Anyone can be a gardener. You just need to get ready, get set, and grow!
Returning plants: strawberries, blueberries, banana peppers, bell peppers, black cherry tomatoes, cabbage, mustard greens, kale, Brussels sprouts, autumn star kalette, zucchini, onions, jack-be-little pumpkins, corn, okra, oregano, basil, marjoram, blueberries, mint, thyme, sage, lavender, French tarragon, and Mexican tarragon
New additions: salsa tomatoes, spinach, and rosemary
Dropped plants: Roma tomatoes, spicy globe basil, parsley, huckleberries, and bok choy
Successes
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Our okra plants produced lots of okra this year. This is the most okra we have ever harvested since beginning our garden years ago.
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We grew salsa tomatoes for the first time. These meaty tomatoes produced a steady harvest over the course of the summer. We were able to make salsa and tomato sauce.
Struggles
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We planted autumn star kalette summer of 2015. Because of the mild summer, the kalette continued to grow during our summer 2016 garden. We were able to harvest some more kalette, but it eventually bolted. The timing was convenient because we were able to put the flowers in a vase for Mother's day.
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Although we had our first blueberry harvest the previous year, we were only able to harvest about three blueberries in 2016.
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Our fight with the infamous cabbage white butterfly continued. They devoured 1/2 of our cabbages.
Garden 2016
The summer of 2016 was our 7th year as urban gardeners.
New Experiences
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Our boys had garden notebooks. We used these notebooks to keep track of the garden harvest throughout the summer.
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We experimented with our pesto. We love lamb chops so we decided to make a mint pesto to accompany them. Our boys liked the mint pesto more than traditional pesto.
From Our Boys
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Jeremiah - My favorite part of the garden last year was watering the plants. I really liked it when we made coleslaw.
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James - My favorite part of the garden last year was getting to water with the hose and not just my watering can. I liked all of the food we made.