Shame on me for waiting until mid July to give you the tour of the veggie garden. For shame, for shame! Our garden had a bit of a rough start this season because spring in Maine is typically cold, but this spring was exceptionally cold and rainy. Man did it rain this spring! But our garden powered through and somehow survived the great flood of May 2011. Now in our second year of veggie gardening, we feel slightly more knowledgeable about the undertaking but we’re still serious novices just stumbling through trying to find our green thumbs. Here’s Veggie Land 2011:
It’s quite a bit different from Veggie Land 2010. In last year’s garden we went a little overboard on the tomatoes and the jalapeno peppers. So this year, we scaled back on the tomatoes and our hot peppers just decided not to grow. We started them again and they’re currently thriving in containers on our front porch. This year we have yellow squash:
Beets:
Swiss Chard:
Lettuce (which I apparently forgot to photograph….ooops), Carrots:
Peas & Green Beans:
Tomatoes:
And schnozeberries….I mean strawberries (anybody catch the Super Troopers reference other than my brother?! C’mon…the schnozeberries taste like schnozeberries….haha):
I recently attacked the garden’s weed situation pretty heavily. Just in time too because some of the plants were being held hostage by the weeds. The swiss chard was barely growing due to weed suffocation but I combated the scoundrels and now the swiss chard is thriving like the rest of the garden. I saved the swiss!!!
I leave you with two bits of randomness from the garden. First off, check out the strawberry plants in the containers above. I swiped those plants from my momma last summer and planted them “temporarily” in those containers just to transplant them. I basically just filled a pot with dirt and placed the strawberry plants on top of the dirt with the intention of properly planting them in the ground when I got home. This obviously never happened but look how well the strawberries are doing! That’s a total “how’d I manage to do that” moment! I still can’t believe it. Those plants have been COMPLETELY neglected for over a year and are producing strawberries left and right. We just have to make sure we get to them before the Goose does. He has an affinity for biting off the strawberries, slobbering all over them, and spitting them back onto the ground. Nobody wants to eat those!
Second randomness moment for you before I bid you goodnight. Carefully check out the tops of the beets and the carrots. Notice how it looks like they’ve been chewed up a little bit? That’s because they have. The ground-ie (my name for our looks so lovable but he’s such a menace ground hog who lives under our shed) is back this summer in full force. Instead of broccoli eating this summer he’s taken a liking of carrot tops and beet greens. The scoundrel! But I’ve got Goose on a seek and destroy mission to remove ground-ie from our yard. The mission has been a complete fail so far since Goose only growls at ground-ie from afar. That is until ground-ie has retreated back under the shed. Then Goose gets braver and tries to attack. Such a scared-ie Goose!
