Garden Update and Our First Harvest

Well the weather has been positively wonderful for the garden lately. It literally seems to sprout up overnight and every morning when I come out with the dog, it's completely different than the night before.

This is our first year doing the Square Foot Gardening method, and I admit I was a little worried that it wouldn't work out. I had read horror stories on the Internet about how if you don't mix the soil exactly so, the entire garden would be ruined and nothing would grow. We were a little haphazard with our soil mixing, but we figured we'd give it a try and see what happened. Surprisingly, everything has taken off and is looking phenomenal! Next year, I just may have to add another bed somewhere. (I have no idea where though - we've pretty much planted the entire yard except for a small patch of grass)

We were even able to make our first harvests yesterday! Broccoli Raab was our first vegetable that we harvested, and you'll have to check back tomorrow to see how we used it. But suffice it to say - we were quite pleased with it!

We also harvested some of our buttercrunch and romaine lettuce last night. Man, there is nothing like lettuce fresh from the garden. It was so tender and flavorful and so far from that organic romaine that we've been getting from Costco. It's going to be hard to go back to that when winter comes around again.

So far, our garden harvest tally is just a little over a pound! I can't wait to see what the final tally will be by summer's end.

Our peas have totally taken off. The tomato cage trellis has worked quite well. I was worried that some of the plants in the corners of the boxes wouldn't reach, but they certainly did and the plants are now almost as tall as I am! We planted golden snow peas and the plants have the neatest little purple flowers.

And just to show you how quickly the peas have grown, I took that picture last night and this morning, I came out and there were about 20 peas that had popped out overnight! Check out how cute they are!

The rest of the garden is also taking off. I'd show you our broccoli/cauliflower beds, and the turnip/kohlrabi/cabbage beds, but they're pretty boring. How about a picture of one of the flower beds??

And here's the rest of the large garden area. We finally planted our eggplant, pepper, zucchini, and squash seedlings, as well as more mesclun lettuce mix, but you can see that our kale and other lettuces are doing just fine. And if you squint your eyes, you can see the new herb garden at the top left of the picture.

Well that's it for today, folks! Be sure to check back tomorrow to find out what we did with our broccoli raab.