About a month ago I told you about our raised garden beds. Well time has passed and things are growing like crazy! Man we have more vegetables then we can eat so I have been busy preparing, blanching and freezing various vegetables and canning a few too!
Tonight we spent the evening working in our gardens and I thought it was time for an update. We are loving the raised beds and it seems that everything is growing exceptionally well in them. Maybe too well somedays. The plants really seem to have taken off with the compost soil and with plenty of water due to the driplines.
Our first produce was the lettuce and spinach and I have started my second crop of each of those. I cut back the lettuce to let it continue to grow every few days but just pulled out the original lettuce as new emerged and will start a third crop soon. We love having fresh lettuce and salads from our garden. Yes, even Clayton loves that.
We started with zucchini about a month ago and they haven’t slowed down producing, only went into overdrive. I posted some of my favorite Zucchini recipes in a post just last week – Do You Have Zucchinis Coming Out of Your Ears?.
I have frozen countless bags of blanched green and yellow beans and I think we grew more beans in our 12 feet of bean rows then we have ever in our 50 foot row! We even lucked out by developing a pretty good bean snapper of our own. 😉 She just needs to learn to snap off the ends too!
We have already picked several heads of broccoli, countless eggplant, and lots of peppers. All of these are favorites to cook with so we haven’t froze or preserved many of these but I will starting this week. I have also had lots of cucumbers and pickling cucumbers and have made several batches of Refrigerator Pickles and hope to make some Dill Pickles this week.
I have also been using herbs in everything and drinking plenty of virgin mojitos as our mint seems to multiply overnight! In addition to mint, I have basil, oregano, flat leaf parsley, curled parsley, lemon balm, sage, pineapple sage, lavender, dill and thyme.
Our carrots and onions are still growing and are nicer than ever. And our three varieties of tomatoes are now taller then me but are green with no pink or red showing yet. The brussels sprouts and cabbage are also coming along nicely and we will have a head or two of cabbage to pick soon! The last items we have in our garden are the spaghetti squash and watermelon that we are trying on a trellis and we are amazed by them. We actually added a third trellis for the watermelon.
Well I better get back to the vegetables we picked tonight. I am not sure what I have up my sleeve but I better do something with them!
Oh did I mention our sweet corn is also ready and my flower gardens are looking amazing! This is definately our year for a bountiful harvest and beautiful views!
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