Apr. 30, 2009 - ~Weekly Garden Update (a lot of good and a little bad)
Mmmmm....mmmmmm....good. Homegrown lettuce.
For some reason, that I'm not sure, the lettuce have always grown very well in the pool. It continues to grow and grow and we continue to harvest. Yum!
We begin harvesting our lettuce about a month and a half after planting from seed. The first few harvests are always very sweet. As time marches on and the lettuce keep growing they become slightly bitter. That's the flavor we're experiencing now which is what we're use to from the store.
Our second round of lettuce is now growing in another pool and I have a few to transplant in the middle of this pool as well. All in all, enough to keep us in lettuce for most of the summer.
Dinner the other night. A quiche and big salad. About half of what we ate came from our own production. The eggs, onions and lettuce. Soon we'll be able to add tomatoes and green peppers to that list (I hope).
Speaking of peppers and tomatoes.........
Here's our tomato and pepper pool. This is another experiment. So far so good. Last year I tried peppers and my soil was lacking something. I was able to pick the brain of a local farmer in the area and hopefully we've found the solution to our pepper problem. Another great reason to visit your local farmers market 
We'll see.......
Other than the lettuce I LOVE growing beans. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's how beautiful they are. They climb so pretty and have the sweetest blooms. The beans we are growing this year are beginning to flower and have a nice purple hue with the white.
We've got 15-20 feet of beans growing, but I think we should grow double that amount for our family.
And lastly, before all the bad news, here is our newly planted (in the ground) garden. I fertilized just the other day and they seem to have really enjoyed the added nutrients. One row each; corn, squash, cucumbers.
Now for the bad news.....sort of. Here's our beautiful blueberries......
Notice all those wonderful clusters of berries. We were VERY excited last night to find quite a few ready to harvest, very blue, berries on our bushes. One plant had a big cluster of berries calling our name. We had to come inside quickly and figured we'd just take our picture and harvest the berries this morning when we woke up. Well......what a rude awakening that was! See the pretty berries, green, still there. But a rascal of a squirrel (I believe) made his way through this
to get to the ready to harvest berries. Those yummy, deep BLUE, blueberries. The ones we had waited for. The ones we were denying ourselves the pleasure of consuming until this morning! Moral..... Don't put off til tomorrow what you can enjoy today.
On another sort of sad note in regards to our garden...... I do not think our apple trees will produce any apples this year. Our Anna was flowering quite nice, but the dorsett (the tree we ate an apple from last year), the one which pollinates the Anna, was not flowering at all. Well, there was a nutrient needed in February that would have taken care of this. I just applied over the weekend, but it may be too late. We'll see by some miracle if we get an apple or two, if not, there's always next year. Until then I will continue to tend to our trees and we plan on purchasing another dorsett to place on the other side of the Anna to encourage pollination on both sides.
I'm posting this on Thursday for the Friday garden club. Don't forget about the garden club at the Petersons site.
