Finally, My Garden!

I know a lot of people have been waiting awhile to see pictures from my garden. Last year I didn't post any, because well, it was a weed garden basically. See, when we dumped a truckload of cow manure 2 falls ago, no one mentioned to me that the cow poo is full of weed seeds, and it would be like planting a bunch of weeds in my garden. Well, that it did. So last year I spent SO many hours weeding, to no avail. When you looked into my backyard, all you saw was weeds. You could only see the produce if you dared to venture through the weeds and start digging. It produced a lot of food, but looked terrible.

Fortunately, this year we were on top of things a little bit better. We put down some weed killer pellets, then rototilled. Then rototilled again. Then planted, and I've been weeding about 3-4 nights a week. Last weekend my FIL was kind enough to take some weed killing spray that we spray on the crop ground and kill off what weeds were left, then we rototilled the empty spots again. It looked great enough to finally take some pictures to show you guys, so be prepared for garden overload!

This year I have planted peas, green beans, corn, carrots, red onions, beets, green leaf lettuce, squash, cucumber, pumpkins and strawberries. I planted zucchini, but for some reason they didn't grow at all. Which is super weird, because usually they grow like a weed. So here we go!

Here's a picture of the whole thing. Yes, it is gigantic.

The corn. I still have some weeding to do here. This section alone took me 8 hours to weed.

 Peas! And a Harley photobomb

You can see some of the pea pods in this picture. The peas flower once and produce the pod. Once the pod is picked, the plant dies and you're left with a bunch of dead plants. These will be ready to pick in about 2-3 weeks.

 Green beans!! And Harley photobombs again. This is A LOT of green beans. I'll get probably 50 lbs or more of green beans off of all these plants. Unlike the peas, these continue to flower and produce. The first picking will produce the most, but I'll still get beans off of these for the entire summer until the frost hits.

Little baby beans are growing! These will be ready in about 2 weeks.

The lettuce...ooohhhh, the lettuce! This stuff can be picked any day!

Poor picture quality, but these are the carrots in front, and beets in the back. The beets didn't do very well either. I might have about 15 of them growing. Sad :( These were one of my best sellers at the Farmer's Market.

Onto the other side of my garden. One thing about the cow manure, it did add these wild sunflowers into the garden! When Patrick rototilled, I made him keep these that were growing along the edge. I think they're gorgeous!

Behind the sunflowers I have the squash, cucumber and pumpkins. Each of the stakes has 1-4 plants growing on a mound. There is so much room around these plants because they have vines that grow like crazy.

Especially pumpkin vines! Those suckers can grow up to a foot per day. They've started to vine out, so any day they'll start taking over everything. And I mean everything.

 Looking up to the house at the cucumber mounds. And Harley, again.

And last but not least, my strawberries! I planted just three little plants in each tub, and they are doing amazingly well! Next year I'd like to get some boxes built so they can grow and expand even more. I've only gotten 3 strawberries off of them, but the first year they don't produce much anyways.

So that's it! I definitely have my hands full taking care of all of this, but I wouldn't have it any other way! In just a couple weeks I'll be able to start taking pictures of all my delicious veggies that I harvest, so I'll be sure to share those too.

Thanks for hanging in there through all of the pictures!