Garden Update Week #7 - The day of the first harvest!

We came home from vacation to seven beautiful burpless cucumbers! Look at these beauties, and they taste great! We've been enjoying them - the kids like them peeled, sliced and sprinkled with a little salt. Dad and I like them thinly sliced and marinated. Here's a great marinade recipe that I got from my Aunt Rose:

1/4 c. Rice Vinegar

1/4 c. Sugar

1/4 tsp. Course Salt

1/8 tsp. Fresh Ground Pepper (I added this part)

1 to 2 tsp. Fresh Ground Ginger (I like to go heavy on the ginger)

One hint* - you do have to slice the cucumbers pretty thin to really get enough taste. I use a V-slicer on its thinnest setting. Yum!

Garden Update Week #5 - baby veggies!

We have little baby veggies - cucumbers, peppers, and even the tomatoes have decided to do something (I was getting a little worried because they didn't seem to be growing much).

My favorite, though, are the darling little tendrils that stick out like bad hair or cling for dear life to the trellises. Isn't nature fascinating...

Garden Update Week #3 - Cucumbers are blooming!

Both the bush and burpless cucumbers sprouted happy yellow blooms a couple days ago! I'm hoping a lot of bees come around to help cross pollinate them now. Apparently cucumbers are gender specific and the pollen from the little girl cucumber blooms and the little boy cucumber blooms have to get together (California could use some gender lessons from cucumbers). The cucumbers accomplish this with the assistance of the bees. Otherwise, the cucumbers will turn out misshapen. I would do it myself, but I can't tell the difference between the girls and boys.

The carrots are really growing too. They are for thinning, which we'll try and get done this next week.

In fact, the entire yard is starting to bloom. We've lived here for five years, but this is the first year that I've actually cared for the landscaping to at least a minimal degree (i.e. watering, fertilizing, weeding, etc.). It's been fun to see things come together after some work we've put into it. Here are some pics...

Butterfly Bush

Daisies

Daylilies

Garden Update Week #2 - Something's eating the beans!

To our great dismay, we discovered that some little critter has been enjoying our green bean sprouts. We're not quite sure what we're going to do, but it'll probably involve chicken wire.

On the brighter side, our peppers grew some darling little buds.

Garden Update Week #1 - We have sprouts!

After one week, our green beans, carrots and corn are sprouting! Only 43 more days until harvest. Of course, we just realized that we will be gone for two weeks on vacation right about the time the first fruits of our labor are available. I guess we'll have to onegai our neighbors to look after things while we are gone!

The day of the first garden...

This week we planted our first real family garden. We've wanted a vegetable garden for a long time, but never seemed to get motivated enough to actually do it. For whatever reason, this was the year I overcame procrastination. I borrowed a million books from the library, downloaded several articles from the OSU extension services, and borrowed some gardening magazines from my neighbor. We started by picking a good spot...

Wouldn't it be great if we could skip pregnancy and grow kids in a garden instead!

Adding a few railroad ties, tomato cages, seeds and seedlings (and about $75)...

And - Viola! - our very first family garden!

Initially, I wanted to keep the variety of crops simple - tomatoes (two types - Rutgers and Pink Lady), cucumbers (one bush and one burpless vine cultivar (a cool new word I learned from my books!)), green beans (Blue Lake and Kentucky Wonder), and sweet peppers. Although, I let No.1 and No.2 pick out seeds so now our garden includes corn and carrots too (Danvers, Danvers short, Chantenay, and some sweet hybrid that's guaranteed to succeed). It would also have included cantelope, watermelon, broccoli, cauliflower and daisies, all of which the kids bought seeds for, but we ran out of space (it's only a 4'x8' plot). Now, if we can keep No.3 from pulling all the leaves off!

And, oh, I couldn't resist adding a few cute pics of the kiddies!

Our custom trellises that second as jungle gyms

Notice the bite taken out of the foam water toy

If you're wondering where No.1 is, he's inside playing Lego Star Wars...the worst mind-numbing invention ever created. And we don't even own a Playstation - it's all free online. If people can sue McDonald's for making their kids fat, can I sue Nintendo for making my kids dumb? *Sigh* So much for family togetherness.