Our First Real Harvest!

As you may now, we started a vegetable garden earlier this year. It's an organic garden, and has come with its fair share of ups & downs (which you can read about here, here, here, here, and here). I told you there were ups & downs. :) hahaha

Now for one of our ups. We were finally able to harvest some real stuff!!! Hooray!!

Our squash plants have been doing really well. They are ginormous in size. I'm talkin' huge!. The plants, that is. Joshua had to cut back some of the zucchini plants that were taking over his jalapenos and corn. Each plant is covered in plants and zucchini and summer squash of all different sizees. So it was time to pluck off some of our "bounty."

Here's what I picked last night:

Two huge zucchini. I left one on the plant to give it another day or two of growing. Did you know that zucchini plants are covered in prickles? Very important to grab the fruit and twist it off. Don't grab the stem!

Eight summer squash. The kids were absolutely thrilled, screaming their enthusiasm, that the squash could be picked. Both were commenting on how yummy the squash looked and they were ready to eat them. Funny, because if memory serves me right they don't like squash! They'll eat nearly any other vegetable, but not squash. Maybe that will change because they helped plant the seeds, water, weed, and now harvest. Of course, I can "hide" the squash and zucchini by making breads and muffins. I made some banana/zucchini bread earlier in the month and they loved it! Everyone loved it, in fact. It was so good. There was shredded zucchini that you could see in each bread slice, but the kids never questioned it, and the flavor was not affected.

I plan on freezing slices of squash and zucchini. We'll eat as much as we can, but I don't think we'll be able to eat a whole lot of it without getting sick to our stomachs of squash. :) I'm going to look for a canning recipe on the Internet too. Joshua bought me a bunch of canning supplies so it might be time to put them to good use.

Look how big one of our summer squash is in comparison to the pen? It was really small just a few days ago, but exploded in growth. Almost like I should carve it into a jack-o-lantern instead of cooking it!

I also picked one bell pepper. Got several others on our plants but they are too small to pick. Got three jalapenos growing that will be ready soon, too. Joshua is looking forward to them. I have a white eggplant that will be ready in a week or less. I'll make fried eggplant with that--yummy!! Our cucumberplants are literally covered in yellow flowers. Found one little baby cucumber, so we should see more popping up in the next few days. Joshua's excited about the cucumbers, too. They are his favorite. I'll be making pickles in no time, since we'll be swimming in cucumbers before we know it.

Our strawberry plants are doing well and keep producing strawberries; however, the berries are being attacked by birds or ants. We had a few small ones just a few days ago that were near-ready to pick. Bright red, but since they were small I was going to give them a few more days to grow. Nope, didn't happen. Something got to them. I found ants crawling around a couple of the strawberries. My blueberry bush was also attacked and nearly all the blueberries were pulled off or eaten off the bush. Just as they were about ready for me to use them in my next bowl of cereal! But we're learning. We may have to start resorting to pesticides, but I'm holding out for now. I'm just enjoying watching everything grow. Kind of like watching a baby grow before your eyes. :)

Oh, our peas are really coming along. Took them a long time to get going. The green beans are doing better than the peas, and they were planted just a couple weeks ago. Let's see, what else? Sweet corn, tomatoes, leeks, onions, oregano. I've got two red lettuce that I'll be harvesting this weekend. Oh, and good news about our radishes (which were ravaged by caterpillars). They are growing new leaves!! The plants aren't dead, and I didn't find any caterpillars on them last night, so it looks like they just may make a full recovery. Whew! Also good news, I have two carrot plants growing. We planted the carrots back in March, and the seeds didn't take until just a couple weeks ago. I just might open another seed pack of carrots and try again since the two I have are doing really well.

So that's our gardening news!