In an earlier post from Spring, I wrote about my dream garden! Yes, I had high ambitions… inspiration planted from the movie It’s Complicated. I knew my garden could never look as incredible as hers, but, I also knew I could create a beautiful garden that would produce some delicious fresh vegetables and herbs. And with the help of my husband, look how our garden has grown! It turned out BETTER than what I truly imagined my garden would be!
To begin, my husband was mostly concerned of the deer and bunny rabbits having a feast once the vegetables really got going. We needed to have the garden enclosed, with a super high fence; high enough to prevent hungry munching deer from decimating everything. We’re talking eight feet! That’s up there. We agreed I should start small with my garden to see how things go, we’ve only lived here on this dirt for about two and a half years. It took a while to figure out what to do other than having to build not only raised garden beds but also a high fence covering a pretty decent area. My husband then saw these wood crates that hold and store items at a local garden center. He asked what they do with them when they’re finished and they said the trash them! So, with his creativity kicking in, he took two and brought them home!
He placed them side by side next to the firewood shed. Then went to work removing some shelves and lining the back with wooden pallets we had lying around. Dallas enjoyed it at this point, thinking this was built just for him!
The kids helped… kind of. Sneaks was Sneaks with his non-stop imagination. Always pretending to be a zombie or a garden-reeper or maybe he was a creeper. I don’t know.
I got in there and helped create the base, spread the dirt around the bottom.
Got a bit of a workout from it!
Kali then helped dig in that dirt. So did Sneaks.
My husband installed the fence and the final look was perfect!
I love it!!! I then took a drive over to the garden center to pick up some growing soil and of course the vegetables and herbs to be planted.
Top right row was designated to peppers! The Pepper Garden! Sweet, to Medium-Hot to HOT! These peppers have been doing so good! I’ve used a few for my pickles recipe and when I took a bite of a hungarian wax pepper, I had to spit it out, it had some serious heat to it!
The bottom right was what was robbed. Arugula, dill, a few onions and some leftover parsley. From this…
To this…
The left top side is the herb garden! It did pretty well, except the basil started to wilt. Lime Basil, Oregano, Thyme, Parsley. I love the smell of basil! It smells sooo much like summer!!!! I eventually plucked some, and have them hanging to dry.
The bottom left is doing good with two exceptions… the zucchini in the back is only producing flowers at the moment. Squash Blossoms! Read on below for some rather sexual references I have learned regarding male and female squash blossoms! The collard greens are growing tall… but some have a lot of holes while others do not. I’ve harvest them and cooked them up in a recipe that included the squash blossoms. The cucumbers are doing great! Made some pickles with these along with the peppers! Hot pickles and mild pickles! Find the recipe here at Garden to Jar to Refrigerator Pickles!
So with some success came failure but it was the perfect size for my starter garden and it resulted in the perfect amount of vegetables and herbs for my family! And, it’s still growing strong! As for the zucchini, I’ve learned a bit more about the birds and the bees... right now, after reading up on hot to grow zucchini or squash, I’ve found I just have a bunch of male flowers. The fruit develops from the female only.
So… I have a garden of man blossoms.
And what’s even better is that to get the fruit to grow, I could try hand pollination! Got that? I could give my man blossom garden a hand-job!
And not only that, the male blossoms are edible! I made a recipe using them! That’s right. Give a hand-job and it’s edible! I suppose I’m officially still a bit immature because I found that all of this was rather funny. And from my life-lessons, doing all of this was actually considered the sure way NOT to produce fruit. Ahhhh, nature. Surprising me with new life-lessons every day!