Little garden stuff adds up

[puglogic]

Tonight we're making a big stir-fry dinner with snow peas, onions, garlic, golden beets, carrots, kale, and kohlrabi from our little garden out back.  We compost our food scraps, paper, etc. and we grow comfrey to make fertilizer tea, so don't buy much in the way of amendments (organic alpaca farm nearby too - wonderful)  Water is an expense, but a heavy watering month only costs about $8.00 more than the minimum billing payment.

Any other gardeners here enjoying harvests?

[Mrs.LC]

We are every single day. We've harvested raspberries, asparagus, onions, radishes, romaine lettuce, green beans, shell and snap peas, cabbage, and potatoes so far this year. Pole beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes will be ready soon. Summer grocery shopping is almost nonexistent for us.

[10dollarsatatime]

I'm behind in my garden, but I'm getting zucchini, a few tomatoes, and cucumbers.  Tonight was zucchini curry. :)

[Monkey Uncle]

I'm getting about half pint of blackberries per day from the parts of the yard that I don't mow.  That's the ultimate in badassity - I actually do less work and spend less money on fuel for the weed whacker, and I get free food to boot.

Also starting to get some banana peppers off the plants in pots on the deck (too many deer to grow them in the yard).  The bell peppers aren't ready for harvest yet, but I'm really looking forward to those since bell peppers are our single biggest produce line item expense.

[Yonco]

Our garden is going great! We have been having salads 3-4 times a week with lettuce, cucumbers, radishes, and green onions all from the garden. I dont know why we always plant so many tomatoes, we don't eat the, but the family loves getting them. This year our watermelon plants died early, they drowned because i had a corner graded incorrectly and we had SO Much rain. It has also caused our zucchini plants to get a late start.

[Rightflyer]

We've been having salads most days for lunch (lettuce, beet greens, kale, spring onions, carrots, spinach, nasturtium and zucchini flowers).

For supper veggies we've been having snap, snow and shelling peas, bush string-beans, carrots, beets, rutabaga and our favourite...pickled turnips!

Been teasing out new potatoes since middle of June. And of course the ubiquitous summer squash.

Even given the cool wet weather we have been lucky to have a good harvest thus far.

[DecD]

Our spring garden is just about done- the basil and peppers are still in full swing but the rest is in summer-heat-dormant mode.  I need to tear out the tomatoes and beans and start again if I want a fall crop!  I missed the window last summer.  It's just hard to get out and do it when it's 101 degrees outside.

Enjoy your harvest!  Sounds delicious.

[puglogic]

I'm scratching my head over fava beans.   

I planted them this year to see if I could get another protein source for our diet, but the beans act weird.  I shelled and stir-fried them with garlic, and they turned blue.  And mushy.  And didn't taste like anything.  Hm...live and learn.

Well, at least the soil where they're growing will be great for whatever gets planted there next year.

The first green tomatoes are showing up finally...we had a monstrous harvest last year but still ran out of frozen/canned/dried tomatoes in January.   The garlic should be ready for harvest within a week or two - 50 heads!!

[Rosy]

All that's left of the garden is peppers - so I've made pepper sauce, sauteed peppers and pepper salsa - not to mention omelets with peppers. The herbs like rosemary and lemon verbena, bay leaves etc are doing fine and I'm happy to have a lot of garlic chives.

In the fall I might try some beans and peas and lettuce again. I usually don't try until early spring. Tomatoes - I'd rather wait till February, harvested the last one 3 weeks ago.

Had more elderberries than ever, so next year I think I will try to make a bit of elderberry wine and elederberry liqueur with the help of my son - he knows how to make good wine from anything.

There is a separate garden thread on this forum, if you want to check it out.

[Helvegen]

I rent, so have to container garden everything I want to grow. Some things have cost next to nothing, like my basil and sunflowers, but my dwarf blueberry bush did not come cheap. Oh well, I love blueberries and it has been worth it to me.

I have some strawberries, but I am having serious problems with pollinators not coming in time and getting tasty, but hideous looking small fruits. I don't know if it will ever pan out to being worth it at this rate. Sadz because my daughter is a really big fan of strawberries. The only fresh fruit besides bananas she will eat on a regular basis.

I have a blueberry bush that is a very heavy and delicious producer, but it will be another good year before recoup what I put into it and this is my second year with it! I'm enjoying the plant so much though that I will probably buy another from Costco next spring. I just can't believe insanely low maintenance this thing is and how good the fruit is!

I have some basil and sunflowers growing now. It will be another month before I can start harvesting anything. I got a late start on this, but the weather has been so favorable for these plants that they are growing like crazy.

The wild blackberries are starting to come in, so I'll probably be harvesting those in the next week or two.

Next year, we are projected to have another hot summer, so I'll probably start some roma tomatoes, zucchini, and bell peppers, in addition to more basil, sunflowers, and probably oregano. I may try broccoli and cabbage again. I did this a few years back, but I had an awful time with cabbage maggots. Anyway, I am thinking about growing a lot of these in the Tidy Cat litter buckets that are collecting in the garage.

[Tris Prior]

I was harvesting literal bucketfuls of lettuce from my garden plot daily, for a while there. Then it got warm and it all bolted. :( But the chard's still doing well. I'm starting to get ripe tomatoes, the basil, oregano, and dill are going insane, and I harvested my first sweet onion yesterday which was extremely tasty.  Sweet peppers are coming, but not ripening yet - it's only recently that it's been warm enough for them to really get going. I did get a couple of full-term jalapeņos the other day.

We've been eating lots of green onions since spring too; I had volunteer onions in my plot when it opened for the season. Now that's frugal gardening - when you can harvest stuff that you didn't even plant, but that chose to grow there of its own free will!

Now if the pillbugs would just stop eating all of my strawberries. :/ I have researched organic cures for that, but all seem dependent on us not getting monsoon downpours daily.

[FLBiker]

Here in FL, I've got okra, purple asparagus yardlong beans, sweet potatoes, collards, eggplant and seminole pumpkin.  The heat finally knocked out my last cherry tomatoes, but I've got seeds for the fall.

I've also got a bunch of perennials.  Nothing is fruiting right now, but we've always got greens (katuk is my favorite, but I've also got moringa, okinawan spinach and daun dewa).

And we do all our annuals @ the community garden, which (for $25 per 10'x3' bed per year) includes micro, mulch, compost, tools, etc.

[horsepoor]

I got the garden in late this year, so it's not producing as much as I'd like right now.  The okra, cukes, tomatoes and peppers are just starting to come on.  Sadly, something mowed down the zucchini, so we don't have any for the first time in years.  However, we're still enjoying the fruits of gardens gone by.  Last night we had a spaghetti squash from last fall's harvest (still good ~8 months later!) dressed up with pesto and sundried tomatoes also from last year.  I think the only contributions from this year's garden were the garlic and onion.

We're also getting kale, chard, beets, cabbage, basil, carrots and herbs right now.

Hoping to have corn, eggplant and green beans within the next week or two, and melons towards the end of summer.

[iris lily]

Comfrey fertilizer tea, interesting .mwe have a comfreynplanynsomeone gave us and we don't really know what todo with it.

It's the height of vegetable harvest here. Onions, cukes, zucchini, plums tomatoes are rolling in. Chard and basil plants are huge.

[puglogic]

Iris Lily, keep that comfrey far away from anything you don't want it to invade. We chop and drop ours and use it for tea and for mulch four times a year, and it just keeps growing back.  Tried to transplant it out of the garden beds into its own space, but the tiniest chunk of root re-sprouts, like a healthy version of bindweed.  Sigh.  The fertilizer tea really kickstarts everything, so worth it.    Handy but dangerous.

[Nancy]

Our strawberries were very productive at the start of the season, and now we're enjoying a large crop of raspberries. Yum! Our collards, kale, and rutabaga have also been excellent producers. The broccoli heads are smaller than last year, but are every bit as tasty. We just pulled our peas, which also flourished. Tomatoes are ripening and everything else is coming along nicely. At the start of the month, I planted butternut squash and black beans for my fall garden. Going to plant green beans and chamomile.

Feels great to skip much of the produce at the grocery store.