The first day!

We had a successful planting day and all had fun! We managed to plant lettuce (two kinds!), beets, radishes, cilantro (have to make salsa!), and carrots. Have to plant the peas tomorrow because I forgot to read the directions and didn't realize they needed to be soaked overnight! :)

The kids had a blast and I enjoyed listening to their answers to my questions...one of my favorites was from my own, Hank (3) and his buddy Adam (3)...when asked what plants they wanted to grow in the garden, Hank replied a string cheese plant and Adam a meat plant...ahhhh childhood innocence! :) (Now if we could perfect a bacon tree then we'd be on to something....)

I think it's neat to share with kids how their food comes to be...their eyes light up when they put two and two together and realize that lettuce comes from these tiny little seeds - when they only usually see lettuce come from a bag!

Hoping to get the big garden ready to go so the tomatoes, peppers and more can go in soon!

And so it begins...

Well, this week will be our first meeting of the 'Flamingo Garden Club'. We call it that because our neighborhood has unofficially adopted a plastic yard flamingo as its mascot (long story). The kids seem to be really excited. I've already picked out some of the vegetables (I told them they could vote but I've secretly selected a few things that they don't know about!) and hope to plant some this week. We need to get moving on the cool season crops like lettuce and peas so I need to get some grass killed here pretty quick! I noticed this morning that some wayward lettuce is coming up in our raised beds from last year. Had no idea that lettuce was perennial! Hoping our lettuce crop this year is more successful too!

I'll report back on our first meeting which is Thursday (Earth Day!)...hoping that 22 kids are ready to do some learning!

A new year - a new garden!

Last year we had a pretty successful garden - a few ups and downs, but not too bad! The other day I was driving and thinking about our vegetable garden and decided to expand it a little. I don't know if I was lacking coffee or just had a mind blank...but I decided to invite all the neighborhood children help plan, plant, and harvest our vegetable garden!

I emailed all my neighbors with kids and asked them if their kids would like to help in the garden...and I got all "YES" emails back! So my two boys, and 20 of their friends, are going to plant a neighborhood garden in our parkway yard. Stay tuned to see how we teach the kids all about fruits, vegetables, organic gardening, harvesting, bugs and critter control, and more!

(and stay tuned to see if I lose my mind...... :))

Anyone need any tomatoes?

Had a banner week for 'maters this week. This is only a fraction of the light bulb (yellow pear) tomatoes on the vine. My kids can't eat them fast enough! The weird looking yellow one is some unknown variety - I think the tags were mixed up on the baby plants I bought - but my hubby ate it yesterday and said it tasted better than it looked. A little bland but tomato-y and pretty. The round, baseball sized tomatoes (Wisconsin) are some of the best I've ever tasted. Nice and meaty without a lot of juice and seeds so they are excellent for sandwiches. My favorite from the garden this year is the 'Health Kick' Italian tomato. It's larger than a regular 'Roma' with a nice thick, hard skin and is dark red inside. It's a little meatier than Roma, but still is good to eat plain or in a salad. Lately I've been cutting them up and just drizzling with balsamic vinegar and salt. Yum!

I'm tempted to can some of the tomatoes and make sauce or salsa or something. We have so many (and so do our friends and family) that we can't keep up with them! It's so different from last year when we had about three red tomatoes all year! The vines are starting to decline already but we still have tons of green ones too. I usually pick all the green ones right before any danger of frost and put them in the house. They will ripen inside (most of them) and we can enjoy them well into October.

Our cucumbers/pickles are officially done - the vines are all dried up. Hard to say why, probably neglect more than anything else! Oh well - we got tons and made plenty of bread & butter pickles. Next year we plan to plant two or three times as many pickles so we are able to can more of them.

One last thing - my cabbage are about ready for harvest. Two out of three heads did great. One head got all rotten (probably due to all the rain) but the other two are gorgeous. I'll probably just make some corned beef & cabbage or just smother them with peanut butter and eat them raw!

The Great Tomato Caper....

I came home the other day only to find about 6 or 8 green tomatoes scattered around the lawn. I was furious...thinking that the raccoons we have seen recently around the neighborhood had invaded my garden. (At the time, it didn't occur to me that they probably can't get in my fenced in backyard...). I picked up the tomatoes and threw them back in the garden hoping that they would just eat the ones they left, rather than pick more!
A few days later...more tomatoes in the yard. Still furious...


Then...a revelation...and a certain dog with a green head...

Turns out our 100 lb. Alaskan Malamute, Lucy, has been "sneaking" in the garden and eating the green tomatoes. Her head is all green from digging around in the plants trying to get the tomatoes out. She tends to like green ones for some reason but has eaten a red one or two as I've found evidence strewn around the lawn. If someone can tell me why dogs like green tomatoes that would be great! Needless to say, we need to keep a better eye on her while she is basking outside so she doesn't destroy our whole crop!

I do have some beauty Italian tomatoes ripening now...we've harvested a few already...they are called 'Health Kick' and are supposed to have more lycopene than normal tomatoes. Lycopene is supposed to be good for you. I'll do a little more research on it and post next time!

FINALLY!!!

We finally had a red tomato!!! It was a 'Wisconsin 55' variety and it was fabulous. There are two more beauties on the vine that are about a day away from ripening. My 'Health Kick' Italian tomatoes are numerous but only a tint of pink.

We have harvested about two to three cucumbers per day and lots of little pickles. My hubby made "fridge pickles" this week. He got five pint jars and they turned out awesome! Maybe if you are nice, we'll share! :) We've decided that we need to plant about 4-6 pickle plants as they don't produce enough to pickle in one batch. We only have two plants, and while those two are churning out pickles as fast as they can, we only get about a dozen per harvest.

Our cabbage look beautiful - we dusted them with a little Sevin (so much for organic!) because we had caterpillars but they seem to have moved on. We lost our entire crop of beets for reasons unknown but might sow some more this week and see if we can get a fall harvest.

We are learning a lot from our veggie experiment and hope that next year some of our "issues" will be easily resolved. But for now, we are excited to have lots of tomatoes coming on! My kids eat them right from the vine and stuff their little mouths with Light Bulb tomatoes so it's fun to watch!

WE'VE GOT A CUCUMBER!!!

We finally have something worthy of harvest! Got our first awesome cucumber today. It's so nice not to have to use Dawn to get the oily junk off of a cucumber like a store bought one! We literally have tons of baby cukes and pickles that will be ready any day now. They are sooooo beautiful too! It helps to grow cukes on a fence or trellis. Nice long fruit that have no bug spots or discoloration due to touching the ground. So excited!

Trimmed a BUNCH of leaves off the tomatoes too. It helps to get rid of some of the "junk" around the base and hiding the fruit. Removing some of the large leaves at the base helps promote more flowers and also hopefully, promotes ripening. We have a million Roma tomatoes ready to pop any day now and the Light Bulbs are starting to form. Just realized that our "unmarked" tomato from Cub Scouts is a cherry tomato so we'll have a bumper crop of those too! Hopefully heat and sunshine will prevail and get these green guys turnin' red!