Garden growing

Both the vegetable and flower gardens are flourishing! And so it's time for a photographic update.

In the vegetable garden behind our house I planted tomatoes, basil, squash, zucchini, lettuce and spinach, and chili peppers. Almost all the seeds came from Seeds of Change, a seed company that provides organic, open-pollinated, and heirloom seeds.

Yesterday I found our first small green tomatoes- very exciting. The tomato pictured on the left is about the size of a quarter. I can't wait for fresh from the garden tomatoes!!!! Really, is there anything better? We've got Genovese, Roma, Chadwick Cherry, and Caro Rich (these last are orange). The tomatoes pictured are Genovese, but we've also got some tiny Chadwick Cherrys.

And the squash & zucchini plants are mongo huge. Soon we are going to have more squash than we know what to do with, I think. Even the chili pepper plants, which grow very s l o o o o w l y are getting big. We have lots of basil too, (3 kinds: fino verde, sweet chen, and purple-leafed). But someone really likes to eat the sweet chen basil leaves, must look into some natural pest control ideas.

Last night we had a mixed green salad that was 100% from our garden. There are a whole mix of lettuces, and some funky greens: Mizuna, Komastuna, Osaka Purple Mustard, Green Wave Mustard, Arugula, and Persian Garden Cress. It was very spicy (which was as advertised, these came in the Spicy Mesclun mix) and yummy! Doesn't it look lovely? I was very proud that we grew our own salad.

We also ate hamburgers - from a local Minnesota ranch - and I mixed in finely chopped green onions from last week's CSA box. At least for that meal we were a bit closer to a 100-mile diet.

The boulevard flower garden is doing well too. We have Dwarf Jerusalem sunflowers in flower and some bachelor buttons as well. So much fun watching it grow and develop! Just before we left I staked the Evening Sun sunflowers, after losing a couple to strong winds. When we got home Saturday night, I could see the sunflowers glowing out at me through the dark. They are really quite dwarf, even more than I thought they would be, they are only about 12 inches off the ground!