Garden 2012

This is our second season as amateur gardeners, and we've had some successes and some failures.  One success has been white potatoes.

Potatoes all in a row, out to dry in the sunshine

We planted one row of them in our big garden plot, and despite battling potato beetles all season long (as we did last year also), we have already harvested quite a good crop of taters.  These filled two 5-gallon buckets that are now in our basement for storage to eat throughout the fall and winter.

I've recently grown very fond of sweet potatoes, so we tried planting some this year.  Unfortunately, the vines don't have a chance to grow because the 50 zillion bunnies in our yard keep nibbling at them.  We'll dig them up eventually to see what's there, but I don't have high hopes for much of a sweet potato crop this year.

Main garden bed

Here's our big garden.  From the left we have a row of various types of tomatoes (started by a colleague who teaches Environmental Science and planted as seedlings), corn and pumpkins intermingled, watermelon vines, and the potatoes were on the far right.  We also have just a few pepper plants that you can't see in this photograph.  I also really wanted cantaloupe (another new favorite of mine), but they didn't grow well either.  The seeds came up, but I believe they also were enjoyed by the bunnies.  The watermelons are growing like crazy, however.  We don't have any large enough to eat yet, but we're hoping for a good harvest.

Raised beds

Behind the main garden we have four raised beds.  One was on the property when we moved here in December 2010, and we added the rest.  The first one has cucumbers, which aren't producing as well for me this year as last.  I think maybe they liked the shadier spot they were in last year better.  They seem kind of scorched this year.  Next are a few tomato plants.  This is the bed where I tried (unsuccessfully, I might add) to plant lettuce and spinach on three different occasions.  It never would come up for me this year.  Why, I don't know.  It's a mystery, and a frustrating one at that since fresh garden lettuce is one of my favorites.  Just this week I planted some lettuce seed where my cantaloupes failed to come up in the main garden, so we'll see how it goes this round.  I'm afraid the bunnies will like the lettuce too!

The next bed is more of a perennial bed.  It has our asparagus (which we may be able to harvest some of next year) and mint.  I also planted some basil in there this year and tried to plant cilantro, but it never came up.  The last bed has four zucchini and four squash plants.  These have given us some good fruit, but I don't have nearly the bounty of squash and zucchini that I had last year at this time.  Right now we're fighting a losing battle with the squash bugs, I think.  I also planted two more of each of these in the main garden, where the potatoes were.  We'll see if they are able to grow and produce anything before it gets too cold.

Behind the raised beds is our growing berry patch.  We have three raspberry plants (which have yet to produce anything).  Last year the birds got about 99% of our berries, not that there were many there to start with.  We also have tried to plant strawberries the last two years, without success either time.  Recently we planted a dwarf peach tree near the garden.  (Peaches are my favorite fruit!)  We're hoping to add other fruit trees to create a mini-orchard in that area.

Charles also likes to plant sunflowers.  They haven't fared so well this year, but I'll leave you with one that I find quite fun to look at :

My favorite sunflower