Tuesday, August 11, 2009

A Walk Through the Garden

Today I am going to share a peek inside our gardens. You need to know right up front that we are NOT professional gardeners/farmers, though we do try!






Each year I plant tons of basil, as we love to make our own pesto and freeze it for the winter. I seem to never grow enough! This year we have about 30 plants, some doing better than others, but still it is not enough. Last year I think we had more. We would go out with a laundry basket and pick the plants nearly clean. We would make batch after batch and freeze it in small containers. I personally love the "Italian Large Leaf" variety. You get way more bang for your buck, and the taste is divine.


This is an adorable little ornamental pepper plant. The peppers start out purple and then turn red. They are extremely hot! I bought them mostly because of the purple peppers. Purple and green are my favorite colors!
It is kind of hard to tell here, but we have corn in the fenced in area. We have a nasty muskrat who was eating my dear husband's corn. Tomato plants to the right and two rows of potatoes. We have grown potato plants for a couple of years now and wanted to plant more this year. We dug trenches and kept covering the potato plant each time it popped out to encourage more potatoes. We hope to have some to 'keep' this year. It is hard to plant enough because with such a large family we eat so much.




Above are the pole beans. We love green beans. There are tons of flowers and a few tiny beans starting.


This little box is what I call the 'Brassica' box. I call it that because that is the type of plants that are in there, Brussel Sprouts, Collard Greens, and Kale, they are from the Brassica family. I learned that from Alton Brown on "Good Eats'. I try to impress my family every now and again with my vast knowledge. Oh, and about the collard greens, I forgot that I planted them. I kept wondering where the cauliflower was, then I remembered that maybe I planted some collard greens.







This box has more pole beans with carrots planted in the front. We put straw down in the paths to try to keep the weeds down, didn't work;-)




My beautiful purple cabbage! Don't you just love purple?



And my green cabbage! I am going to make some lacto-fermented sauerkraut from this beauty!






We also have lots of peppers, hot peppers, strawberries, more basil, snow peas and lettuce.


I hope you enjoyed a tour of our little garden.

4 comments:

Noel said...

Your garden looks FANTASTIC!! I wish I could get something like that going, especially the herbs, but down here the 100 degree temps are wilting everything and even our tomatoes aren't doing well. I'm going to try lasagna gardening starting this winter and I hope for results like yours!

Cheesemakin' Mamma said...

Very nice! I hope to start really gardening one of these days. Right now, I just dabble in it.

Deb said...

I would love your pesto recipe as I have got tons of basil and don't know what to do with all of it!!!!
Your garden looks great!!!!
Blessings!
Deb

The Prudent Homemaker said...

It's really interesting that you can grow basil and cool season vegetables at the same time! My basil doesn't even sprout until a month or two after the snow peas are done. Do you start yours indoors?

I grow the cool season vegetables in winter; it is too hot here now. I plant basil (from seed) outdoors, and it doesn't come up until April.