Garden update

Here's a shot of Sparky's herb garden:
It's chock full of basil, oregano, thyme, sage, mint, lemon grass, chives, cilantro, lavender, and some other stuff.

And here's what growing in our main vegetable garden:
From left to right that's potatoes, tomatoes, egg plant, and watermelon.

Red onions.

White sweet potatoes and onions from seed. The sweet potatoes look scrawny because I just planted them yesterday.


More sweet potatoes, shallots, and a couple different varieties of peppers.


Peppers and green beans.

Several more varieties of tomato plants, which have many green tomatoes on them now, which means I'll have ripe fresh tomatoes in a few weeks. Yay me!

Broccoli and lettuce bordered with marigolds.

In the side garden bed we have:
Peas, butternut squash, zucchini, yellow squash, cantaloupes, strawberries, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, green beans, and cucumbers.

Everything has been grown with no pesticides, no herbicides, and no non organic plant food. We've been watering the garden with rain water from our rain barrel. We're trying to grow this food as close to naturally as possible. And we've been eating lots of lettuce, peas, herbs, and potatoes out of the garden so far.

I'm hoping to have enough tomatoes and peppers to make and can some salsa and to perhaps can some tomatoes by themselves. And I do this despite all the warnings from my blog buddy XUP. She claims it's not worth the time or effort to can stuff, especially homemade jams, but I did a cost analysis on my pints of strawberry jam and we're coming out way ahead on the cost of what I canned versus store bought stuff. Plus home canned stuff is fresher, contains no High Fructose Corn Syrup or other additives, and it tastes better too. I grew up thinking that canning and jam making was a huge undertaking that was something akin to hard labor because my drama queen crazy aunt used to act like it was the hardest work in the world. I have found the opposite to be true in my case. It's not hard at all, it took me less than an hour each time I made my batches of strawberry jam. What it takes to make the salsa however, remains to be seen.