Garden Produce

I think I've mentioned before that one of my FAVORITE parts of being a home owner is having my own garden. This is the first year since I was a little kid that I've been able to grow things of my own, in my own back yard. I spent a lot of hot, sweaty hours outside digging my vegetable garden and building a raised bed for my strawberries. I also sunburned a ridiculous stripe across my lower back, where my shirt rode up while I was working. Anyway, I like to snap photos of my garden and its produce with my phone, and I think it's high time I share them with the world! Read on:

OK, so this is my "farm." It's about 6'x6' and I had just finished digging it up when I took this photo, back on April 5th.


Eventually I planted 3 types of tomatoes, a cucumber vine, some peas, and a banana pepper plant. This is how things looked a few weeks later, on June 16th:

I did not grow any of that from seed - I tried to grow a lot of tomatoes and peppers form seeds and it didn't work out well. I think I started too late, gave them too little light, and in general did not know what on Earth I was doing. I bought these as baby plants from various nurseries around Wichita including Johnson's Garden Center, The Home Depot, and whoever set up shop in the old CompUSA parking lot at Rock and 34th.

Before long, the garden matured and started fruiting like crazy! Well, everything but the peas. They died pretty quickly. I heard somewhere that peas like a colder growing season, so maybe that's why they didn't make it. The first plant in the veggie garden to produce was the banana pepper. Imagine the thrill when I checked on it one afternoon and found THIS:

Sadly, I had a hard time telling when the pepper was ripe. I'm pretty sure that by the time I picked it off the plant, it was past its prime. However, the plant has been gracious enough to provide several new baby peppers, and I hope to do better with those.

Next, the cucumber took off. That thing has pretty much taken over all the free space in the garden. For some reason I don't have any pictures of my harvested cucumbers, but there have probably been 7 or 8 so far, with plenty more left growing on the vine. My first few were beautiful, dark green and long. The next "batch" was different, kind of yellow and shorter. I think something happened to the plant that it didn't like. Maybe it didn't get enough water for a while, or maybe it was just too darn hot. I haven't tried one of the yellow cucumbers yet, but I'm hoping they're not bad.

Finally, the tomatoes burst into productivity. I have a pretty decent harvest from the three plants about once a week, sometimes twice. Here's a typical day's worth of ripe ones:


I like to combine my tomatoes and cucumbers in a salad which I dress with a mixture of olive oil, red wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, and whatever else I'm in the mood for. It comes out looking something like this:

I'm addicted to these salads now - I don't know what I'll do when the growing season is over.

I also made some salsa with my best friend last weekend using a bunch of tomatoes and some store-bought ingredients. It was super easy! We skinned the larger tomatoes (Slice an X into the skin, boil them for a minute (maybe less) and drop them into ice water. The skin slides right off.) and left the little ones alone, then diced them all. Then we chopped about a quarter of an onion (I am not big on onion. I use it sparingly.) and a few cilantro leaves (again, not a big fan.) Combined all those and added some lime juice and a TINY pile of chopped hot peppers, and I had the perfect salsa for me. Mild, tangy, and colorful. However, I have unique taste in salsa, and to make it more crowd-pleasing, we then added some garlic (which I hate), more hot peppers, and more cilantro. The salsa went over well with everyone, so I can't wait to make it again! If I make it at home, I think I'll add corn. I love corn in salsa. But I digress. . .

Here's the garden today:

You can see the tomato plants got HUGE! The biggest is the Yellow Pear Tomato, then the Roma, then Jet Stars. I think they grew the way they did because the Yellow Pear gets the first of the sun, and shades the other two. I'm happy though, because I like the Yellow Pears best, then the Romas, then the Jet Stars. You can also see the yellow parts of the cucumber. I really don't know what I did to anger that plant. It's still putting off cucumbers though, and the new ones are nice and dark green, so I think it forgave me. The pepper plant sort of blends in with the tomatoes, but it's in front of the Jet Star plant. The peas, clearly, are not there at all.

I also built a raised strawberry bed in April:

It was slow to take off, but I added a layer of straw over the top soil and that seemed to make the plants happier (sorry, no picture) and they started to fruit around June. I think they may be done fruiting now, or they might just be taking a break, but for a while I had something like this waiting for me just about every morning:


Last but DEFINITELY not least, I have a ton of flower plants. I can't take credit for many of them, because the previous owner of my house had a lot of beautifully maintained perennials. Here are a few photos of them:












I also contributed my own NEW set of perennials around our mailbox, which I think I've shared before:

(Those are all looking pretty dead now, by the way. I'm hoping this is just part of what they do - none of the neighbors' flowers are alive anymore either so I don't think I messed up.)

And, in my back yard, I planted a huge pot of petunias:

I wish I had taken a picture of them a month later - they went crazy and filled out the whole barrel beautifully.

I also planted sunflowers. I then failed to water them sufficiently and, shortly after blooming, they died. I did get one picture before it was too late:


Phew, congratulations if you read this far! Thanks for letting me share my garden story with you. I can't wait to do it all again next year!