I believe I bought 7 dozen ears of corn and that was almost enough to last us all year.  I didn't quite have enough corn to make it as often as I like, corn is yummy :).  I bought broccoli at a grocery store when it was on sale, but I didn't really keep very good track of how much I bought, but like the corn, it wasn't enough to last a whole year.  But those two experiences taught me a lot about food storage and blanching and freezing food.  Any now, pictures of my garden. (Don't mind the weeds, I do what I can, when I can.)

This is the container part of my garden.  It has some of my strawberry plants in the front two blue containers.  They are doing much better than the strawberries in my garden which keep getting eaten by bunnies, I'm guessing.  But the potato plants in the container behind them are doing very well.  There is another container sitting off on the right, it just didn't make it in the picture.

Below is my corn on the right and in the middle.  Planted at two difference times, of course.  All of my corn didn't come up with the first batch. Hence, planting the second batch.  I will have to do a little more research to see if i can figure out why my corn didn't come up.  On the left of the photo is my pole beans.  The are on stick trellis's of four sticks each, four trellis's.  They are doing very well and winding there way up the sticks.  I love fresh green beans.  And with the pole variety they will produce over and over again till the end of summer.  No planting, ripping out, and planting more beans.

These are my cucumber plants, the top half of the picture is regular cucumbers.  The bottom half is pickling cucumbers.  I am very excited to make pickles this year.  Pickles go fast in this house, so I'm excited about making my own this year.

Top half on the right is some potatoes that I had left over that would not fit in the containers by the house.  The left side is my watermelon which is doing rather well.  I just have to make sure the vines stay in check and don't grow over the potatoes.  The Bottom half of the picture on the right is four brussel sprouts and three cauliflower.   I had four but one got ripped out when a deer went through my garden.  On the left side is twenty-four broccoli plants.  I love broccoli and hope they do well this year.

These are my strawberries in the garden that are not doing all that well.  They are all new plants this year, but they keep getting ripped out and eaten.  So we havn't gotten many strawberries this year, but I am hopeful for next year, and I will need to put up some kind of fence around them so they stay safe.

This is my sorry excuse for a grape arbor, lol.  There were two posts in the ground here already so I ran some twine between them and it has done well so far.  But now the grape vine is too heavy for the twine so I need to fix that, but I have some grapes on there this year.  It's the third summer for this grape vine so it's starting to produce more, yay!  I also have a blueberry bush in front of the grape vines, and one off to the right of the picture.  I need to make a blueberry patch and get more blueberry bushes next year.

These are my tomato bushes, I have twelve in all.  All Roma tomatoes.  I have plans of salsa, pizza sauce, and spaghetti sauce.  But I don't think I will get all of that out of 12 tomato plants.  Maybe I'll try one recipe of each so that I can find one that I like.  I'm kinda picky when it come to pasta and pizza sauce.

And last but not least, the pumpkins.  I have never grow pumpkins (or watermelons) before, but since my husband made my garden super big this year I had to fill it up with something.  

Hopefully my garden will keep doing well over the summer and produce wonderful amounts of food for my family.  And I will be able to spend less time in the grocery store over the fall, winter, and spring months :).


   Shared on The Prairie Homestead
    http://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2014/07/homestead-barn-hop-168.html