How to slowly harvest your garden...

What you are seeing here is 4 tomatoes. But it's not just four tomatoes. It's our first four tomatoes from our tomato plants that we've been nursing along all spring and summer. It's been an incredibly slow start. There are a lot of green but it's taken a long time to get to four red tomatoes. I guess we can't complain, the last time I attempted to raise tomatoes on my own I only raise three tomatoes and they never turned red.

What you are not seeing here is our first strawberry, which upon returning from camping appeared to have been missing, eaten by someone else. I'm assuming someone winged and unappreciative of the first strawberry that I've ever raised. I hope they choked on it.

Other happenings in the garden appear to be steady now, it's a slow wait game for the sun to bake things evenly. We have bells and jalapenos and Matt's raised from seed peppers appear to be handling themselves well, now they just need to get their stuff together and start putting off peppers.

The beans are have come and we are just finishing the final harvests there...we may see a few more but we'll probably be hauling those out of the ground before long. The peas we also said goodbye to. It was definitely a learning year with them. We learned to take them sooner than later.

What else we learned is that cabbage takes up a lot of room. A lot and when you plant a lot of seeds, they grow and look like a forest. I have a coleslaw recipe in mind for them later. We are struggling with cucumbers. We have had two good ones but now we can't seem to get our stuff together. They start out well but it's like the head and the tail aren't growing together. It's a good thing we have a neighbor that is very willing to share! Here's to their good produce.

We also appear to have 1 pumpkin started, which I'm a bit bumped about, I was hoping for 4 or 5. But one, gad! For all the blossoms and all the leaves.....sigh. Oh well, maybe next year. These pictures are the front and the back of the second bed. They are looking good and appear to be doing well. Just need to get going with their job.

All in all our Rapunzel, aka cherry tomato plant was a beautiful decision, we are really enjoying her and will probably do that again in the future! All in all, our harvest are small, manageable and almost nightly.

MJR holds up handful of beans.
MJR: You know for what we want to do, we are never going to raise enough.
ALR: To can you mean?
MJR: Yes.
ALR: You are right, our garden is the size to support us through summer eating, not get us through summer and winter.
MJR: That's a bummer.