Our Attempt at Gardening Part 3

Well, we have had a pretty bountiful first garden this year! We didn't really know what we were doing to start with, but we asked some questions, did some research, and then just planted and watered!! You can read about our other gardening adventures here and here.

We started out with planting watermelon, cucumbers (which Tad forgot he planted until we found full-grown ones in the garden!), strawberries, chives (which grew from small chives into big green onions), carrots, parsley, cilantro, basil, tomatoes, and green peppers. We got almost everything we planted. The strawberries, parsley, and basil just never came up at all. We had the cilantro probably the first half of the season and then it was gone. Our first watermelon patch produced a lot of watermelon, and then Maddy's watermelon patch on the other side of the garden started producing the second round and we are still picking. Watermelon must like super hot, sticky, nasty weather because we probably got around 12-15 watermelon!! The hard thing has been knowing when to pick them. We have picked them too early and too late, but this last one was just right! And Judah and Maddy had a blast eating it!

We got a plethora of carrots, but we didn't really know what to do with all of them! One tomato plant got huge and produced no tomatoes, and the other stayed small and produced no tomatoes (sad!) Our small little green pepper plant looked like it wasn't gonna do anything and then it produced 2 small beautiful green peppers and is working on 2 more!
The green onions are plentiful but I have too many to use up! They are still thriving in the garden so if you live in Oklahoma and need green onions, just give me a holler!
Maddy planted one sunflower from seed, well 2 actually but Judah pulled one up from the root early on :( and it got to be a huge tower! It bloomed while we were in Ohio and we still got to see it in all its glory when we got home. We now are just now harvesting the seeds from it!

And since being back from Ohio, and being very sick in pregnancy, the garden is overrun with weeds and looks like a safari jungle. Every time I go out into the heat for any length of time it makes me feel sick, and I couldn't imagine getting out there with the hoe to hack down the mass amount of weeds that have overtaken everything. Who knew I would get pregnant and so sick halfway through garden season? Oh well. At least it has still produced far more than we could have hoped for!!
So, I guess for next year I have a better idea of what we can get the most use out of, what we don't eat much of, and how much work a garden is. I did pretty well keeping up with it until I went out of town and got sick. So I'm sure I will have different plans for next year's garden. But I must say, I think it did pretty good for a first garden planted by amateur gardeners!! So, until next year, happy gardening!!