Garden Galore!

One of the things I love about summer is gardening; not flowers, vegetables! This has been an exceptional year for our vegetable garden. I think the record temperatures helped! We've been able to grow vegetables that last year failed miserably! It helps that we haven't had to deal with the slug problems like last year; I think the heat wave helped with that too.

I know we've not been able to grow green peppers in past years and just look at how cute these little guys are!!

Tomatoes! Lots of tomatoes! Not that Eddie and I like to eat them, but we do like tomato sauce, Mexican rice, and fresh salsa!!

Corn! We have corn! Now, we did get some corn a couple of years ago, but it was not edible. This corn shot up over TWO FEET just during that week we had the hot, hot temperatures! We've got about two ears per stalk; three stalks.

Potatoes! We planted these so long ago, I don't even remember which variety of potato these are! I guess that will be half the fun when we dig them up then.

Pumpkins! Last year we had enough to carve FOUR huge jack-o-lanterns. Then we cut apart the pumpkins, cooked in the microwave for a few minutes, scraped the 'meat' of the pumpkins into a bowl and pureed it. Then we put the puree into Food Saver bags and have fresh pumpkin in the freezer for pumpkin bread, pie, cakes, cookies, and whatever other yummies we can think of!

Peas - these are just beginning to flower so we should have some snap peas in the next couple of weeks. The down side to snap peas is that they only harvest one time so you have to plant lots of them!

Raspberries! We just planted these at the end of the season last year. We've only had a few berries so far, but lots of flowers are beginning to form! The challenge here will be to get these plants under control so they don't take over the yard!

Jalapenos!!! We have the cutest jalapeno peppers growing! We've NEVER gotten jalapeno peppers to grow. That salsa is sounding really good right now...

Broccoli - it's amazing how huge the plant is for such a small crown and it's only good for one harvest! Oh well, Eddie loves broccoli!!

Zucchini - we've learned, you really only need ONE zucchini plant. Yeah, we have FOUR! Lots of zucchini bread, stir fry, and pizza toppings in our future!

Cucumbers - these are the tastiest cucumbers we've ever grown! They're the miniature variety so they're each only about 5" - 6". We love cucumbers and more are just waiting on the vine...

We have some herbs growing as well - anyone need any basil or oregano?? Next year, I think we'll make more room for lettuce and onions. We got a few onions this year and they were so yummy; well, I thought so anyway, Eddie's not into onions so much, go figure!

At any rate, vegetables out of the garden taste so much better and force a bit of a challenge on us when it comes to fixing dinner (can't let all of these beauties go to waste)! It's great!!