Friday, April 10, 2009

Gardens Teach Patience

I love fresh vegetables from our garden! The taste beats grocery store veggies by far!! Spring and summer harvests are my very favorite and I am so excited to see our little plants growing and looking healthy! The vines above are rattlesnake beans. This is the first time I have ever tried them. I was inspired after reading Tnfarmgirl's blog on how prolific and delicious they are. I am hoping to have enough to can.
Squash was planted the earliest in our garden and I can already see some teeny baby squash on the plants! I froze some summer squash from last year's garden but I think I should have used the younger and more tender squash for freezing. I am keeping that in mind this year!

We also planted blackeyed peas, soy beans, cream peas, zippers, okra, corn, cucumbers, watermelon and cantaloupe. Corn is another first for us. Our neighbor's corn was destroyed by worms last year. If that happens to our corn I will just feed it to our animals. Either way it will be useful.

The picture above is my experiment. I have always bought my tomatoes and peppers as plants. This year I tried raising them from seed. The right half of this planter is tomatoes. They look great! The left half is a variety of peppers and they are not looking so hot (no pun intended!). I don't know what happened with them. I may be buying pepper plants again this year! I have transplanted part of the tomatoes into the big garden. I am amazed at how few it took to fill up a row!! I hope to be able to get the rest planted next week. One other problem I encountered. I labeled all the different types of peppers and tomatoes on the white plastic spoons you see sticking up. I used a permanant marker to write with. However, the first rain just washed all those names right off!! Now all I know is the left side is peppers and the right is tomatoes! We shall see....

Anyway, I can't wait to sit down to supper with a big plate of peas with okra and a slice of cornbread....mmmm....mmmm.....hurry up garden!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

i'm so glad to see your blog!!your garden is beautiful. you are so right about the tomatoes. i planted a "FEW" seeds, when it came time to transplant, i had a whole bucket full. i do not know where i am going to plant all of them as we only have here at this place about 1/2 acre? my beans and peas have come up and will start trellessing soon (is that a word). i would put pixs on myspace but i just had my laptop serviced and the young man deleted my kodak icon so now i can't download anything? uggggh. guess what? i have peaches and from counting (that is a big thing to only be one year old) we see already about 30 peaches from 2 trees, yeah!i have blooms all over the place with my blackberries. roger has corn already planted and 50 watermellon plants planted from transplants. i have a few hot peppers, lavender, edible marigolds, basil but i forgot about bell peppers, squash, and okra. how did i do that? do you know anyone that has a kodak disc i can borrower,? if we were together, we would be canning and freezing together,what fun? just keep putting up the pics on screen for me. luv u all, xox0x

Ginger said...

Where do they get the name "rattlesnake". I'm scared.
Girl, I'm looking forward to some of your veggies. We just might have to have a "veggie lunch" with cornbread for our Monday study! Did I mention that I "love" to shell peas? I'm not kidding. I absolutely love it!

Boysaplenty!! said...

Kay,
Peaches! Yum! We may have to do some bartering, my veggies for your peaches??? Monroe and I found A LOT of blackberry bushes in the woods behind the house and they are full of blooms! I will email you about the Kodak thingy. Yeah, just rub it in about not being here to can and freeze our bounty together :-( I will miss that!!
Hugs,
Pam

Ginger,
Not sure about that name myself! I am wondering if the beans are noisy if you shake the pod??? I'll let you know! Oh, you made a mistake by telling me you love to shell peas!!!! I hope to have bunches and bunches! Hey, can shelling peas be incorporated into a science project somehow? LOL We will put these kids to work, huh! Cornbread and peas sounds like a wonderful lunch to me! Let's do it!
Pam

krackerjap said...

Don't forget about me. I like peas and cornbread too.