One of my Passions

So, if you can't tell, I like gardening. I like it on so many levels I get a little tongue-tied when I try to explain it. So I won't try to explain it right now, but I would be very remiss in my blogging if I didn't tell you about our gardening adventures this year. So here you go.

This is a picture of our garden from the north side. Terral's sister Heather lives in her in-laws' basement, and this is their (the in-laws') plot of land. Heather and Chris were nice enough to invite us and Erin and Corey to share the space with them. Our section is what you can see over until the road posts that are strung with yarn. As you can see, there is quite a bit of bare ground in our section. We didn't plan it that way. We've had a few challenges this year.

We were spoiled with imported soil in raised beds last year. Sure, we had to do some MAJOR weeding in order to get to the beds, the earwigs almost completely destroyed our beans, the birds got most of our small yield of strawberries, and we had to replant our beets and carrots-- but we really had it good.

This year we've gotten to know the native clay-filled soil. We really struggled with keeping our plants watered at first, mostly because the water just didn't sink in. But we made it past the critical stages. Then we started getting attacks from the bugs. Now we have deer. (Tomatoes are their favorite.) But the worst has been the disease. It has affected our beets, tomatoes, zucchini, and chard. It completely wiped out our spinach.

If you look on the other side of the furrow and past the peas, you can see that our chard is doing okay. Spinach is definitely something we'll try again. It was sooo good while it lasted!

Our cucumbers are another fatality. I love cucumbers. We planted two to begin with. (Six was a bit much last year.) One died right away. The other gave us false hope by lingering on for a few weeks. This last one we got for free at the Ladybug Nursery open house. It struggled for a while, revived and grew blossoms, and finally it, too, succumbed.


Not all has been doom and gloom though. Our pepper plants, which seemed most likely to die in the beginning, have been doing quite well. Peppers are an acquired taste for me. My mom doesn't like anything "spicy", and even sweet peppers fall in that category. So I never really had them until I was older. I love them now!

We decided to try the rainbow variety this year. We ended up with green, yellow-green, and purple peppers. The purple peppers are quite small. This one got stuck in between two stems! (Forgive the lack of focus--my camera wasn't cooperating with close-ups in that light.)


Here's a picture of one of our latest yields. Terral likes to call that thing in the top/middle our "butt squash"--excuse his french.


I leave you with a view of our garden from the south. Terral's smiling because we are excited about the harvest of our valient surviving plants!

By-the-bye, what you see in the background is the houseboat that Heather's father-in-law built himself. That's right. Terral is inspired. No word yet on whether or not that's a good thing. ; )