Pictures of Flowers and Vegetables

You know, having a garden was really fun!  And I'm not saying that to sound cool or anything, it really was pretty awesome.  It rained pretty much every day near the beginning, so it really flourished right off the bat.  Once the daily rain was finished, it did start to go downhill because we didn't water it (but that was because we became extremely worried about running out of water in our well after the alarm sounded one day and we had to become hyper conservative for a while, and we did go get water from a kind neighbor's hose once or twice, but really, after that we just let it kind of die out).

Anyway, we got a lot of good stuff.  I'm not sure if I posted about how much zucchini and yellow squash we were getting --it was pretty crazy ridiculous.  We did shred and freeze a lot of it, and ate a lot of it, and gave away a lot of it, so it was good.

My pea plants actually gave quite a lot more peas than I thought they would for just the few plants that I had.  Yay for peas!

A gnarly edit on some of my flowers.

We got a ton of cukes for a while, which wasn't that exciting to me (because I don't love cucumbers much at all) until I discovered this salad recipe and become an addict and ate it every night:

1 large tomato chopped
1 large cucumber peeled and chopped
1 bunch of fresh parsley chopped (parsley, not carrot tops as Hazel brought me back from the garden one day when I sent her out for some)
1 avocado chopped (optional --I like it both with or without)
1/2 a package of Queso Fresco (aka Mexican crumbling cheese) chopped/crumbled  (feta is also a delicious option)
salt
Cavender's Greek seasoning, to taste

We had the tomatoes, cukes, and parsley from our garden so it was awesome.

These red potatoes are DEEEEElicious!!!  I'm not lying!

Besides vegetables, we also like to grow birds in our garden.  I saw this nest snuggled in one of my tomato plants one day:

Speaking of eggs, our chickens have started laying!  (Our ducks too I imagine, but we don't know where--probably out in the woods--so until we get our bigger shed with the nesting boxes for them all, we probably won't see them.)  It's so exciting!  Our hens really like to come in the garage and sit between the wall and a board we have propped up where they feel nice and cozy to lay their egg.  Once, Talmage came out to the garage and accidentally scared it out, and it layed an egg on the run!  (Don't worry, we're really close to getting them their bigger house with nesting boxes, I promise.)

The zinnias and cosmos exploded and are beautiful.

The green beans from our garden were delicious too.

These are the horrible bugs that are eating some of my flowers, particularly the dahlias.

The melons weren't amazing, because of water issues stated above, but they were okay.  Some of our watermelons have been blah, and some have actually been tasty.

Our corn didn't actually taste that great.  I don't know why.

These little beauties are delicious!  As soon as we got the fence up and kept the rabbits and whatever else out of them, we get yummy little strawberries to go out and pick every day and they are SOO good, albeit scrawny!

I have bottled about 19 quarts of tomatoes from the garden now, even though a couple of our plants had kind of bad fruit (particularly the beefsteak for some reason), and we have been eating toasted tomato (and sometimes bacon) sandwiches for lunch, dinner, and dessert every day practically!  I loooooove toasted tomato sandwiches with all of my little heart!

I also made some pints of zucchini salsa, made and froze some vegetable medley soup, and have a big box of potatoes down in the storage room and quite a few pie pumpkins.  I think that's about it.  The tomatoes are still coming, but most everything else has kind of died, and we never did get any of our peppers because they died in the drought.

I couldn't actually believe just how big of a bouquet I got out of my very own garden!  I was so pleased with it.

And look, the eggs hatched and the baby birdies were nestled all snug in their nest.  They've since grown and moved out--they grew SOO fast.

One day I felt a little sad so I went into my garden and picked myself a bouquet and it was lovely.   (Yes, I do realize all my bouquets look quite similar since they're all the same kinds of flowers.)