Bountiful Garden

At the beginning of the summer our garden was a lot of work. Brian set up the drip line system for the entire SUU garden with all their old equipment. After we planted, there was major weeding to do for several weeks. It's like somebody scattered grass and weed seed over the whole garden. We'd go to the garden in the morning as a family, then Brian and I took turns working on the garden and taking care of Bracken. Bracken loved the cows and would spend the whole time feeding them grass and weeds from over the fence. But holy cow they smelled bad! He also loved playing in the dirt. If we didn't watch him closely enough, he'd eat it too. There was one day he had a really weird diaper and I finally realized it was because he'd eaten a meal of dirt. Yuck!


On the way home from the garden: Bracken always plays hard at the garden. This time he was so dirty we had to strip him down to his undershirt. He fell asleep before we'd been in the car for one minute. Gardening can be exhausting!

I was getting a little discouraged for the first month and a half of gardening. It seemed like the weeds were the only thing that were thriving. But all of a sudden at the beginning of July, things started to grow! This picture is from the second week of August. We were just starting to harvest our veggies, and we got to share them with Brian's family while they were here. You can see how tall the weeds around the garden are. Brian keeps the pathways weeded, but they are like a forest around the perimeter of the garden. Bracken thinks it's so funny to go hide behind the weeds. He'll stand there quietly while we say "where's Bracken?" and then laugh like crazy when we come and say, "We found you!"

Hooray! One of our first harvests. (Don't mind the swim attire, we'd just come from the lake.) We've definitely learned some things by trial and error with our garden. Most of all, next year we'll plant our tomatoes much further apart, and we'll use stronger tomato cages. We have a tomato plant jungle right now.

Today's harvest: beets, eggplants, zucchini, green beans, onions, grape and early girl tomatoes, pickling cucumbers, purple and green peppers, and fennel. This is as good as a bountiful basket any day...except no fruit.

I'm not sure what his expression is about, but Bracken kept coming into the kitchen and taking green beans to snack on. Speaking of snacking, some of our favorite meals and snacks using our garden produce lately have been: Eggplant Parmesan, Zucchini Fettuccine, Salads, Green Beans with toasted almonds, Eggplant Towers, Fennel Soup, Tomato/Mozzarella/Basil Quesadillas, and of course, fresh Garden Salsa. Harvesting, sharing, and eating our produce has definitely been the best part of having a garden!