Gardening Updates as Fall Approaches

School starts in a week around these parts. How is summer over already??? We figured it’s been a while since we did our garden updates (although we’ve posted little updates on Facebook here and there) so here is a little summary of how things are going for us this year.

This year has been an interesting year for my garden. I got a late start on some things but they are finally catching up and I’m excited to START harvesting soon. We’ve been having pretty mild falls here lately so I’m hoping to still get a few months of good tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, etc. Most of my spring plantings got eaten by my chickens so I’ve had to adjust a few things to avoid that problem in the future. They were thrilled to discover brand new carrot and spinach seedlings growing in my garden and dug up the entire bed.

Here are some pictures of my current garden!

First pepper harvest (my kids think it’s the funnest thing ever to harvest).

My HUGE pumpkin plant that has taken over the yard (that’s what I get for actually WATERING it this year, lol)

The world’s best tomato cage. Every year my tomato plants fall all over the garden boxes and take over the yard and break my tomato cages. This one has been awesome so far!

Here is a “volunteer” tomato plant that grew out of a crack in my paver stones. There are actually tomatoes on it!

I managed to salvage a few green bean plants from the chickens, gotta assign these to the kids next 🙂

My cute little corn patch. I always try to grow corn and it never works that well. So far I have quite a few little cobs coming on, and the chickens seem to have kept the grasshoppers in check so maybe this year will be the year!

And THIS is the problem I have been facing … I try to keep the kids from letting them out when I’m not outside to keep them out of the garden. You can see how well THAT works out 😉

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I have two huge areas full of potatoes that I need to harvest. One I planted, and one is full of volunteer plants from last year. I am planning to try to can them since I will be pulling up so many all at once. I’m excited to try my new reusable canning lids for this project! I also have some zucchini just coming up (I planted two plants this year because they both looked half dead when I moved them outside … what was I thinking???). I have a few cucumber plants that almost died while we were on our trip to Canada, I THINK I will still get come cukes though. Probably not enough to make pickles this year though. I also have a few onions ready to pull up. I have decided I am not ambitious enough to do any fall planting. I will just enjoy harvesting what I’ve planted so far, and prepping my beds for next year.