August Garden Update!

Wow! My garden is growing like crazy! I thought I was just going to have a little raised bed garden this year, but it has truly taken on a life of it’s own. It’s been especially fun to share gardening with my kids this year and start to teach them about growing their own food, and where food comes from! (See pictures from the garden last month.)

We are up to our ears in zucchini and tomatoes. We actually pulled out one of our two zucchini plants in an effort to save some of our carrots which were getting shaded out and overgrown by the zucchini.  Next year I’m definitely only planting one zucchini plant, and I’ll probably have to give it a box all it’s own!

Here’s my one zucchini plant on the left, carrots, basil and oregano in there somewhere under the zucchini!

The tomatoes have also been growing like crazy, and I’m trying to find ways to use fresh tomatoes as much as possible.  We’ve been sharing lots of tomatoes with our neighbors too, and still have more than we can handle.  I need to learn how to can them!

And the butternut squash! Oh my!  We got home from vacation and it had totally taken over the garden. My hubs says we have a squash factory! We have at least 8 or 9 squash out there already and it’s still growing! I guess I’m going to have a lot of butternut squash to puree and hide in things like spaghetti sauce and meatballs this winter! (I hope hubs isn’t reading this!)

Here’s the squash in between the boxes!

And here’s some of the squash from the other angle.

And it’s taking over the other side of the boxes, I’m just trying to keep them off my neighbor’s driveway!

The strawberries have filled up the box and now some of the shoots are actually jumping over the edge of the box and growing along the ground. Does anyone who grows strawberries in boxes know what I should do about this?  Do I snip the shoots off?

And what do I do with the strawberry plants over the winter?  I would be so sad if they didn’t make through the winter and I didn’t have any yummy strawberries in my garden next spring! I really need to do some research and figure it out!

Don’t you love how I have this whole gardening thing figured out – I am truly flying by the seat of my pants, and proving that you don’t have to know everything about gardening before you start your own home garden!

We’re also planning on pulling our sugar snap peas and lettuce out, and replanting peas and spinach and lettuce for the fall.  That’s on the to-do list for this week.

And the kids are delighted with their flowers.  The plants in the front are daisies which are perennials, so I’m hoping to transplant them to our front flower beds so they’ll come up again in the spring and actually flower.

And we finally got our yard all finished! Our neighbor sodded their whole yard and had a bunch left over and gave it to us.  I was really trying to push for a drought-resistant grass or ground cover for the front yard, but who can pass up free sod?  And hubs is happy about it.

So, finally it’s the end of August and our little yard is pretty much complete. The amazing thing is that everything was pretty much free or very cheap to us – free rocks from a farmer’s field, free, reclaimed wood for the garden boxes and fence, free sod, cheap mulch, and some seeds and plants from the farmer’s market –  all we had to do was put in the work and effort to make it what it is! (And when I say “we” I mostly mean Jer, of course!)  Love it!

I still want to plant more perennial native flowers in our front beds so they will grow on their own and we won’t have to worry about planting flowers out there every year, and so they’ll attract bird and butterflies – but not rabbits!  For some reason the rabbits have loved eating our flowers this year?! So weird! Next year I’ll need to come up with a good, non-toxic rabbit repellant, although part of me would like it to be toxic to the rabbits – they ate off all our lillies this year!

So, that’s how my garden is growing!  It’s been a great experience this summer, and I’m learning a lot!

Also, I wanted to share what I’ve been Babbling about this past week.  I’d appreciate it if you’d head over to Toddler Times and check out my posts over there too!

Make Homemade Non-Toxic Cleaners With Your Toddler – A list of my must have ingredients for making homemade cleaners.

Green Cleaning With Your Toddler – A list of my favorite green cleaning products

Confessions of An Imperfect Parent – Honestly, I don’t always know the best way to discipline my toddler.

Can Your Kid Use Your Smartphone Even Though He Doesn’t Know Your Phone Number? – Oops, this is true of my kiddos!

How is your garden growing?  What are you harvesting so much of you don’t know what to do with it all?

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