While The Big Guy and I work on a kitchen project (that sadly did not come together as planned, otherwise, I would be posting about that right now), I thought maybe you’d like to see more of our garden for this year. Once we’re able to harvest, there will be more recipes utilizing these ingredients so it’s a sort of glimpse into the future for you. The garden is not entirely complete–my mother, who works for the nationally-known mail order nursery that I once worked for as well, may be getting some more veggies for me soon once they close out the season and give away the leftover stock–but this will be the backbone of the season. So long as I don’t forget to water everything and have it die. No snickering; it’s happened before. I’m hoping that having two children plus The Big Guy as my gardening assistants will help the garden thrive this year. What a great family project for the summer!
The Big Guy planting cucumbers while my little girl watches
Today, we picked up pickling cucumbers, purple peppers (yes, purple!), a couple ever-bearing strawberries, and a white cherry tomato. Because you can never have enough tomatoes, especially the cherry variety. Have you ever eaten one fresh off the vine after it’s been caressed by the sun all day? It’s nearly orgasmic. It’s about all the passion I can handle right now.
black cherry tomatoes, white cherry tomatoes, and cherry roma tomatoes
ever-bearing strawberry
Another great advantage to container gardening is that if you’ve chosen a poor location (most vegetables require at least 6 hours of direct sunlight in order to thrive), you can relocate without it being a huge hassle. That is, if you have somewhere to relocate. We’ve having some territorial issues right now–I lost my prime growing spot on the south side of the house–so it may take some moving around to find what will be my prime growing location. At least I have that flexibility.
basil and pickling cucumbers
Are any of you starting a garden for the first time this year? I’d love to hear from you! Advice from any seasoned vets would be appreciated, too. We’re all in this together!
pots consisting of: mint, chives, rosemary, cilantro, thyme, oregano, dill, parsley, basil, appletini mint, jalapeno, cayenne, red bell pepper, purple pepper, strawberries
early girl tomato
I have not tried it but looked into strawbale gardening. Our ground is not very good for growing, tried one year & all we produced were weeds. Maybe next year.
BTW – Hope the back is healing well.
There are so many interesting ways to grow a garden outside the conventional raised bed plot. You should try it! I haven’t heard of strawbale gardening, but why not?
The back is improving, thanks! Can sit much longer now and I’m getting around a bit better. It’s still a long road ahead, but definitely a huge improvement over pre-surgery just one week ago.
As a freshmen culinary student we’ve been talking about local farms, seasonal cooking, and organic growing in just about every class, so I finally decided to buy some veggies to plant after an onion and a clove of garlic in my pantry decided to root all on their own.
I visited a local nursery and a few other places to pick up plants. If everything goes well I’ll have blueberries, blackberries, rasberries, strawberries, eggplant, roma tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers, dill, thyme, basil, oregano, parsley, and one adorable pineapple.
I’m glad I decided on container growing too, because its raining like crazy and it dropped from 80 to 50 overnight so I had to migrate all my guys into the garage.
Oh and good luck, your tomatoes already look good.