Veggies

This was originally posted on kimschoenherr.wordpress.com on July 11, 2011.

 First of all, it rained today, so yay! The power actually went out at work for 3 seconds, which doesn’t happen. This is from earlier today:

So, when I was pulling weeds on Saturday, I was admiring my vegetable garden, and I thought I’d share.

That’s one side, with the 4 tomato plants, 3 of which are significantly larger because they get sun 13 hours a day, while the fourth gets it about 9 or 10.

These are my current pride and joy – my onions. I didn’t expect these to grow at all, let alone this big. I thought I’d get maybe 2 or 3 small onions, but at this point, every single one that we planted is growing, and they’re pretty big. Each leaf represents one layer of the onion, and they’re all at least 8 or 9 layers so far.

They smell amazing, too.

I’m also pretty in love with my carrots. These were planted early June from seeds, and I didn’t expect them to grow at all, let alone how many of them are growing. They’re pretty darn cute, too. Here, you can see some carrots next to our super cute

Here’s the cucumbers you can’t see in that first picture:

I hope they’re the climbing kind instead of the bushing kind. I don’t know, though, I wasn’t there when they were purchased. The climbing cucumbers did really well last year, though, so I’m hoping these do well too. They were pretty tasty.

Another thing that did amazingly well last year was zucchini. I think we actually still have zucchini bread (just don’t tell Mike and Brandon) from last year, so I hope these do well this year.

They were planted in this super rich soil from a seed after memorial day, and today, after the rain, those buds opened up and were a beautiful orange color. Which means we’ll get fruit soon.

The thing that I was MOST excited about in my garden was the spinach. I LOVE spinach. I could eat it all day every day. And ONE plant came up early and was getting big enough to be picked. Then Saturday, I went out to the garden and found this:

Some stupid rabbit ate my spinach! They didn’t eat the carrots, just the spinach (carrots are actually bad for rabbits’ digestive systems) but REALLY rabbit? was the necessary? I really need to put up rabbit fencing.

So finally, there’s the love of my life, my basil!

I planted it earlier this year from a “plant in the package” kit that was a year old. I expected one or two seeds to come up, not ALL OF THEM! I guess I’ll be buying Buzzy Seeds from now on. They’re the ones you get in the dollar bins at Target, which, if you actually read the packaging, they’re guaranteed to grow. The tomatoes are Buzzy, too. I’ll let you know the flavor when we get some tomatoes out of it, but the basil is an amazing, strong flavor, and I can’t wait to make pesto.

Speaking of Buzzy, we bought a bunch of cutesy pots with the names of the herbs on them (chives, parsley, etc) but it was impossible to get them out of these round pots. I thought I’d killed them all, but we seem to have chives growing.

Back to the basil, though. I planted this in Marchish, and then moved from school and back into my mom’s house. Well, I set the bag of basil on a box in the back of the truck so that I could organize some stuff, and it ended up being closed up in the back, driven around campus a bit, and falling to the floor of the truck! Poor, traumatized basil.

I did prune some basil today. There was a terrifying moment with a beetle, and I’m still too creeped out to look at pictures of beetles to identify exactly what kind it was. It’s sitting on my counter, looking pretty

What are you gardening?