Reaping some rewards

My veggie garden is coming along quite nicely.

Enjoy the pics, cause i'll enjoy the veggies LOL

spinach picked today, packed that 5 gallon bucket till I couldnt' put anymore into it.

Giant red mustard heirloom.

needs to be picked but I want to eat the first batch so maybe tomorrow.

some of my gourmet lettuce pics, not sure what is what but the dark burgundy is awesome in looks and taste

more lettuce

Is this not yummy looking?

lettuce pic

whole lettuce bed, well, not the whole bed, but a good picture of the majority of it.

Early alaska peas comingalong nicely, the spinach I just picked is on the right of the peas, still looks like it hasn't been picked, but I was tired so I left all the little stuff. Andthat's th best stuff, I know, you should have seen it before I picked it.

Looking good! There's nothing like fresh lettuce straight from your own garden. I'll be picking some soon!

cabbages are coming along nicely too

last one, brocolli any day now for these, I"ve picked 4 so far

yum - kathy ann - you'll be eating well this spring! The gardens look awesome. I'm hoping for a good year as well with my small area/ How fun for you!

woooooohoooooooo.....awesome Kathy Ann. Hope you're are indeed enjoying the rewards!

Gorgeous!

kathy_ann, looks wonderful!

This is my first year to try more than just tomatoes and the bed isn't really prepped yet nor has it been warm enough at night to put stuff in the ground. I DO have 9 spinach plants in a flower bed next to the house and one person cannot possibly eat all it produces (nor from the 9 leaf lettuce plants).

I'm soooooo jealous! I want a REAL garden, not just a tomato and pepper plant amongst my bedding plants. My dream garden would have corn, purple hull peas, turnip greens, tomatoes, okra, squash, bell peppers, hot peppers, onions, lettuce, carrots and eggplant (we don't really eat eggplant much but it's just so pretty!). I've never grown strawberries or asparagus, but would like to try those too.

Kathy, your lettuces are beautiful. Everyone in your family must like salads or you end up with a lot of bolting. Do you eat it all yourself or give some away?

Hi Debra, I give alot away. and it's all tilled under now. it was starting to bolt. or rather the green lettuce was starting to bolt, the reds were being picked too much to bolt. I'll plant again the end of august for more salads. We get burnt out fast on salads around here.

I've seen your dream garden, it was georgious. Lots of work though ha ? I'm getting worn out and can't keepup with the weeds, you'd think shame on me if you saw all the weeds in the veggie garden now. LOL

If that dream garden ever happens again, it will have some type of landscape fabric or mulch to help keep weeds out but won't have to be perfect like the one in the photos you saw. Your family is fortunate to have all those healthy salads while they last. Don't you wish there was some way of freezing lettuce? lol

LOL, yeah, that's one thing I haven't tried to put up yet LOL

kathy- I just came across your photos from early May. I am so so impressed. You are an inpiration. Have you thought about selling off some of that lettuce? I'd buy ;) Also, I thought it was impossible to grow spinach, my favorite veggie, outdoors in the midsouth. Whoa. you proved me wrong. Congrats!

I've not really thought of selling the lettuce. I have given alot of it away. I've had alot of the green lettuce bolt on me, since we ate the red lettuce more. Since these pictures, we have tilled under all the lettuce and all the spinach. The brocolli is pulled up and all the cauliflower is pulled up, but may be 2 of them, WE are now into the hot weather crops and the weeds are horrid. I tend to slack off inthe warmer months. I suppose that's understandable, My dh went out there today and said youcoudlnt' see the potatoes fromall the weeds. Well, You know, I think he has 2 hands too ha ha.

At least you have a garden! Here's my tomato (singular)

and squash....

It's easy to see why I'm so jealous.....

Kathy, I forgot to tell you about the Salad Burnett. Two days after the RU I went out to the garage to discover something had eaten all of the leaves leaving nothing but a skeleton of bare stems. I didn't plant it because I didn't think it would survive but as of today the stems are still green so I brought it in to water it. There are small webs at the base of the stems. I'm going to get rid of the webs and plant it. Maybe it will come back.

I t should come back, no telling what ate it down though.

fleursdefouquet - I spent many years with only one tomato plant. Some years it was one tomato plant in a 5 gallon bucket that I moved around a small porch to catch as much sun as possible. Keep the faith. Where there's a will there's a way. It took me 20 years, but I finally have a few acres, albeit, it they are in the middle of the high desert! ... in our neck of the woods, anything that gets mowed down has probably been Evil Rabbit food :-)

kathy_ann, looks lovely/yummy!

Deb its not too late to get some more tomatoes in the ground. And fall is a great time to grow lettuces and spinach even though the srping crops are bolting now. DH and I ate our broccolli the other day. Sure was alot of work for one meal. LOL I am hoping for a second flush of little florets before I pull them out.

KathyAnn is the Midsouth veggie queen. And Joe the Veggie King. :-) So please keep us posted as to what you're doing when veggie-wise your highnesses!
carol

Here are a few pics of the summer garden, Right after DH tilled everything up, looks kind of nice now for a couple weeks anyways LOL

the tomatoes , we just pulled the weeds out today and left them laying in themiddle of the rows. to the left far left is new broad leaf mustard greens coming up and then I have some big smile and teddy bear or something like that, sunflowers

Here's squashes and the yard long beans, a volunteer sunflower and volunteer amaranthus by the beans.

We have about 7 diff kinds of summer squash growing in that row I'm picking different varieties of patty pan, crooked neck and zepher squash now.

picking some heirloom purple/green streaked green beans, for get the name of them , go them labeled though.

You can't see the heirloom bean row I don't think,

zuchini in the middle, cucumbers on the left, their about l/2 inch long now LOL,
but i'm ready to make some dill pickles.

got the watermelon on the right, and I stuck the gooseberries in there to the right too along with 2 jujubees and 2 goumi berry bushes. Their really small though. Maybe i'll have something in a year or two on them.

behind the zuchinni i'm going to plant some more strawberries this week when they come in.

here are the melons, about 5 different kinds growin that row, tigger melon, collective farm woman, a small asian, very tiny, forget it's name, I have them all labeled. will have to check to see which ones are out there tomorrow.

and a volunteer sunflower that i'm taking good care of LOL

That's all that's growing right now, we're considering planting more tomatoes and staking them a new way . I'll see if I can post a picture of a way I think is neat.

here's how a friend is staking their's , and I'd liket o try it this way so we're going to probably plant some more soon.

Interesting staking technique KathyAnn! hmmmmmmm.......not too late to give that a try here too. The only tomatoes that are doing much here are the ones that volunteered in the compost pile. I just left them despite the fact they are planted way too close. The ones in the garden are still babies.

Your pctures are so wonderful. What a pretty garden!

thanks for the compliment, my staking is horrid this year, following the pictures of another master gardener, and I hate it. I wanted to take the easy way out. it's not such an easy way out.

I don't think I can still do it that other way. or rather it would be too much trouble LOL

kathy_ann, thanks for all the photos!
It is so much fun to see your beautiful
vegetables, and get your remarks.

Thanks for the look at the new tomato
trellis. I think the toms should be com-
fortable on that.

Fitsy

Hope so, I just hope I can get someone to help me plant them,

I'm suppose to go out and plant more green onions today but can'tstand the heat, so I'm still in the kitchen ha ha

thanks for all thenice compliments.

Your garden is looking great, Kathy. (jealous, jealous, jealous....but keeping a smile on my face) Do you not have issues with deer, rabbits, raccoons or other critters? Where did your neighbor learn to stake like that? Does he have any other innovative ideas? One of the things I enjoyed most about the 1 year of gardening at the community garden plots was seeing what everyone else was growing and how they did it. Lots of new ideas and advice.

I apologize if it was this thread where I saw it, but don't think it was.....someone on DG grows tomatoes with no stakes at all. They are allowed to sprawl on the ground. She said that's the way they are grown in their native South America. The tomato is usually sitting on leaves and vines so doesn't rot any more than if it had been staked. Hmmmmmmm.....now wouldn't that save a lot of time and backaches?!!!

It's good to be back. No internet service since Saturday and had strep throat since last Thursday. I think not having internet service caused more suffering. LOL!

goodness, so glad your doing better.

I have no idea how they learned to stake their tomatoes liek they did.

I don't think i'd like them sprawled out all over the ground though LOL

Sounds like letting them sprawl in the ground would result in more soil-borune diseases like southern blight. Let us know how it works out though.

I'm firmly on the fence with the stake/trellis/sprawl issue *G*. I had planned to have my Maters on a long trellis, but some have started (or been pushed into) growing away from it. I had some plastic storage shelf units, so made them one tier high (like a table) and will let the Maters grow in that direction, but still off the ground. Some of my cherry tomatoes in pots will get stakes around them, to help with support. We'll see.
Margo