Wednesday, September 07, 2011

How does your garden grow?

Remember me? It's been awhile since I've had time to sit down and write.

Anyway, the backyard growing season is just about wrapping up for me; the fall weather came in with a vengeance on Monday -- what is it, Mother Nature figured it's Labour Day so that's it, summer's most definitely over?

So, how did my garden do this year? Unfortunately, not so well.

But the good first. My raspberry bush was fantastic! Every day for the month of July, the kids and I would go outside in our pajamas and pick about a pint worth of raspberries. Every single morning for a month. And every single day we ate raspberries -- and I can't say 'we ate them until we got sick of them' because we never got sick of them. I'd like to also say that I made jam or some other tasty treats with the raspberries. But no. We ate them. And ate them. And ate them.

And they were delicious!

The cucumbers did alright. I haven't had to buy cucumbers at the store for about a month now, and I made two batches of relish with the overflow cucumbers -- so I guess they did more than alright. But then again, I planted five cucumber plants this year instead of two or three -- so it kind of makes sense that we had more cucumbers.

The tomatoes produced, but nowhere near as many as the last two years. In fact, we had enough to eat tomatoes whenever we wanted one with dinner but there was never an excess. So no tomato sauce and no salsa this year. I had to buy baskets of tomatoes from the market to cook with.

And the zucchini. Well, think back to last year when I complained that my damn zucchini plant was taking over my garden and producing multiple baseball bat size zucchinis on an what-seemed-like daily basis. I had so much zucchini that after we ate as much as we could and I baked as much zucchini bread as we could handle (and I used 12 cups of shredded zucchini in two batches of salsa) I still had something like 10 or 12 cups of shredded zucchini in the freezer.

This year....1 zucchini. That's it. My entire plant produced just one single zucchini. And we ate it.

But, believe it or not, I still had shredded zucchini in the freezer from last summer! So maybe, somehow, my new plant knew that I didn't really need any more of the vegetable.

2 comments:

Helene said...

I would've loved to have had a raspberry bush!!! Our summer garden did pretty well this year. And our peach tree actually had peaches for the first time, which were surprisingly delicious.

Isn't it such a good feeling to just walk out your back door and pick food fresh from your garden!!!

Deb said...

Ohh, a peach tree sounds fantastic! I'd love to have peaches in my backyard.

And you're right, it is such a good feeling to walk out the door and pick food from the garden. Before dinner tonight, I sent Austin out with a bowl and told him to pick some tomatoes. He was thrilled!