End of the garden

Last night we had our first frost of the season. Frost kills tomato and zucchini plants. Here's my last harvest of the year.

So of course, tonight is stuffed zucchini for dinner. I've posted the recipe before. Tonight's variation has a filling of ground turkey, onion, celery, green bell pepper cooked in tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, beer, balsamic vinegar, and hot sauce. Oh so good.

Zucchini for stuffing

Look what my garden produced!

(The banana is not a zucchini. I added it for size reference.)

Garden update

My garden is coming along. It's certainly a lesson in delayed gratification. But any little bit of progress is encouraging.

First baby tomatoes

and on another plant

Baby cherry tomatoes

My first squash harvest

I'm having some soil nutrient issues so I had to harvest all the squash before I lost some of them to blossom end rot. The ground around here is very sandy. So the drainage is great but it lacks nutrients. The last garden I had didn't have this issue. But even though I waited two years in between, it now has nutrient problems. I thought initially it was just in need of fertilizing but liquid plant food and manure didn't help. After some research, my best guess is that my soil is low on calcium. So, I harvested everything and poured a bone meal tea on the squash plants. We'll see if this helps.

Garden Project

Two summer ago I planted my very first vegetable garden. I had fresh tomatoes and squash to feed me and a dozen acquaintances for a months. I'm not much of a gardener. I hate pulling weeds; I hate mowing; I'm not even real excited about planting flowers; and if it's not on an automatic watering system, it dies. But a vegetable garden! For some reason, that's a whole different story. But things got in the way, my Master's degree, my new job. I just didn't want to worry about anything taking my focus off of these big events.

Now! Now, I'm getting my life settled into some sort of normality. (I use that term loosely.) I have time for a vegetable garden again this summer. Two weeks ago, The Boy, my friend and I got my pretty little garden plot all ready.

We planted three tomato plants of different varieties;

two squash plants, one zucchini and one yellow squash;

and a row of six little baby corn plants.

Ever since, I've been obsessed. I go out and check the progress every day. I pull the little weeds that creep up through the ground daily. I have fixed the irrigation twice to get it just right. I check the weather report and cover my babies if there is a chance of frost. There's something about a vegetable garden that makes it completely different than a flower garden and yard. Maybe it's because with the vegetable garden there are literal fruits to my labor, instead of just labor that keeps needing to be redone.