May Garden

Our garden this year is truly much more impressive than last year, by comparison. We have added several more garden beds (3 large box beds, 2 medium beds, and 2 beds that border our fences) and five peach trees to replace a tree that we had to take down because it died.

We started all of our plants this year from seed and have been growing many of them since the beginning of March under a timed grow light in our basement.

It certainly paid off considering how brutally long and cold this winter/spring has been. Our tomatoes are vigorous and huge compared to what we are finding other places in the city! Several are already flowering and have little baby tomatoes on them. Our other plants are doing great as well. We are hopefully going to have a bit more produce this year and perhaps starting earlier in the season as well.

Last year, was our experiment year and we decided to let our tomato plants sprawl everywhere and take over. Mostly because we didn't know what else to do. This year, we are trying a support method that grows the tomato vines vertically around ropes. For the small space we have, this may turn out to be great, and will probably look pretty impressive by the time August gets here.

 This year we also planted many varieties of peppers, eggplant, pole beans, bush beans, squash, watermelon (the small ones), pie pumpkins, sunflowers, herbs, salad greens, sugar snap peas, tomatoes, tomatillos, kohlrabi, radishes, carrots, potatoes and rhubarb (which comes up every year in our yard).

And of course, our animals. Who provide us with our milk, eggs, and occasionally meat (when the ducklings grow up and the accident rooster becomes too obnoxious).

And for your amusement, my girls like to practice milking whenever they get the chance. :-)