How Does Your Garden Grow?

We are blessed to live in an area conducive to gardening.  Our garden is a little behind this year as it was a wet, cold, spring and we had a frost in mid-June that caused a few casualties.  HOWEVER, our garden is coming right along!  I like this stage of the garden.  The plants are looking full and healthy, we are winning the war on weeds, and there's not an overload of produce yet. At the moment we are harvesting lettuce, radishes, chard, green onions, and strawberries. I thought I'd share a bit of our back yard.  :)   

Cilantro, onion, radish, lettuce, hot peppers.

Cucumbers, cantaloupe, kohlrabi, onion, beets, gladiola.

Dave decided to try a few square foot gardens this year.  He got the lumber for 10 4x4 beds and got 6 of them put together this year. Personally I'm not sold on them for us.... yet.  I think I will like them for strawberries and for things like "themed" gardens; a salad garden with lettuce, green onion, pepper, radish, etc.... or an herb garden.   Since we like to can, freeze, or dehydrate a lot of the food we'll eat through the winter, we'd have to have a bunch of square-foot gardens to do enough for our family.  I DO love the idea of the amount of produce you can get off of them in a small space.  Perfect for a garden mostly to eat out of fresh, or to be used in a small space.  Don't they look pretty and organized?!

Green Peppers, cabbage, onions, and lettuce.

The rest of our garden is in several sections.   The main section has green beans, peas, carrots, swiss chard, yellow onions, pickling cucumbers, summer squash, tomatoes, and tomatillo.  To the side of that garden we have 6 rows of potatoes (red and yukon gold) and 6 rows of corn. I didn't get pictures of the gardens further back but in one is 6 rows of corn and the winter squash.  The other back garden has oriental pea pods, 6 more rows of corn, candy onions, raspberries, and rhubarb.  (to be truthful the raspberries are full of weeds still... would not have been a pretty picture)

A view from the swing set.

Corn, potatoes, and onions.

 Our strawberry bed isn't much to look at right now, we're in the process of moving it to some of the square foot gardens, but we are getting a decent crop of berries this year anyway!  We're on our 4th picking.  Today we got about 1 1/2 gallons of berries.  Some of them were beautiful, large, sweet berries.  Part of them are the last of their variety for the season and they're much smaller, but still so sweet.  Nothing like a fresh bowl of strawberries with cream and sugar!

Thanks for letting me share some of our garden with you.  There will be plenty of cooking in my kitchen going on using produce from our garden in just a few weeks!  Stay tuned!