Early July Harvest!

This week, I had a littler helper in the garden. My nephew was visiting this week and he loves to garden. Here he is helping me dig up the potatos. The harvests are definitely getting larger now.

We dug up potatos, carrots, and picked pole beans and cucumber. The carrots are disappointingly small still. They have been in the ground since March, not sure what is going on. I suspect they don't like our soil. Next year, definitely need to add more amendments to the soil.

I don't have a scale to weigh my vegetables this year. That is on my wishlist for Christmas. I told my husband, that the only thing I wanted was a food scale. LOL. He thought it was funny. So I've been keeping track numerically by how much I've harvested to date. It's a modest harvest, but not bad for a first time gardener.

2010 Vegetables Harvested to Date
Radish - 7
Radish Greens - 1 bunch
Lettuce - 3 bunches
String bean - 24
Raspberry - 2
Red Onions - 3 small onions
Red Potato - 9 small potato
White potato - 3 small potato
Zucchini - 4
Beet - 1
Cucumber - 7
Carrots - 6 baby
Rain Barrel Water Collected - 284 Gallons

Cages

We had seen this article in This Old House magazine where they used posts and twine to hold up their tomato plants. Being the thrifty gardeners that we are, we tried it. As soon as the plants hit about 4 feet tall, they started to droop terribly. The twine was not strong enough to hold up the gigantic Roma plants. So we gave in and bought cages. Now the plants are growing straight up the cage and not drooping. Oh well, we tried. How do you hold up your tomato plants? Do you have a DIY solution?

Wildflower Galore!

When we bought our house last year, we had a problem with people walking their dogs on our property and allowing them to do their business. My husband decided to put up a fence, and we thought, what can we put there to soften it up? He came up with an idea to sprinkle wildflower seeds on the ground.

Now it's in bloom and it's so pretty! And the best part, no more dog poop!

The last of the seedlings

I must admit, I'm sick of seeing the huge mess of seedlings in my front enclosed porch. I started off with actual pots and then when I ran out, I used a mishmosh of recycled plastic containers, plastic cups, pudding containers, ricotta cheese containers, and sour cream containers. I'm eager to get my front porch back, the plants are not quite big enough to go out into the garden.
So I've moved most of them to the back porch to get larger and harden off. I can't wait to get them in the garden!