Summer Garden Week 3

I'm a couple of days late with the garden update this week, but better late than never! Things aren't looking so good this week, well some things are and some things aren't. The herb garden is looking good. . . .

this is the cilantro I grew from seed, I just sprinkled it on the bed a few weeks ago when the chance of frost had passed. Cilantro is a cold weather herb (which I didn't know last summer and kept wondering why it would grow so fast and go to seed before I even had a chance to use it!). There is a small bunch of it behind these main ones that I bought at the store, but mine appears to be doing even better than that one. You can also see my two pots of mint (spearmint and peppermint) and some rosemary here.

What's not doing good are the squash :-( Dang cucumber beetles are all over them and have eaten just about every one of them. I finally gave in with the natural homemade spray and went and bought some yesterday. It is still 'garden safe' but just not organic. I have more zucchini doing well in individual pots but I'm not going to put them out yet until the beetles have gone, hubby said they are seasonal and won't be around all summer (I hope he's right).

Here's the picture taken from the left side of the garden, and below is the picture from the right side. You probably can't see much difference from last week but I want to keep posting from these two locations so over time we might see a difference in growth. These were taken Monday morning, so the garden is in shade.

I bought this strawberry plant weeks ago and put it in this hanging basket. I have no where to hang it now that I've put up a topsy turvy plant (which also looks pretty sad) so I just leave it on the ground. It has barely grown. Do you think it needs to go in the ground or a bigger pot?

we have 3 tomato plants... I'm happy to say they seem to be doing well so far.

the broccoli might still be in with a chance too, something was eating it's leaves so I sprayed those too!

I'm linking to Outdoor Wednesday today. Be sure to visit Susan and all the other wonderful participants.

Summer Garden Week 2

We had our first harvest of the season this week... some of my mesclun lettuce leaves were ready to pick :-) Don't they look pretty? I picked some twice this week and made myself a salad both times .

The second time I also cut a few chives from the garden, and I made a balsamic vinaigrette (from the South Beach book) that called for fresh thyme and basil leaves... which I also got from my herb garden. It's fun when you can start making meals with what you've grown out in your own back yard.


So, here we are with week 2 of our Summer Garden update. I want to try and take pictures of the same things each week, at the same angle so we can see how things are progressing. I hope that doesn't make things too boring for you all. For me it will hopefully show that plants are indeed growing when half the time I think they look no different. Of course over time as we plant new things I will add new pictures too (for instance, the lettuce won't grow when it gets too hot so I will be planting something else in it's place hopefully).

Here is the tomato and pepper bed again, with the mesclun in the background. You can compare with last week's picture if you scroll down to my week 1 post.

and here's a close up of the mesclun... this was after I'd cut some leaves off twice for salad!

broccoli is definitely getting bigger.

Peas are starting to get little flowers on them... the beans don't look much different to me!

I will try to take a picture each week from two corners of the 'garden'. This is from the left corner (pic above)

and this is from the right hand corner. I'm working on making the paths nice, but it's a costly thing!

WHAT'S NEW: Grapes are starting to grow again - we've never really had any to eat off these vines, we only bought them last year, and while they had grapes on them, they didn't really mature to anything we could eat. . . .

We have 4 grape vines... I'll share more about them next week.

We also have pumpkins ready to plant out. We're working on getting another bed cleared out for them.

Sunflowers

We had one big sunflower last year and it appears to have seeded itself in these two beds. I hope to gather together the 'garden' posts I made last year on my daily blog and will make a link here so you can see how big the sunflower got!

The weather is perfect right now for getting out in the garden, warm but not hot. Soon we'll be having to go out there early in the morning or late at night as the sun is going down, but for now, on a warm and balmy April evening. . . . . this is where you'll find us :-)

Summer Garden Week 1

I recently found Sweet Pea's lovely blog again. I remember reading her last year and loved seeing some of her garden posts. Well her new blog is wonderful. Her garden posts are all grouped together and I am really enjoying reading old posts and seeing pictures of her winter garden. She's in Houston and that means she has the same climate as we do. We can plant a summer and a winter garden here (we just never got around to doing winter stuff, but hopefully this year we can give it a try). Sweet Pea's posts have motivated me to try and post weekly here too! I know I said I would in my last post.... but well, that never happened.

So, here we are about 3 weeks after I last posted and I shall do a quick recap and call it 'week 1'. These pictures were taken about 5 days ago on April 8th:

above - this bed has 3 tomato plants on the left, and 3 pepper plants on the right (at the top of the picture you can see mesclun (baby lettuce leaves)

Here's a close up of the leaves.

These are broccoli plants.

Here we have beets.

This is my new herb garden... everything looks so small!

This bed has peas and beans in it. The peas are along the edge where the netting is, so they can climb up.

A close up of the peas!

A view looking toward the back of the house.

I get impatient at this time of year and often think the plants are not growing very fast! We had 3 squash plants and they have slowly been eaten by cucumber beetles. I'm pretty sad about that. I've planted more seeds and I have one remaining plant, so I'm still hoping we can get some zucchini this year. I will hopefully post after each weekend and take pictures of the progress. At least that way I can see for myself that things really are growing, even if they don't look like they are!

I'm linking this post to Outdoor Wednesday this week. Be sure to visit Susan and all the other participants for some great outdoor pics.

Weekly update....

It was Spring Break this week so we've just been pottering around the house and yard a little. The weather was nice enough to be out but there wasn't much we could do by way of cleaning up the yard, because we haven't been to buy supplies yet, and Jason was working most of the days.

Today is the first day of Spring but the weather changed dramatically! We had a thunderstorm last night and woke to a back yard flooded in parts. And the temps dropped to the 50's. It's felt so cold today I've put the heating back on!

I planted some lavender seeds and dill seeds this week and had them in the little green house, but the wind blew it over today (despite it being tied to the wall!) and the pots have gone every where. I don't know if I can save them or if I should just start again. They'd only been in a couple of days so hadn't even sprouted.

I am going to try and update this blog once a week (at the weekend) and show anything new we've been doing. This is really just a blog for me, but if anyone so happens to wander in, well, hello and welcome :-) You are more than welcome to browse around, see what we're up to and of course leave a comment if you so chose.

Earlier this week I also planted the herbs I'd recently bought in to a new bed nearer the house....

A New Year....

The weather is warming up here in Central Texas, it's meant we've been able to get out in the garden a little this past week. We want to start gardening again this year but we haven't had a chance to get any seeds started. So yesterday while I was at the grocery store, I picked up some of these. . .

tomato plants, spaghetti squash, bell peppers, jalapenos, herbs and a strawberry plant! We haven't put them in the ground yet, we'll wait a week or so before we do that. But I did separate some of the plants in to individual pots. There were 3 spaghetti squash 'shoots' so I divided those, and a couple of sage plants in the same pot, so I divided those too. I also put the strawberry plant in a moss hanging basket.

For now we've put the plants in our little greenhouse we bought at Lowes last year (ready for seedlings this year!)

I also planted some seeds in trays for grape tomatoes, more jalapenos, sunflowers (Jason wants to grow more of these) and some spinach.

The garden looks pretty sad right now! I took this picture this morning from the game room window...

The grass is still all dormant but the clover (and other stuff?) is growing green. The veggie beds are all empty as you can see, except for a couple of things in my herb garden - the rosemary and cilantro made it through the winter. We would really like to do something about the pathways this year. The grass and weeds grow rampant once the summer comes and it's so hard to keep the paths clear. Last year we paid to have them weeded and mulch put around them, but that didn't keep the weeds at bay for long. I'm hoping we can invest some money in to getting at least some of the pathway concreted this year.

Earlier this week Jason planted some seeds straight in to the beds, some were peas, and we also put in some 'mescalin' lettuce, and I think beets? I'll have to get better at taking note of these things.

A tisket ... a tasket... a huge big basket!

This is the harvest from yesterday! Everything in this basket I pulled out of our ever growing 'farm' when I wandered out there before anyone else was up.

The basket, I just got from Goodwill on Friday for $3.99. It's huge and just what we need cos all this stuff weighs a pretty ton, most especially the spaghetti squash. I will probably be handing a lot of this out to our neighbors as we still have zucchini, cucumbers and spaghetti squash to cook from earlier last week.

Today I made some zucchini bread (hubby's favorite) which I'll post about tomorrow on my daily blog and feature also in my cooking blog with the recipe and pictures.

Things continue to grow well for us, and we're getting ready to plant more seeds for the Fall season. There are different veggies we can grow in the cooler months, like broccoli, onions, lettuce and peas. These don't do well in the hot summer months and we didn't get a chance to plant any in the early spring so I'm looking forward to trying them soon.

I'll leave you with a 'birds-eye' view of our 'little farm' taken from the upstairs game room last week. My daily blog will let you know when I update in here. It may only be once or twice a week.

Morning Harvest!

We are in the habit of popping out to the 'Farm' each morning to see what we can harvest. Here is my basket of goodies from today. . .

I'll show you them indivudually. Here's the butternut squash. . .

These seem very small compared to what I see in the supermarkets, but I didn't want to leave them too long and have them go bad. I think I will try to make a small batch of our favorite butternut squash soup today. I'll let you know how it turns out.

These are the Acorn Squash, again quite small compared to store bought. To be honest I've never bought Acorn Squash, but I saw them in the store yesterday and realized they do indeed stay green, they're just a little larger than ours. When I saw ours was starting to turn a little yellow, and had been green for a couple of weeks now, I decided to harvest them also. I'll have to look for a recipe for these as I have no idea what to do with them!

Here's some little chili peppers that have finally turned red and are a little longer than most of the ones left on the plant! Again, don't know what I will do with them though. . .

And here's my yummy tomatoes. . . "let not the eye deceive you'"!

See what I mean about the skins splitting? There I was waiting for these to turn even redder, when I double checked their label - they are called 'Golden Boys'! They don't turn red, they go orange! So, despite the fact that they didn't look ripe enough to me, I harvested some the other day and got a really lovely surprise. These 'guys' are the most sweetest and juiciest tomatoes I've ever had. I wish you could try them! Jason is even eating them on his salad, and he hates fresh tomatoes! He says it's different when 'they're your own' ;-)

And finally. . . cucumbers! We are starting to realize that we don't need to plant as many cucumber plants as we have this year. We seriously can't eat them fast enough, and I've already given a ton away! Here's the pile in the kitchen from the past couple of days. . .

I've also pickled some already, and we're waiting to see what they turn out like, before we decided if we want to do more (of course not with these guys as they won't be that fresh by then!). These guys are going in to the office with Jason today!

Yesterday, I was busy in the kitchen'cooking up a storm'.It's book club at my house tonight and we've been reading (my pick), Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran. I've actually made the pomegranate soup that the book gives the recipe for, and also some Baklava (again from the book). Surprisingly the soup is rather tasty. I'll take pictures tonight when I set everything out for my guests. I think you've got enough photos today to keep you happy ;-)

Mood girls by Mulberry Street Graphics (no longer on line)