Garden Update 6/14/12

Well, summer has arrived and the garden looks a little different than last time. First off our little corner with the cucumbers, blackberries, and flowers (I have no idea what kind I planted) has taken off! Aaron found me some pallets a couple of months ago and I decided to use them as a trellis for the cucumbers. So far they seem to like it!

In our raised bed, we finally had to pull the pumpkins after harvesting about five of them. I think I may have sorta killed them when I trimmed them back (they were taking over our yard!) and they weren't doing so good. We'll be planting them again in July in preparation for Halloween. The tomatoes are taking off! We had so many tomatoes I wasn't sure what to do with them, so I've made several batches of homemade salsa lately,and it's been yummy! (I'll put the recipe below.) I pulled all but one of the brussel sprout plants, and I almost pulled that one up today, but lo and behold, there are sprouts nearly ready to harvest. Not sure if they'll be good or not this late in season, but we can try!

Fresh Salsa

Ingredients: 6-8 medium sized tomatoes
1 jalepeno, diced
2-4 cloves of garlic, diced
1/2 to full bunch of cilantro, chopped
Juice of 1/2-1 lemon
Cumin, Salt, and Garlic Powder to taste

Instructions: Bring water to boil in a large pot. Once water is boiling, add tomatoes and boil for three minutes, then remove from water and let cool. While cooling, combine remaining ingredients in bowl. Once the tomatoes have cooled, peel skin from tomatoes, then pulse in food processor until tomatoes reach desired consistency (I like to leave it a little chunky), then add to other ingredients and refrigerate! Lasts up to 1 week in the refrigerator.

Garden Update

This is our second year of having a raised garden in our back yard. Last year was alright in the spring, but before we could harvest much, summer (and our dog) came and wiped out pretty much everything but the cherry tomatoes. We tried again this year (and started a little earlier since our winter was so mild), and it's taken off! So far I haven't killed anything, and we've really enjoyed the past couple of weeks as we've been able to start harvesting quite a bit of food! We also planted some extra cucumber seeds I had over in the corner by our blackberry bush, so here in a month or so, we're going to have TONS of cucumbers. So if you like cucumbers, tomatoes, or pumpkins, we've got you covered!

The pumpkins are the big feature this year since we didn't actually mean to grow them! I began composting last year, so when I was prepping the garden in February, I went and mixed in all the compost with the soil -- not thinking about the fact that we'd put October's jack-o-lantern in the pile along with everything else. Come March, I realized there were plants growing where I hadn't planted them, and it turns out they were pumpkins! We harvested our first ones this week and have more coming. I'm planning to take seeds from these and plant a couple in July so we'll have some ready for fall. (Though I've read that these may keep that long.)

Not only have I enjoyed keeping a garden, but the kids love going out to check it, especially Carson! They've been learning about plants at school, so he loves telling me all about how they grow as we're out there tending to it.