Reaping the rewards

The garden did not amount to nearly as much as I had hoped this year. We simply did not have enough good digging weather before the time to plant had come and gone. We really should've started last fall, of course, but I was busy having a baby and we didn't quite realize how valuable that time of the year was. Next year...

But we did get a few things in the ground. We have tomatoes covering 240 sq. ft., about 200 onion plants, a small bed of potatoes, and some broccoli and cauliflower that completely bombed.

We've been daily bringing in armloads of tomatoes. Of course in a family made up of 1 person who barely eats solid foods and 4 others who don't particularly like a fresh tomato, you may wonder why on earth I would plant so much. While we don't like fresh, we all love tomatoes cooked into anything and everything. So I will do some cooking, pureeing, saucing, and canning, and through the winter, we'll enjoy the delicious flavor.

The potatoes still have another week or two to go, but I'm looking forward to those. We were given a partial sack of seed potatoes that our friends didn't need. I tried the lasagna gardening style in that bed, placing paper down over the bed, laying out the potatoes, and then covering with a foot of hay. I've read that your harvest isn't usually as great, but the ease of it makes up for it. We'll see. If I don't get many, I'll do it the normal way next year.

We've been out twice daily battling the bugs. We've found a couple of the tomato hornworms on the potato plants. We pulled those off and have not found any further evidence of those big baddies. The other bug we've been inundated with. I have yet to identify it, but it is a little inch-long gray and black bug that leaves a complete mess of black droppings. They hang out on the leaves and then, if disturbed, drop to the ground and try to hide in the mulch. Do you know what they are? I can only assume that they are eating leaves because we've found lots of destruction. Of course, the grasshoppers are numerous too, as everyone around here is experiencing this year, so they're not making anything better. Despite all this, our harvest looks like it will be decent.

Our onions did great. Not bad for a couple of bucks worth of sets. We pulled them all out a few days ago and strung them up to finish drying out. I've enjoyed the new dining room decoration: