I Once Had a Green Thumb

Remember when I was commenting about my 'pitiful garden' this year compared to past years because of becoming a long arm quilter -  I'm sure some of you were skeptical, right??   Well, here are few pictures of what the garden looked like when I had more gardening time and no long arm quilting machine!

potatoes

I tried to grow everything imaginable. Here are 3 types of potatoes, white, Yukon gold and red.

Keep in mind that each of these rows were 60 feet long from side to side and the entire garden was 100 feet long.

That's a lot of covering up with a hoe and digging them out when harvest time came around.

We also had sweet potatoes too.

Onions came next to the potatoes -one row of yellow and one of white

Followed by 21 tomato plants of different varieties.

Those little wooden boxes next to the tomatoes held watermelon and cantaloupe.

We had egg plant, zucchini squash, yellow cooked neck squash and 2 rows of okra.  I had never eaten it, but a friend wanted me to plant it for her.

We had pole beans and green bush beans, pinto beans, Persian Lima beans and  Christmas Lima beans.  It's not that we love beans so much, but I wanted to see what they looked like growing.

Needless to say, I got into learning about more than growing veggies, I HAD to learn about canning these veggies-- big time too!

These were the most prolific cucumbers I've ever seen.  They were called Market More and they had at least 20-30 cukes on them every day!!  They must have been for commercial growers because they were of uniform size and color.  They were delicious and I made Cajun pickles, relish, ate them fresh and gave lots away to neighbors almost every day!

One of the zucchini plants.

This was the harvest almost every other day for weeks.  Except the corn did not do well at all.  The raccoons got to most of it before we did.    Boy, do I miss all that wonderful, fresh produce.

I don't miss all the work so much, but I love playing in the dirt and watching what miracles come from the earth.  It still amazes me how one tiny little seed can bring forth such wonderful, tasty food.  Nothing is as good as fresh veggies from your own garden.  If you haven't tried it, you should.  It's great exercise too!!

Garden Problems

Since I've gotten  my long arm quilting machine, things have changed a lot on the gardening front.  It seems there is less time to spend outside planting and tending a garden (whether it be vegetables or flowers) than before.  I hate that I've let this happen.  I really miss being able to walk to the garden and pick fresh tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, beans, beets, corn, and many other things of past gardens.    So this week, I could stand it no more and I went to Home Depot and bought a few tomato plants and put them in my flower garden.  It was the only place I could find that was close to the house, relatively easy to dig and I can water them easier than in the original garden area which is much farther away from the house.  

I planted a Better Boy, 2 Roma, 1 patio, a yellow Pear tomato and 1 Big Boy.  They are all doing well except something has eaten off half of the Big Boy plant.   We think it may be a groundhog that we've seen roaming on the property.  I bought some zucchini plants too, and will probably put those in a big over-sized planter since there is not much room left in my flower garden.

See the large plant on the right in the back, that's the Big Boy and now it's half that size.  I have since put mesh wire and bird netting around all the tomato plants until they get bigger.  

Here's my lilies blooming on the other side of the tomato plants. Sure hope Mr. Groundhog doesn't take a liking to these, since I've roped off his tomatoes. :)

I may still get some more veggies and try container gardening.   It's just not summer unless there is a fresh crop of veggies to pick and can.  Old habits die hard and this is one that I don't want to give up until I'm too old to do it.