We had a slow start to the garden this year as discussed in my previous update but everything is finally producing. The plants managed to survive a short drought and 3 huge storms that dumped unprecedented amounts of rain and a lot of wind.
Onion flowers are so pretty:
When I made my last update we were mostly just harvesting snap peas, radishes, chives and mustard greens. The radishes have bolted/flowered and it's my favorite time of year, radish pod season. I like to pick them when they are thick and juicy and bright green:
These are so tasty and we have a lot coming in right now. We add them to stirfrys and salads and I also quick pickled some (also pictured are pickled green beans):
If you've never quick pickled before I highly recommend it, I boiled half water half vinegar with some salt and brown sugar, then added some dill and spice, poured over the veg and stored in the fridge. These aren't shelf stable but will last in the fridge for many months!
The green beans (these are bush beans) started producing last month and almost every day I can go out and pick the biggest ones and get a few good handfuls, nothing makes me happier than lifting up the leaves and finding a whole bunch more, it's like a treasure hunt:
Our garlic is looking like it's close to ready, the storm the other day knocked some over so we had to tie them up, one had a very weak stem so we harvested it and used it for supper, the bulb was a decent size so I am excited to see these when they mature 0_0
Slightly beat up garlic:
Another thing that started producing are the cucumbers, I have around 5 plants going, just harvested the first one but lots more coming in. I will probably quick pickle a bunch of those too because it's hard to keep up with eating all those:
They are vining all over the place and going up the netting which was the plan, I have to retrain the vines everyday because they are trying to latch onto my tomatoes and surrounding plants.
Speaking of tomatoes we have a few varieties going, these one have a very strange lined appearance, I think the massive amounts of rain have given some of them really weird shapes and one split :
We have loads of dill everywhere which I love! Next to it you can see more green beans, these are the vining type, they have climbed taller than me but no flowers yet... first time planting these so I don't know what to expect.
We have more parsley than I could ever wish for, its partially bolted and growing all over, I'm leaving a lot of the flowers because the bees seem to like them! I guess we will probably harvest a bunch soon and maybe dry it out.
There are also strawberries in this patch but they have been overtaken by the parsley and bush beans, a few rogue tomatoes snuck in there too so we are going to let them all fight it out.
This is my first year growing zucchini, I have two plants, idk why but I had a very hard time getting them going, they were slow to germinate (maybe due to the temp?) and now I have one massive plant and one teeny tiny one, they are right next to each other and get the same amount of sun so it's a bit of a mystery. I have my first zucchini coming in and I want to make zucchini bread. The packet says to harvest when they are between 6-8 inches so this one is getting picked soon:
We have a brassica corner with cabbage, kale, chard, mustard and a few other things, the leaves have been bitten a lot but I might manage to get 2 cabbages this year if I'm lucky:
Here's a full shot of our biggest garden, you can see it's gone a bit wild but I try to keep the walkway clear so we can get in there lol:
We have a few patches with green and bulb onions that we are starting to pick when we want them and multiple potato patches. The potatoes seem to be dying back a bit so I think they will also come out within the next month.
Our other main garden has a mega squash corner that has basically extended right up to the netting so it's quite difficult to get to that corner. I believe it's spaghetti squash and acorn:
We also have a clump of massive jalepeno trees that didn't produce at all last year :( It self seeded so we decided to let them live and give it another shot before we give up, it's flowering now so fingers crossed:
Theres a bunch of other stuff that I can't access to take pictures of 😂 a few beets here and there, some leeks and basically tomato plants everywhere. Here's what I harvested on my round today that will be going into tonights supper as sides for our steak:
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