Fruits from Our Labor

Summer is here and our garden is grown.  Most of the vegetables are ripening and we are starting to enjoy the fruits of our labor.   It has taken a little work and we have had some disappointments.  We have had a war with the bunnies and they have pretty much won on the bean front.   Rather than having two full rows of beans and enough to can, we ended up with a few meals worth.

Green Beans

We have fought with wire grass and although our garden is somewhat green it doesn’t seem to be bothering the vegetables.  We have a plan to beat it next year though.

Overall, the vegetables have held on through a dry month and now that we have had some rain, we will be picking quite a bit over the next week.   We spent about $12 on plants and seeds.

Tall Corn

So far we have harvested corn, yellow squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, a few green beans, a couple of okra, basil,  and green peppers and will still have more.   Still to come are lima beans (we expect about 5 gallons as the rabbits don’t like lima bean leaves), cabbage, banana peppers and some red and yellow peppers.

Cukes and Squash

I have frozen some of the squash and some of the corn.  I have made my first batch of Bread and Butter Pickles.  It turned out to be about 4 quarts of pickles.  By the time our kids finished taking home a jar, we only had one quart left.  I am hoping that we will get enough cucumbers to make another 5 quarts.

I believe at this point, our garden has more than paid for itself.  We still have a years worth of limas and corn to harvest and buckets more tomatoes.  And I don’t think there is ANYTHING as good as fresh garden tomatoes.  If you haven’t grown and eaten them fresh from the garden, you can’t imagine what you are missing.  Tomatoes from the store taste like cardboard when compared to a garden tomato.

If you grow your own vegetables, what do you grow?  Have you found that the garden pays for itself?

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