Or Not.....

It still seems to be a better year overall for the garden, but things are going more slowly than we'd hoped. Except the beans -- we've had a bumper crop of beans, mostly the Dragon Tongue but plenty of Bush Lake as well! Banana peppers and lettuces have done fairly well, too. We've been getting lots of tomatoes but they haven't really ripened yet -- and we're having an issue with worms,which I may have mentioned before.

Pretty squash flower

 We have had a few zucchini and summer squash, which is an improvement from last year, and several spaghetti squash are coming along. We're just seeing some acorn squash, too.

Zucchini

Small harvest!

Basil, banana peppers, green tomatoes, beans

 By all appearances the root veggies are doing well. We did pull a couple of onions last week, white and yellow. The red onions didn't make it, unfortunately.

One small stubby carrot

Butter lettuce, we think -- we actually had several volunteers that popped up, and have thrived.

The neighbors had a visitor.

The deer didn't bother our garden (we do have a fence around it, though it's certainly not tall enough to keep out a determined deer, but with so many open gardens for the picking, I suppose they just don't bother. We did unearth a nest of baby bunnies under one of the squashes, though. Most gardeners would probably be upset about that!

Reaping the rewards of our efforts: broccoli with tomatoes, and teriyaki beans. The chicken is store-bought. ;)

It's been raining a lot lately, so we haven't needed to water much. Jill did some weeding the other day, the peppers were getting a little overgrown. (I will say that the newspaper and straw has worked even better than I thought it would,  though I'm still not sure about all the crickets.) The weeds that we do have are thriving, but there are far fewer of them than we had last year. Surprisingly, the sunflowers we planted aren't doing well at all -- I kind of thought they were fast-growing, but that's certainly not the case here.

Meanwhile it's almost September (where has the time gone?!) and in a month or so we'll need to start cleaning things out. Mom is ready to give up already, and thinks we should just do a garden in her back yard next year. I think we should set up her yard now for an overwinter garden -- garlic and asparagus, and I'd have to research what else -- and then a late fall garden with winter squashes and pumpkins. All the stuff that you can't do in a community garden because of the time line. I'm thinking raised beds, so we could do maybe three of them, with one for a small patch of tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, etc.

I would still like to do the community garden next year, I like the setting, and I've gone a couple of times by myself and it's peaceful and meditative (especially with the crickets!). I'd like to try some additional heirloom tomatoes -- I have a few plants coming along this year but I have no idea what they are, since the seedlings got mixed up. (I can make a few guesses, of course, since a lot of them were the non-red kind -- I think a Zebra green, white cherry, one of the browns, etc. -- I don't have it right in front of me but I did make a list of which seeds I started!) Next year I think we'll try the black fabric weed block, and get everything plotted, dug, and blocked before we start planting. We'll also try adding some kind of fertilizer to the soil at planting time, rather than just fertilizing during the growing season. (We had compost tilled into the soil this year, but not a specific fertilizer.) I'll also need to do a little more research into planting times, harvesting, etc., and re-planting mid-season (the lettuces, for example, are about done now, but we probably could have re-planted a few weeks ago and be harvesting right now.) It's a shame, really, that we (society in general, not just my family) are so far removed from having even a small family garden these days -- a few decades ago I wouldn't have had to research this stuff, it would have been common knowledge.