Pole beans!

All of our limas, black eye peas, and soy beans have gone down the drain, but our pole beans are still holding out. We're seeing a few mature beans on the vines, and plenty of flowers and baby beans too.

These are a climbing variety, and I think next season we'll try a burgundy bush.

Rotten radishes

Another vegetable that's not doing so well--- first the beans, then the squash, and now the radishes. The tops have been yellowing, so I pulled a few up to see how they were doing. I think they've been in the soil so long they started to rot.

Why'd they fail? I think our soil compacted too much, and it's been way too hot here. We'll pull these ones up and plant a new batch elsewhere.

Collards

With so many of our vegetables failing, it's so nice to see our collards doing well.

Collards are one of my favorite foods. Nothing beats a huge pot of collards cooked with bacon.

A big investment

Between the chicken coop, raised beds, rabbit pen, seeds, topsoil, and everything else we've purchased for our garden, we've probably used close to a thousand dollars worth of materials (not to discourage anyone that wants to try their hand at gardening or raising animals for food--- there are cheaper ways to do this! We've just decided to experiment with some different methods, like pulling in topsoil from other places, that added to the bill).

After all of this, we're eagerly awaiting something like the fresh salads we got from our last garden.


Things are getting close--- our radishes are nearing harvest time, and we're starting to see itty-bitty baby squash popping up in the beds. After all of this investment, these fresh vegetables are going to be the most appreciated foods we've ever eaten.

An unexpected harvest

This past summer, Taylor and I had a garden at my home in Oviedo. We lived more than two hours away, so it was a bit of a challenge. We set up an automatic timer to water the garden, and would come home every other weekend or so to do some damage-control. Things worked well for a little while, but eventually the weeds just took over. In Florida, weeds can grow a few feet tall in a week or so, if you're not careful. We eventually gave up on the long-distance gardening experiment. We let the weeds take over (there was no point in setting down a cover crop. We were simply admitting defeat).

Yesterday afternoon I wandered out there to see what things were like. Of course I found three-foot-tall weeds, but I also found a hidden pepper plant or two, still doing great. I had to pull apart a net of weeds to even see the poor little guys, but there were a bunch of peppers hiding down there.


I found two teeny bell peppers, and a dozen jalapenos and banana peppers.

I wound up putting the bell peppers in a soup, and unloading most of the other ones on a neighbor across the street. He's a capsaisin fanatic, and it's always good to be responsible for his fix.

Some gardening watercolors

My mom loves crafting (so do I, but not nearly as much). To get her fix, she has an entire room devoted to scrapbooking, beading, cardmaking, and all sorts of other things. Normally she tries to con me into doing something up there with her whenever she retreats into her crafting abode. Yesterday, inspired by the cover of How To Grow More Vegetables, I tried my hand at watercolor painting.


I actually didn't have watercolors, so I tried these new watercolor crayons.








And my favorite, the grain.

I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with these. Maybe put them on the covers of my notebooks once school starts?