Gardening can sure be hard work, but it’s 100% worth it when you get to enjoy the fruits (or veggies 🙂 ) of your labor. We planted our garden about two months ago and we’re finally harvesting squash, cucumbers, kale, and more, while we continue to weed and maintain the garden.
Gardening is definitely something that brings me joy but frustration at the same time. It’s amazing to me when a small seed can produce seemingly endless vegetables, but it also takes hours of weeding, pest control, and harvesting.
It’s been just over two months since we planted this summer’s garden and I’ve been blown away at how well it’s doing. Here’s what’s been going on:
Harvesting
We’re finally harvesting tons of veggies! It took awhile for everything to start getting ready, but then all of a sudden we’re struggling to keep up with it all. We’ve picked hot peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and kale.
Overall, we’ve had mostly zucchini, yellow squash, and cucumbers. We weren’t down in the garden for a few days because I was working long hours for a festival (I work at a chamber of commerce), so when we went down to catch up with it, it was overwhelming. I picked about 10 GIANT zucchini, 10 yellow squash, and 40 cucumbers. There was no way we’d keep up with all that, so we kept what we could handle, gave some to family, then actually sold the rest to a local couple who own a few restaurants (have you seen me share in my Instagram stories about my love of Karma Coffee Co? They used our squash in a brunch special!)
I thought the squash plants were slowing down finally, but just the other day I saw quite a few little yellow squash and zucchini starting to grow. It’s also about time for our tomatoes to start producing more fruit, too! I’ve picked a few handfuls of yellow cherry tomatoes, which are super sweet and less acidic, and I see more green ones down there. I’ve also picked a couple Roma tomatoes, which are larger and oval shaped, and our big sandwich tomatoes are still green, but coming along (I don’t remember exactly what kind they are).
As for other vegetables, we’ve picked just a couple tiny green peppers, but each plant is starting to get a few more. We’ve dug a little around the potato plants and we have a lot of them about ready to pick, too! I’ve never grown broccoli, so I’m not exactly sure when they’ll be ready, but the plants are huge and I see little broccoli beginning to grow. Before we know it, we’ll be harvesting a ton of veggies once again!
Cooking with veggies
We eat so much healthier in the summer because of the garden! Most of the time we don’t really have a choice–if we don’t eat what we harvested, it will go bad.
We’ve been having zucchini or yellow squash at least four or five days a week with dinner. Most of the time we make foil packets with the squash, olive oil, and spices, but we’ve also been having a lot of zucchini boats and noodles, too.
Besides the squash and zucchini, we’ve been snacking on cucumbers constantly (cucumber salad recipe coming soon) and adding kale to meals whenever we can. I even made a pasta salad for a church picnic and added tomatoes and cucumbers from our garden. I’m excited to start cooking some of the veggies that will be ready soon, including potatoes, peppers, and more tomatoes–I’m thinking we’ll have lots of salsa, tomato soup, and tomato sauce for canning!
More weeds
Ugh, the weeds are never ending. If you read my one month garden update post, you saw we started covering the garden with newspaper and hay to keep the weeds down. This worked SUPER well, but we only did maybe 1/3 of it. Before we had the time to finish the rest, the weeds were already back.
Just about a week ago, we weeded around the sweet peppers for a second time and put the newspapers and hay around it. I also weeded around the kale, but still have to find the swiss chard–both were completely taken over by weeds. I’m not sure if we’ll cover any more of the garden with newspaper and hay, or just continue to weed the areas without cover the rest of the season.
Failed plants
I’m happy to say we’ve only had a few unsuccessful plants this year! One zucchini and one yellow squash plant died, but we got some veggies from them beforehand, and we’re still getting more than enough produce from the others! We planted seeds for spinach, swiss chard, and kale, and the kale is the only one really doing well (see photo above). We had just a few spinach and swiss chard seeds pop up.
I planted some more spinach seeds last weekend and will probably plant more swiss chard, too, once we weed around it. Greens don’t take very long to grow and they usually last pretty well throughout the fall.
Besides the squash plants and the spinach and swiss chard not coming up, everything else has been doing very well!
I can’t even describe my excitement when I go down to the garden and find what seems like hundreds of veggies. Harvesting and cooking with our produce makes all the hard work worth it. I’m feeling sad knowing that sooner than later our summer garden will be done, but that just means we’ll have to work hard the next couple months to harvest some more and preserve it! I’ll be sure to post again in about a month to show how that goes.
Thanks for reading! Happy gardening ♥
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