Gluten Free & God Seeking

Friday, September 30, 2011

My Gardening Adventures Without Pesticides

      Finally I got my garden!  It took 11 years, but I finally got it for my mother's day present this year!  For years I've been gardening in containers.  That works for tomatoes, peppers, and herbs, but I really wanted some peas, beans, beets, cucumbers, and onions.  Like almost everything I do, it connects to memories in either growing up in California or my grandparent's farm in Pennsylvania.  

    Helping in my grandmother's garden was a chore I didn't always like especially on a humid summer day. I really treasure the memories I have though of sitting on the porch with her shelling peas or snapping beans so she could can them.   


      Anyway when I planted my garden in May, my son and his wife and two of our international students helped plant the vegetables.  I put a border of marigolds around it because I have read and heard that this helps keeps some bugs away.  

    This summer I've been watching almost in horror as my tomatoes grew taller and taller.  I've never seen tomato bushes get almost 5' before!  I never fertilized them,  all I've done is  throw my dishwater on them or  water them  with the hose.  In the picture below you can see them climbing up the fence. Here's a picture of my 5 year old granddaughter checking it out; she likes to munch on the  spinach and the radishes. 

   During the past few weeks I've been harvesting a lot of the vegetables from my garden, and I've been taking pictures of what I've picked.  The first thing I noticed were some cucumbers growing into the burlap fence my husband put up to keep the rabbits out.  As you can see they're pretty hefty.   I've been checking my carrots periodically, too.  They got planted kind of close together, so they didn't really grow that big.  Boy are they sweet tasting not like the cardboard tasting ones you get in the store sometimes. 


    
In the last few weeks I've been picking my tomatoes.  I've put some of them into salad.  We have had a pretty short summer so a lot of the tomatoes are still green.  I zoomed in to get a few of the red ones that were in the middle of the garden.   


For someone who didn't have that much time to fuss over the garden, it grew a lot of vegetables! 

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