You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘vegetable garden’ tag.
We’re planting our winter veggies right now, in waves, so we’ll be able to harvest at different times. We bought a cute little greenhouse from Lowe’s ($40) to make it easier to grow seeds outside. We’re considering putting some small warmer weather vegetables in there and seeing how they do.
Cute little greenhouse!
This weekend, we planted lettuces, mustard greens, and bok choy.
Ready to go into the ground...
Our new garden beds are working out really well. They get more sun than our side yard.
YUM! We've got leeks, mustard greens, lettuces, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, and cabbage =)
Here's our second garden bed. Green beans and spaghetti squash on the right.
We're getting quite a lot of green beans. They're super-tasty.
We also started pulling up the summer plants from our side yard. They had a bit of measly production left, as we harvested a tiny butternut squash and itty bitty eggplants, but overall, they’re done.
Pulling up cucumber plants.
A couple of weeks ago, we had a big storm here. Our big, beautiful eucalyptus tree fell over. Thankfully it didn’t land on our house, but did damage our spa cover slightly. We found out later, from our neighbors, that the tree had already fallen over once before! The people that lived in our home before us propped it back up. Clearly, a poor idea. When my hubby was digging out the roots, we saw that the largest root had been broken off from the trunk long ago. Once a tree falls over, it’s pretty much said “Goodbye, world”.
So we bought a loquat tree and put it in the spot where the old eucalyptus tree was.
We bought it from our neighbors. At a garage sale. Score!
Loquat trees grow very quickly, are evergreen, and produce tasty fruit. Three wonderful things that both the hubby and I desired. My mother actually grew her loquat tree from seed. These trees are very expensive in the hardware store or at the nursery (~$60-$75), so this may be the way to go for those looking to guard the pocketbook.
Alas! With our wedding a mere 17 days away, I haven’t had the time to post as much as I’d like. No worries though, I have a bunch more things planned (solar cooker, mini-greenhouse, and upside-down planting, oh my!), and I’ll be back to regular posts starting the beginning of August when we get back from our honeymoon!
In the meanwhile, our suburban sustainability has begun to really pay off.
We get fresh quail eggs every day.
Fry them in a pan with a little bit of season salt...and they make amazing appetizers!
My fiance’s jalapeno plant is growing more peppers than I though possible for such a small bit of greenery. We’re contemplating how to use them all. Ideas?
He likes to surreptitiously slip these into stir fry.
This was our first zucchini. We’ve got a couple more that are almost ready, and more that will be ready in the next weeks. We chopped it up, fried it, seasoned it with soy paste, and it was DELICIOUS! Best zucchini I’ve ever had.
And our thirteen tomato plants are all growing a ton of tomatoes. I can tell we’ll be making a lot of gazpacho, tomato sauce, salads, and salsa.
These are the "Extreme Bush" variety. So far I'd recommend - very hardy, lots and lots of tomatoes, minimal staking required. Let's see how they taste!
Here’s what our garden looks like now.
Mostly tomatoes on the right, eggplants, sunflowers, squashes, and cucumbers on the left.
VEGGIE GARDEN’S DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 2-3 minutes. We’ve set up an automatic sprinkling system with different sprinkler heads for the different plants. I just go out there to do some sporadic weeding, fertilize once every week or two, and to check what veggies are ready for picking. Easier than going to the grocery store.
In other news, my mom gave me a few hanging flower baskets. They look lovely. I water them twice a day. A couple of times while watering them, a little finch flew out of one of the baskets. “How strange,” I thought. The third time it happened, I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence. I brought a chair over, and peered inside.
The bird had built a nest in there! Here I was, unknowingly watering her eggs. From that point on, I watered really carefully around the nest.
Yesterday morning, they hatched.
The lovely basket my mom gave to me.
And inside…
Tired babies!
Be back soon!
