Doug and Jenny's Blog: Gardening

Showing posts with label Gardening. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Garden (Year 2)

Our garden this year is not doing nearly as well as it did last year, but it's still growing stuff. Mostly weeds, but there are a few vegetables here and there. Having it at my parents' house (the old one) makes it challenging for us to give it the care it needs. We're only there on (most) weekends, so sadly it gets pretty neglected. Maybe one day we'll have a yard that's big enough for a full fledged garden, but for right now, my parents' yard works just fine.

This year we're growing...

Peas... This is, surprisingly, one of my favorite parts of the garden. I've never even liked peas (like EVER). In fact, I used to hide them under the ledge of the table growing up. That's because they were frozen (or even worse, canned). Now I that we have peas fresh out of the garden, I LOVE them!

Strawberries... My absolute favorite fruit, but they were small and sadly sort of disappointing. We were away from our garden so often, the bugs ate more strawberries than we did.

Corn... Although the reason I took a picture of this corn is because we're pretty sure this corn ate another corn. You can see the tassel from another corn sticking out the top. Our other corn wasn't as cool as this one.

New to our garden this year were pumpkins. We didn't expect them to take over things like they did. My little brother kept on having to move the vines out of the yard because it kept on escaping the grow boxes. It tried to strangle our corn as well. This is how a pumpkin begins. (We'll before this, it was a seed, but I didn't take a picture of that.)

This was our HUGE pumpkin this year. You can see Doug comparing one of our tomatoes (Oh, and we're still growing tomatoes and peppers in our garden as well.) to it. All of the leaves/vines around Doug are from ONE pumpkin plant. The actually base of the plant is about 5 feet to the left of where Doug is standing in the picture.

It turned orange a little early (well WAY too early), so Doug picked it so the bugs wouldn't get to it. I wanted him to wait to see if it would grow big enough for Cinderella to fit inside, but Doug never listens to me!

Here it is coming home with us. I figured we didn't need a booster seat because it weighs 70 pounds. Yep, 70 pounds! I can barely lift the sucker.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

SALSA!

Our garden has produced a lot of tomatoes this year... too much to just have with salad and such, so my mom and I made salsa.

We sliced up green peppers, jalapenos, onions, and of course tomatoes.

I had quite the MEMORABLE learning experience while cutting up the jalapenos. I had some hair in my face. Without thinking, I moved the hair out of my face and accidentally touched my cheek. My cheek started burning so I ran to the bathroom and splashed water in my face. Unfortunately, I still had all of the juices from the jalapenos on my hands. The whole area around my eyes burned and became really red... yeah, OUCH!

We threw everything into a big pot and added some extra ingredients. It was only suppose to cook for 20 minutes with the recipe we were following, but it still was really soupy so we cooked it longer and added some tomato paste to thicken it.

I think it turned out okay, but I still haven't had the chance to try it with chips.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Bigger Is Not Always Better

This whole gardening thing has definitely been a learning experience. I came over to my parents' house last night to learn how to can salsa since we have a bazillion tomatoes. I have a bunch of pictures from that, but no time to post so I'll share a little gardening tidbit I learned...

From my experience with gardening, you usually let whatever it is grow until it gets to its biggest size and then it's ready to be picked. It turns out that that is not how it works with squash. I had been keeping on eye on my squash feeling so proud that they continued to grow. After all of the salsa making, I asked my mom about the squash and she informed me that they should be picked MUCH sooner. So, I went outside with a flashlight (it was now midnight by this time) and picked all of the summer squash.

Picture of the squash before I knew that it was bad to have big squash.

Comparing the size of the squash to my foot.

It turns out that squash seeds become as big as pumpkin seeds if you let the squash grow too big. (Anyone ever roasted squash seeds like you do pumpkin seeds? ...just wondering if that works.) So we cut up the huge squashes, seeded them, and then put them through a slicer attachment on my mom's Bosch. After that, we put them in little baggies and into the freezer. The plan is that sometime this I will make some zucchini bread with it.

Little squash pieces!

Bagged and ready to go!

Monday, July 27, 2009

Harvest Time!

The garden is turning out pretty good this year. I had a piece of corn a few weeks ago and it was delish, but I wanted to wait till Doug was able to be there to pick it so we waited and now the corn kind of tastes waxy... sad. Well it grew well, we just need to pick it earlier next year. We have tomatoes growing EVERYWHERE, so its a little crazy trying to pick them because they weren't caged. The cherry tomatoes are excellent and I love just snacking on them.

We also had some sweet peas pop up this last week. I've decided that after eating these, I haven't really had peas. My mom always got the frozen stuff and I got the even cheaper canned stuff. These are SOOO good, they don't even compare. This garden is turning out quite healthy for me because I'm finding vegetables that I like. I'm not sure if its that they taste better fresh or I'm just so excited that I actually grew something.

The garden is terribly overgrown with weeds, but I'll show you a picture of it anyways. The veggies out of it are quite yummy!

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Our Garden

Our garden is still growing! We've definitely had some set backs (rot in the lettuce, only one pumpkin plant, which is not good, and our cantaloupe and carrots never showed up) Its not a perfect garden, but we will improve each year.

There are quite a bit of weeds, but not near the smaller plants that can be choked out. I don't think there is a weed that can take out our corn. It's huge! The tomatoes are not caged because I was gone the weekend that they needed it and Doug said, I quote, "Tomatoes grew just fine before there were cages. Don't worry about it!"

Tomatoes!

Note to self for next year: Lettuce needs more space.

This is the tasseling stage, I believe.

Wha la!

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Our Garden!

...is actually growing!

We worked in the garden for quite some time this Monday. The lettuce, corn, and tomatoes are doing great. We had two summer squash survive and all of our cantaloupe and pumpkins didn't fare too well. We're pretty sure that the seeds rotted after the dumping of rain we had ALL week a few weeks ago. We replanted some things and are going to try green beans this time around.

Here is a picture of Doug watering the garden!

Monday, April 20, 2009

We Planted a Garden!

We were at my parents house on Saturday just hanging out and getting our weekly dose of Lost, Fringe, The Office, and House... in that order. We don't have cable, satellite, or even bunny ears at our place so we go over to my folks place to watch our favorite shows on weekends.

It was a BEAUTIFUL day, so we went outside to go on a walk. The kids were all doing their outdoor chores and one of Shelly's chores was to weed the garden plot in the backyard. My family hasn't actually had a garden in that plot for probably 12+ years, but they're hopeful every year. They just never get around to it. I decided on a whim that Doug and I would plant something, so we ran over to Home Depot real quick and picked up some seeds and starter plants. In our garden this year, we will (hopefully) have pumpkins, lettuce, carrots, corn, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, summer squash, and cantaloupe. I'm really excited about the cantaloupe! My family never had it in their garden and for some reason I had this idea in the back of my head that it was a fruit that was grown in more exotic locations. We're still looking for strawberry starters, (A MUST!) but they didn't have any that we could find at Home Depot.

Both mine and Doug's families had gardens when we were growing up, but my family stopped when I was 10 or so. I'm not exactly sure why, but I'm guessing they just got too busy with so many kids and we hated to eat vegetables anyway so it seemed like a lost cause...

I was quite impressed with Doug's knowledge of gardening. I had always had in my mind that it would be so hard to start a garden, but it really wasn't that difficult. Chris, Shelly, and Johnny (my three younger siblings still at home) just sat and watched us in amazement. Johnny, the little entrepreneur, decided that when the garden starts to grow we could sell the vegetables for money! :)

I know that the hard part (weeding and watering) is still ahead of us, but I'm just glad we actually got something started. Starting tends to be the major setback with my family. My dad made the announcement after we had put in all of the plants. "Now we are REAL Mormons again! We have a garden!"

Here are some photos of our planting adventure:

Hopefully the pictures in a few months will have slightly more green in them because our plants will be growing!

The corn is so tall!