Grow Your Own

My last post was an excellent reason to have your own vegetable garden. It honestly is not expensive and doesn't take a Master Gardener or a degree in agriculture to do. It is a bit time consuming but very much worth the effort.

This is partial haul from one weekend:



This is leaf lettuce. We planted 8 plants and at first I forgot that I planted leaf lettuce and kept waiting for heads to form. It could have been harvested a bit earlier but it was still great.

This is our zucchini, mint, parsley, dill and bush beans. I knew we wouldn't have problems with bush beans since we had grown them quite easily at another home. At that place they were the only thing to grow! The next door neighbor wasn't able to grow zucchini because they had worm problems but so far ours have been growing like weeds. We pulled our first cucumber yesterday and my pickiest kids were all over it. They love cucumbers but are very particular about how they taste. It was gone before I was done slicing it!

I don't use pesticides and weed control was all done by hand (ugh!). Our yard is not in the sunniest of locations either so where you may already be putting up your harvest, we are still waiting on some things. The peas we planted got too much rain and sort of petered out, the carrots are taking longer than anticipated and the radishes...well, 20 days may be normal for other areas but here they just didn't go at all.

This is also our first year here and most of everything we planted was experimental just to see if it would bear fruit. I did plant strawberries but the plant was no good and it didn't root. I also have pumpkin vines, a watermelon vine, tomato plants, pole beans (a friend gave me extra plants), sunflowers, oregano, basil, chives and lavender in addition to too many flowers!

If you don't have a garden or haven't tried because you're afraid it won't work, give it a second thought. It's not as hard as it looks and I am always of the mind that if your yard grows weeds well it can grow almost anything well.