Gardening: Second Year

"Mommy, spray me! I'm growing." and "I want to water the 'matos." B-Bee is becoming quite the big boy helper - when he wants to be. This is part of my garden late this July. You can see the rhubarb was going crazy, tomatoes were growing tall, and peppers were starting to get going. I've found peppers to be rather slow growing until they get big - the habeneros are just not blooming, hope it doesn't get too cold for them just yet. Now a few of the tomatoes are taller than I am, nearing 6 feet. Don't remember if the super tall ones are the Mr. Stripeys or Big Johnsons - just looked, both are really tall but the Mr. Stripeys are the tallest.

One of the changes we made when redoing our deck was to put stairs on the garden side of the deck. LOVE, LOVE being able to just step right into my garden. Nellie likes it too, because it's easy to follow me everywhere I go.

When they're not busy pooping in the garden, here are the household sungods. At least we're finally keeping them out of the boxes.

We are nearing the end of the harvest already this year. I tried to get all my plants started earlier so that we wouldn't be plucking green tomatoes off before a hard frost in November, like we had to do last year. The Roma tomatoes are almost done and the bigger tomatoes are ripe. We've made lots and lots of salsa. The other night I blanched a batch to freeze until I have enough to make a huge batch of marinara to can. Sweet Banana peppers went crazy alongside the jalepenos. What does one do with so many jalepenos? I'm hoping the Habeneros produce at least a few peppers before it gets cold. We didn't have quite as much zucchini this year, plus I know what to do with the ones we do have this year. There are 4 watermelons that I'm wondering when to pick. How do you tell when a watermelon is ripe? Cucumbers didn't do so great this year - Daddy-O nipped one of my 2 plants with weed kill. Lesson learned there. The broccoli keeps growing more heads, so we'll probably have broccoli once a week until they die off. Herbs did okay, but I was slow getting them in the garden. Next year will be better, but all in all, it was a good garden this year. Year #2 was a success. :D

Strawberry Picking At the Berry Patch Farm

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Sweet and succulent strawberries. Hands down the best strawberries I've ever tasted - even though they were pretty small. Their small size probably contributed to their intense sweet flavor. Nellie's checking out the picture here as I type, saying "bah-bah, bah-bah" (her word for everything food, bottle or beverage related.

I took the kids to pick strawberries at the Berry Patch Farm. This is about as much picking as B-Bee did. He was more interested in the tractors and pushing Nellie in the stroller. Nellie was content to sit in the stroller as long as I kept handing her berries to eat. Have mentioned that she loves food? If she's not eating it, she's feeding it to the dogs. Needless to say, my 2 little helpers weren't very much help. I may have had more fun enjoying the fruits of labor at home - rather than attempting to pick strawberries in the heat and chasing down my 3 y/o pushing my 1 y/o across the field. It wasn't so bad, but I hope B-Bee is more interested in picking next time we go (in August to pick rasberries).

If this were at the Willy Wonka's Factory, she would have turned into a strawberry. She's so serious, serious about strawberries.