Our Garden

Wow is all we can say about our tomato plants this year. Wow is because at the beginning of August it was taller then Corrine, and now in September it's taller then me and 4+ feet across. It's so big and heavy that we had to get a big wire stand to help hold the weight of the plant up. It's produced a few hundred little red cherry tomatoes and it has a bunch more flowers on it! We pick cup fulls at a time and give them away, then do it again a few days later.
Rebecca LOVES them and she knows which ones are ripe and ready to eat. She'll go over pick one, take the green top off and pop it in her mouth. They are like candy to her!





This is the 1st year having our garden in the raised planter box Johann made last year. Since we took out our tree we now have sun in our entire backyard. Before we only had sun on our deck, so we planted bell peppers and tomatoes in pots up there. Because they were in pots we had problem regulating the water and we ended up with so much tomato rot from the pot going from wet to dry too often. This year we so far haven't had any problems with rot, but we also have a different smaller variety of tomato.
We planted garden salsa peppers because I wasn't able to find bell peppers plants. So far the peppers are long and skinny. They are suppose to get red before they are ripe. We ended with 16 peppers on 3 different plants. These babies are HOT, not mild like they said they should be. A small bit of one had enough flavor to burn our mouths in an entire dish. YIKES-not what we wanted! Next year we'll stick with bell peppers of all colors.


We also have 2 strawberry plants that didn't produce this year, but they have a few shoots going off. Also some thing happened with our raspberry plants. We had 7 or 8 planted last year, with one planted at the beginning and producing great, but this year that good producer along with the other 5 didn't grow. Only one has grown about 5 inches tall with no fruit. Not sure what happened there. We're hoping to get some more shoots again this summer and try again next year.
Grandma Smith gave the kids a soda bottle bird feeder for the backyard at the beginning of the summer. A few weeks ago I was pulling out the hostas behind the deck to get it ready to plant grass, (since hostas like shade, and we no longer have that). I starting pulling what I thought was tall grass. One of them was harder to pull out then it should have been and that was when I realized it wasn't grass I was pulling, but corn stalks. We have a bunch of corn stalks growing under the bird feeder that obviously had corn in it. We have also found a few smaller corn stalks trying to come up in the yard. We decided that the corn could stay this year, but next year this area would become grass, and we'd plant sweet corn on the side of the house since we know it will grow in our yard.


Ammon's pumpkin plant is all vine. It had one small pumpkin on it about the size of a gumball, but it fell off. Since then we have had alot of growth with the vine and some flowers, but no more pumpkins. The vine goes around the chimney and almost reaches to the front of the house.

I though I'd put one last picture up of the Green Monster that lives next door, but loves to come over into our yard. Corrine is as tall as the fence and the Green Monster towers over her. We cut our side back just so the kids can play on the play structure and Johann can mow. I cut down the taller trees that grow in it so they don't get the lines above. It creates a nice natural barrier, but it is pretty out of control!