Harvest

This year has been hard in the garden.  The season has been extremely shortened, it rained, flooded, and didn't really warm up until June.  Now it is September and it is starting to cool down fast!  Still no pumpkins yet, and my runner beans are having a hard time, but everything else seems to be doing okay.  So far this year I have harvested:

Fairy tale eggplant....they taste so good and they don't take as long to ripen as the large eggplant.

Onions: They are tiny but full of flavor!  Hopefully next year I will grow normal sized onions.  This is my second year and I have definitely improved but still not quite there yet.

Cayenne peppers:  This is just the full harvest with plenty more to come.  I also have jalapeno, and poblano peppers on the way!  It's funny I have a hard time with everything but peppers.  Maybe when I married my husband, (who is Mexican)  his heritage spilled into me haha!

In the morning I have started eating egg white omelets with stuff harvested from the garden.  My favorite one so far is with tomatoes and basil.....I have so much basil!!!!  I am going to make pesto soon.

I was also very successful with my garlic.  I was really worried last year after I planted it in November.  There was a small warm spell and some of the garlic sprouted.  Turned out it didn't effect the garlic to sprout before winter.

My front garden is finally starting to fill out.  A lot of the flowers are starting to lose there color but some are still pretty vibrant!

This summer I also filled the rose garden with rock.  It looks a lot better and hopefully it will keep that crazy snake grass down!


This year because of the shortened growing season all of my squash and pumpkin are having issues.  This makes me really sad cause I love squash and pumpkins!  Oh well I still have hope!  The snow isn't on the ground yet!

week 6 (04/07/2011)

 

This week has been filled with crazy weather, from 70 degree weather to snow storms!  My Magnolia is starting to bloom and it smells extremely sweet.  This plant is by far my favorite in the garden thus far.  The tulips still have not bloomed but they are getting close!  I can't wait till everything is sunny and warm.  

The raspberries look very healthy and they are sprouting up everywhere.  It kills me to pull up a healthy raspberry plant but I can't have them taking over the yard.  Hopefully I will have a lot of berries this summer.  So far I have four plants and all of them look promising.

I know I just barely posted a picture of my garlic but it looks so good I just had to post another picture.  All of the garlic that I planted is doing great except for the three or four my doggy crushed.  I was so worried last year because I planted them right before thanksgiving and we had a warm spell.  Most of the garlic sprouted right before winter really got started.  This mishap didn't seem to bother the garlic at all and it looks like the harvest is going to be a lot more successful than last years.

All of my pepper sprouts have come up and are doing very well.

This is my second try at okra, hopefully it is more successful than the last.

Here is a picture of some of my tomato seedlings.  These are Roma tomatoes.  I just planted a bunch of them in a container, every other day or so I will make sure they aren't crowded and maybe pull a couple of the seedlings out.  I hope this strategy works out, so far it has but the seedlings are still pretty young.

This week I planted......

ONIONS

CORN

.....and potatoes.  I have never planted potatoes but I'm excited about the process.  Because you have to use a technique called 'hilling'  while growing your potatoes I planted them in deep holes.  The potatoes are covered with about three inches of soil.  As the potatoes grow I will fill the hole with more dirt until a little hill is in the place of the holes.  You have to do this because as the potatoes grow on the stem of the plant, you want to keep them covered.  If a potato is exposed to light it will turn green, If you eat a green potato it will hurt your stomach.  In this picture you can also see my bamboo teepees I constructed for my beans.  The beans are not in the ground yet because I wanted to wait until it gets a bit warmer.  Hopefully we wont have any more huge snowstorms!

Week 5 (03/31/2011)

 

Today is nice and warm.  I placed my seedlings outside to harden them.  The biggest ones are my Soy beans.  The leaves look great but the stems are not very strong.  This worries me and I hope they will still be good plants as long as I make sure they are well supported.  This week my okra seedlings died :(.  I guess they didn't like the seed starting pellets.  I noticed today that the seeds I planted with compost in my egg carton are starting to grow.  I didn't take any pictures because they were just too small but I'm sure next week I will be able to get some good pictures.  The pepper plants that I planted next to my okra in the same egg carton are also starting to grow.  They are sprouting much faster than the ones in the seed pellets but I'm not sure that is because it has gotten warmer and the soil is warmer or the compost just germinated them faster.

This is a picture of a little bell pepper which has popped out.  It still hasn't grown any leaves yet and I just noticed it today.  My Jalapeno seedlings were the first to sprout and have already grown there first true leaves.  The Habanero, and Cayenne still haven't made an appearance.

I planted basil in this pot with compost and soil a couple of weeks ago and the seedlings look so cute!  I pulled out a few that were just way to close together.  Last year my basil seedlings did not make it so I am really hoping these little guys pull through...fingers crossed!

This week I also started some lettuce, mesclun, ceasar, and Kale.  After just a couple of days I am already seeing little seedlings coming out.  I was going to just start these outside, but I then decided I wanted an earlier harvest so I decided to plant them inside.  These will be the first to go out, probably in a couple of weeks.  Speaking of planting outside....I have planted my sugar snap peas.  Yesterday a light rain started right after I planted them so they are off to a good start.

The lettuce, and snap peas are going to be in the same bed as my rhubarb.  I am so excited about this little guy because I love to use rhubarb in my cooking.  If you look closely a third leaf is starting to grow from the center.  The bigger leaf on the left is as big as my palm.  I planted this last year and it never got this big so I'm hoping it has a good year and I may be able to harvest from it towards the end of the summer.

 As I walked around the garden today I noticed more sprouts.  This is why I love spring because every week I go out, there is something new to find.

Peppermint

Magnolia (hopefully I will have flowers in about two weeks!)

This week I also placed both of my agave plants outside.  

This is my biggest one, it is a blue agave I'm not sure what kind the one on top is.  I got both of these plants from my husbands uncle who lives in El Paso. 

week 4 (03/24/2011)

 

I know this post is a couple of days late.  I have been in training all week and it was a bit exhausting so I put off writing this post until the weekend.  This week I planted my tomatoes.  My peppers have not come up yet but I can see very tiny sprouts coming up.

This is a picture of my okra which is looking very sad.  I bought these pellets at Home Depot that you can just add water too and they turn into a seed starter for your seedlings.  I haven't been really happy with them.  This picture at the top of this blog is a picture of my soybeans.  The leaves are looking great but the stems are extremely weak, and I worry that they wont be able to hold the beans up.  

My eggplant looks like it is really the only one that seems to enjoy these seed starter pellets.  This week they have all sprouted a third leaf and look green and healthy.

I re-planted some okra, soybeans, and some peppers in this home made seed starter.  It is just an egg carton with holes poked in the bottom filled with compost and dirt.  I wanted to plant the same seeds that I had used in the seed starter pellets so I could really compare which one worked the best.  Of course the egg carton isn't very deep so I will have to transplant the seedlings sooner than I would with the seed pellets but hopefully the seedlings will be healthier.

On Sunday I will be planting some pea seeds directly into the ground if the snow has completely melted.  It has been warm here but yesterday we had a small snowstorm and today the temperature is about 38 degrees F.  It is supposed to warm up by the end of this week to the 50s.  If not I will probably wait until next week to plant my seeds.  

Still no tulip blooms yet but they are getting close!  I have buds on all of my trees and both honeysuckle plants.  I can't wait for spring flowers!

Here is today's harvest. I have slowly been collecting the yellow pear tomatoes and I have a couple of Roma as well but not nearly as many as hoped for. Next year I am going to double the amount of Roma plants and hopefully have enough to make a couple of sauces and can them. My carrots are doing great though. I have been able to pull about five a week and leave the rest in the ground. I will probably pull the rest of my harvest withing the next couple of weeks. These carrots must be eaten raw because if I cook them at all I wouldn't be able to enjoy their intense flavor.


This is a green zebra striped tomato. This plant had a hard time and I am happy that I have the three tomatoes I have on this plant. They are supposed to get a bit bigger so hopefully the are able to ripen completely. I may pick them earlier and let them finish to ripe on my window sill. I planted this plant in a pot that turned out to be way to small for it. I just didn't realize how big it was going to get! Lesson learned for next year.

Besides the small yield from my tomato plants I have been very successful with my peppers! Each plant has multiple peppers on it and all of my varieties are doing very well.

Chocolate Beauty sweet pepper

Jalapeno

Mariachi pepper

I also have three Habanero plants, and a yellow sweet pepper plant that are all doing nicely but I haven't taken pictures of them yet. I have already tried a Mariachi pepper and it was delicious!

I also have about four pumpkins ripening on the vine. I'm happy to have that many considering the difficult time I had with pollination. Here is a picture of my biggest one thus far.....