The garden last year was crazy....so crazy in fact that we didn't get the time to work on the blog! We will try to be better about it this year. We have started the pepper and tomato seedlings in the basement already and we started the peas and spinach outside during St. Patrick's day weekend. We also had LOTS of volunteer strawberry plants that sprang up anywhere and everywhere around our established strawberry beds. We pulled them up and planted them anywhere we had space around the house and yet we still had extras!
A recap from last year - you can see some pictures we took - we grew a lot of lima beans and yellow cherry tomatoes. Our generous neighbor also let us use his garden bed where we grew MASSIVE carrots and lots of chard.
We were harvesting those well into January!! Our potatoes once again failed miserably despite our use of big containers and great diligence. We tried Malabar spinach which took control of a large section of garden and was amazingly
productive when normal spinach is not, so it was an excellent addition. We also tried leeks that did not do so well (they were more like green onions). We got to harvest our first asparagus and strawberries last year and we are looking forward to more this year. We also tried a new kind of garden pea that has blue/purple pods. It was astoundingly productive so we are going with that again this year. Also, we harvested our first batch of hops, which you can see below. They are already growing up tall again this
spring! This year, we are growing garden peas, pickling cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, regular tomatoes, spinach, Malabar spinach, lettuce, hot peppers, sweet peppers, melons, yellow squash, carrots, chard, zucchini, leeks, and I'm sure there are some others in there that I'm missing. Anyway, I'll keep you posted on developments! We've gotta get some lettuce started this weekend!
Wow, ok, wedding over so now maybe a little more focus. We lost all our seedlings and have been heavily dependent on Oakland Nursery. Because of this, our assortment of veggies is different than we would typically pick. We are growing collard greens, swiss chard, malabar spinach, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, watermelons, pumpkins, cantaloupe, and berries. We harvested our first 2 cucumbers yesterday and our first 2 cherry tomatoes - they were all wonderful!! We are in the midst of blackberry season which is fun. Our grapes and hops are both growing strong and we are going to be getting grapes for the first time this year! You can see some pics of our arbor going strong.
