And to the second half of our garden update from last summer - more vegetables, a few fruit and some flowers. Enjoy!
Melons - Cantaloupe and Watermelon
We planted organic 'Heart of Gold' cantaloupe and organic 'Sugar Baby' watermelon and ended up with fairly small but delicious fruit. The long summer definitely helped in ensuring that our fruit had enough time to ripen before the first fall frost. Yum!
Onions and Leeks
The onions were amazing!! All summer long we watched them grow and were thrilled with their progress. I watched many videos on how to hang onions together (like in the old days) for use during the winter. So many plans. Turns out that we ended up eating them all straight from the garden, even before the season ended. We planted 'Red Globe' market onions, 'Sweet Spanish Utah' large globe onions, 'Parade' onions, organic "Giant Musselburg' leeks, and organic 'Runner' leeks. Apparently I took no photos of the leeks :( We will definitely be planting onions again this year!
Peppers - Jalapeno and Green
We harvested a lot of jalapeno peppers and quite a few green peppers this summer. We were actually very surprised at the number of jalapeno peppers and how well they grew in our climate. I assumed that they grew better in a warmer climate...
We did plant some red and yellow peppers but they didn't have time to mature. At least I think so. We ended up with all green peppers. No complaints tho'. We planted organic 'Jalapeno' peppers, organic 'Sweet Sunrise' peppers and 'Chesapeake' peppers.
Squash - Butternut
We planted organic 'Waltham Butternut' squash. They grew beautifully and were ripe just in time for our harvest dinner.
Swiss Chard
The organic 'Rainbow' swiss chard we planted grew really well. The colours were amazing but we didn't really know how to eat the plants - we hadn't eaten any in the past. The internet is great for learning new things and for finding great recipes and we all enjoyed a new vegetable on our dinner tables this year.
Tomatoes
Our tomatoes were our biggest disappointment. The plants grew really well until they didn't. We watched in sadness as each plant down the rows turned brown and died. We did harvest some cherry tomatoes and some of the larger tomatoes that we picked green and allowed to ripen on windowsills did fine but the rest had to be thrown away. We planted organic 'Beefsteak' and 'Brandywine' tomatoes, as well as organic 'Cherry Bomb' tomatoes.
Zucchini
We planted organic 'Dark Green Zucchini' summer squash and some leftover zucchini seeds that we don't know the names. We had zucchini coming out of our ears, there was so much and we didn't even have pigs on the farm this year to feed the leftovers too. Lesson learned - plant fewer zucchini plants this year.
Flowers
In addition to the fruit and vegetables, we planted a number of flower bulbs that our mom couldn't use in her own garden as they were planning on moving and wanted to preserve them for the new house. We had a gorgeous collection of dahlias and gladiolus, as well as one lonely ginormous sunflower that sprouted on its own in the middle of the garden.
We hope you've enjoyed these posts on the garden. Let us know if you have any feedback on what we did wrong - we want to learn from our mistakes! Those tomatoes, in particular. Any advice would be very welcome.
Read all about our seedlings and garden plot here and the first part of the vegetable series here.