Category: Our Garden

  • Baby lettuce hatching

    I planted a few rows of lettuce 13 days ago. I’m happy to see that a few seeds have germinated. Hopefully, fresh fall lettuce is in our future.

  • Mid-September Harvest

    Our little garden is not in a very productive mode right now. (Makes us thankful for our CSA all the more) Nonetheless we are enjoying what is growing!

    Our summer squash plant has regenerated itself, as big as ever. Unfortunately, the blossoms come in all the time but they fail to develop into squash. So I guess that means it is time to pull that plant out.

    Last week I planted green onions and lettuce. No signs of life there, yet.

  • Home Grown Jalapeños

    Back in March my son and I thought it would be fun to grow our own hot peppers. So way back then we planted jalapeño seeds in the little jiffy starter packs and put it under the plastic dome. To our surprise, they actually popped up! A few weeks later we put them in the ground over in a corner where nothing else was having success.

    March 26th, Jalapeño seedling planted

    A lot has happened in our garden since then. Corn came and went. Eggplant grew up next to it and matured. The tomato forest grew next to it. We were over run with summer squash. And all the while our little jalapeño plants just kept on growing, and we waited for some sign that we’d get hot peppers.

    April 9th, not much change

    Spring gave way to summer. And the little plants just quietly grew. We kept watering the 4-5 plants who made it past the transplant and watched them grow bit-by-bit stronger. All the while, Paul and I would ask… is this thing ever going to flower?

    May 1st, still growing

    We’re pretty patient gardeners. And so we were more curious than anything. When would this thing mature?

    June 15th, our first jalapeño

    Right before we left for our summer vacation all of the pretty little flowers gave way to this beauty. A baby. But we were still hopeful that our plants would grow even bigger and that we’d get a lot more peppers!

    August 14th, the harvest is coming!

    A couple weeks back, I could tell we were on our way to a bumper crop. Now fully mature, our jalapeño plants got to about 3.5 feet tall and had fruit all over the place. It was just a matter of time.

    September 5th, the first big harvest

    Today, 180+ days after we planted the seeds, we have our first basket of beautiful jalapeños. Well worth the wait.

  • Tomato Apocalypse

    I just couldn’t take it any more. Our yellow cherry tomatoes were so severely overgrown, and no one would eat them, so I pulled out the two plants. You know its gotten bad when your harvest has filled all the baskets and bowls in the house and you’ve resorted to the bags the oranges came in. Yeah, that bad!

    I’m hopeful that the space I’ve created will give room for our two heirloom tomato plants to finally reach their potential.

    It felt very weird to hack away at a perfectly healthy plant just because we couldn’t stomach eating the fruit it was producing any more. As I pulled the vines out of a tree it had grown into (almost 20 feet from the base) I just kept wondering what kind of fruit I’d rather have planted and wished it had grown this much. Strawberries? Grapes? Apples? Snicker bars?

    With yellow tomatoes gone with now have some significant areas we need to replant in the coming weeks. The big question in our minds is, “Do we plant for another summer harvest or do we get and early start on a fall garden?”

  • Jalapeño

    We’ve got a large crop of jalapeños coming in. That’s why I was a bit surprised to spot this little red dragon as I was getting ready to pick some other stuff tonight. Most of them are long and green, but this one must have hid under a leaf while it matured and came out short, stubby, and bright cherry red.

    In the next 2-3 weeks we are going to start harvesting 5-10 jalapeños per week. And since I’m the only one in the house who likes things really hot, I’m just not sure what we’re going to do with them.

    That said, Kristen is always quick to find a recipe that matches what’s growing. I’m sure she’ll come up with something.

  • Too much of a good thing

    One thing we are learning as new gardeners is that you have to time a crop so that all of your fruit doesn’t ripen at the same time.

    Right now, we’re sick of yellow cherry tomatoes and summer squash.

    You know you have too much of a good thing when your children won’t pick things that are ripe and your friends won’t take what you are offering.

    Our plan for next year is to be a little more patient in how we plant things. We’ll start seeds at one or two week intrevals so we can better space out our harvest. While we do want to have a lot of eggplant, we don’t exactly want to go from no eggplant to 25 in a week!

    Another concept we are thinking about is to form some garden partnerships. We think it would be fun to agree to grow 4-5 items in abundance with the intention of sharing crops.

  • Watermelon

    We’ve been impatiently watching this watermelon grow in the yard. Since we’re new to this we don’t know if it is normal or not, but each plant is only growing one fruit at a time. Another will flower and get to about an inch long before dying. I wonder if that’s some sort of selection process of if the plant knows it can only support one fruit at a time?