I Am Finally Back

Where did the last 11 months go too? Sorry about not posting but I have been busy and have lots of pictures to share with you.  I was busy all last summer planting a garden.  This was the first time for me and boy it sure does take up a lot of your time.Here in our apartment building management has a fenced in area that they plow out for us to use for garden space.  I had two spaces one space 45 by 75 feet and the other 45 by 15 feet or something like that.



This is the wrong picture but the plot next to mine. I am on the left of the screen.  Where you see the pole on the left is the right side of my plot starts and goes all the way back to the fence.  From the left side I have two rows of green beans, then next to that are two rows of yellow beans.  In between are some mixed flowers to keep the bugs away. Next  to the right are a variety of pepper plants.  As you follow the beans back down to the end of the rows going the opposite direction across the back of the plot are four rows of sunflowers.  Then behind them are some flowers, herbs, wild asparagus; chives, and oregano along the fence.

Now this is my garden. Continueing right into the garden starting with the pepper plants on the front left corner.  (This picture was taken a little later because you can see that the beans are up now top left corner.)  Going to the back at the end of the peppers are some acorn squash,  where the wood slats are (used for shade) we planted leaf lettuces, spinach, and radishes.  Behind them are butternut squash, then the sunflowers going the opposite direction. To the right of the hose is more acorn squash then going back are our 48 tomato plants, 12 cherry tomato and the rest Roma's tomatoes.  Behind them is a patch of cantaloupe.  I ended up getting over a thousand ripe Roma's tomatoes to can.  We had 7 picking on our beans and I finally stopped because I could not find anyone else to give them to.  I canned over 15 dozen quarts and pints of different things from my garden and loved every minute of it. 

Veggie Man keeping guard over the garden

This is where our second plot.  It is next to my friend Gwen (on the far right) and the smaller of the two plots.  Where you see the chair we had a row of wild daisies but they never came up.  In the right front where you see the wet spot are our cucumber plants. We planted them late and only had three hills. Going to the left are a row of Zinnia's, then Basil on half the row and Cilantro on the other half.  Last row onions and next to that mixed leaf lettus and a patch of wild flowers behind them.

Wild flower patch

                                                           

Watermelons.  We had over 35 watermelons

                                                                

You can see things are producing rather nicely.  To the left are the rows of beans in bloom, center front are five different variety of pepper plants, behind them you can see the squash in bloom.  On the right are the tomato plants.  We put mirical grow on the plants and the tomatoes got so large that we had to strip the leaves off so the sun could ripen the fruit.  The plants grew over six feet tall.  Here the hose is giving them a good sprinkle.

In front view of the peppers on left and acorn squash on right, tomatoes behind.

Believe it or not this is my bean rows BEFORE I weeded them.  They got a little ahead of me.  My partner in the garden was suppose to do the weeding and I was suppose to do the planting but I intended up doing all of it, or I might not of planted so much.  But Everyone said I had the best garden of everyone.

This is me setting in the chair weeding the garden.  Do these beans look better?  Everyone teased me about my floppy hat but it did the trick.  After wearing shorts one day and burning my legs and ankles I did not wear them any more.

This was our prize sunflower it was over 14 feet tall.  That is my friend Sharon who was suppose to be doing the garden with me.

                        

This is the stalk from that sunflower it was over 12 inches around.

This is the spot where the watermelon were at.  I transplanted over 600 strawberry plants in the fall to start a new patch for next year.  Well there this is what I did this summer.  What do you think?