Monday, September 3, 2012

2012 Vegetable Garden

I am a little late in writing about our garden seeing as our squash plants have produced a ton of zucchini and yellow squash and are now almost dead, and the tomato plants are getting crispy in the relentless end of summer sun.  I seem to be saying this a lot lately, but better late than never, right?!

I was so proud of my big 6 ft by 6 ft raised cedar beds that we built last year.  Turns out they were too big for me to reach into and I had to practically climb in to get to the plants in the middle.  So for this year's veggie garden we decided to cut them in half and make four 3 ft by 6 ft beds.

The photo below was the scene at the end of winter.  Josh just pointed out that its so ugly it looks like we purposely made it look bad so it would be a good 'before' photo.  Sadly that is actually what our side yard looked like for a good 5 to 6 months.  Embarrassing!

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It was quite a bit of work to move the gravel (have I mentioned before how much we loathe the previous owners for dumping a million tons of gravel all over the back yard?!), move the soil, cut the wood sides in half, add new wood, refill with soil, and then put the gravel back.  There may or may not have been an embarrassing incident where one of us tripped while stepping out of a bed and face planted into the gravel.  There may have been multiple cuts and bruises and a mouth full of dirt and gravel.  And there may have been a husband trying to be concerned while stifling hysterical laughter.

Despite all the hard work we were pretty happy with end result.

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The smaller size was much easier to work with.  We planted our garden towards the end of April.  Usually we plant earlier but with our trip to England and having to reconfigure the beds we got a bit of a late start.

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We used chicken wire again to deter neighborhood cats from using the garden as a little box but apparently it makes a comfortable bed!  Those are baby zucchini plants she's sleeping next to.

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We make our own compost and there must have been some tomato seeds in it because a bunch of volunteer tomato plants sprung up.

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I hated to pull them out but realistically we didn't need 100 tomato plants.  I did throw them in the compost bin so at least they will add some nutrients to next year's compost.

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This is about a month after we planted the seedlings.  You can see how the squash plants really took off!  Its funny because last year our squash plants looked sickly all season and produced maybe 3 squashes.  It was really pathetic and sad.

We decided to make pathways around the beds to make it look neater and also to make it easier to walk in all that gravel.  We used the 98 cent pavers from Home Depot and picked up 10 every time we went so it took a while to do all the pathways.

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Yellow squash trying to keep up with the zucchini.

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The first zucchini.  We picked this about a month after we planted the seedlings.  From this point on we were over-run with zucchini and couldn't eat them or give them away fast enough.

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This might sound like an exaggeration but we got around 60 zucchinis from our three plants - pretty amazing!  The yellow squash didn't do quite as well but we definitely had more than enough of them too.

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This is about two and a half months in and you can see that we were almost done with our pathways.

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I love how the pathways look and I think the dogs appreciate them too - I've noticed that they try to keep their feet on the pavers and off the gravel.

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The tomato plants always grow fast but it seems like the fruit takes forever to ripen. The waiting is the hardest part!

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This is about three and a half months in and you can see how the squash plants are starting to look a bit raggedy.  They started producing less at that point and slowly started dying.  We noticed that they rotted at the roots.  I'm not sure if that's a normal part of the life cycle - I need to look into it.

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The tomato plants always seem to outgrow our staking system and become an overgrown mess.  Those wooden stakes are 6 feet tall!

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Whenever we pick tomatoes Zeke and Zoey expectantly wait for their portion - I think they are convinced we grow the tomatoes for them!

We are thinking of trying some new veggies next year.  Any suggestions?