Gardening Success!

Several months ago, what started as a venture in growing tomatoes, turned into a full blown gardening experience! Well, now that the summer is winding down (Fall begins tomorrow!!), the days of gardening wind down as well. And it's probably not a bad thing, since harvesting any more vegetables would require us to get a new freezer.

Our tomato project produced less than abundance of ruby red tomatoes. The lettuce has yet to finish growing so that we can pick it. The half of the green onions that actually grew are finally getting ready to pick. And we haven't produced a single head of broccoli or cantaloupe (unless you count the one that grew to the size of a tennis ball and rotted) or green pepper. Pretty big bummer, huh?

Oh, but no! We could open our very own supermarket, selling cucumbers, yellow squash and zucchini. We're gonna be sick of this stuff before we get rid of it all! We were able to eat several fresh squash and zucchini and have given 15 or 20 away to friends and family. But even after all that, we have 3 of these...


That would be Ziploc freezer bags filled with zucchini and yellow squash (I just sliced or chopped or shredded it, put it in the bags and labeled them). Those plastic Sterlite baskets from Wal-Mart fit perfectly into our side-by-side freezer. And in addition to those 3 very full baskets, we have several loose bags stuffed into random corners of our side-by-side and chest freezers. As of this very moment, we have over FORTY FIVE bags!!!

So, all in all, I'd say the Gardening Gilberts Experiement of '09 was hugely seccessful!! Now, I'm excited to make some yummy fall soups and casseroles with this goodness!

Siamese Squash

You may remember this post upon which I was the proud owner of a small garden out back. I fear that the squash plant felt as though it was represented unfairly or not mentioned enough to its liking as less than a week after that post, it produced this:

You rebellious little plant, you!

The Gardening Gilberts

Several months ago, Marty decided that he'd like to try his hand at growing some tomatoes. I'm sure you've seen the ads for the "Topsy Turvy" Tomato Planter (it hangs from a hook and grows tomatoes upside down). A friend told us about a way he'd figured out to make his own upside down tomato grower out of a 2-liter bottle. Figuring we had nothing to lose, we gathered our supplies, and got started. And this is how it turned out...


It's certainly not the most beautiful contraption of all time, but it seems to be working! It's grown quite a bit since this picture was taken and is finally starting to get some little tomatoes on it! We've got 3 plants like this, so we'll hopefully be making some homemade salsa before long!

Soon after the tomato plants started proving to be a success, Marty decided that we might as well try our hand at gardening as well! So, after several trips to Wal-Mart and Lowe's for soil and supplies and seeds, we set out on this new adventure.

First, Marty made a basic box of out 2x4s. Then, we cut out a patch of landscape fabric and used stakes to secure the box to the ground.


Next, we filled the box with a whole lotta soil...we used Black Kow, which is basically just composted manure, for more organic vegetables.

We had started the germination process for several seeds and decided to plant some sprouts as well as some seeds to see what happened.


We planted Zucchini, Yellow Squash, Cantaloupe, Cucumbers, Cilantro, Green Peppers, Hot Peppers, Broccoli, Green Onions and Lettuce.

And just a few months later, here's what we've got!

The squash and zucchini plants have taken over completely!! We ended up having to uproot several plants of squash, zucchini, cucumbers and cantaloupe because their leaves or vines were keeping other things from growing.

And here is our first little bit of harvested homegrown veggies!!


So far, we've collected plenty of squash, zucchini and cucumbers. The broccoli didn't come up at all. We had one green pepper plant come up, but no peppers produced from it yet. The lettuce is finally starting to come up (after several tries), but probably won't grow enough for us to use. And the green onions seem to be growing, but not fast enough. We tried to do a little container garden with cilantro and some hot peppers, but that bombed as well. Our cantaloupe plant finally has a little melon on it, so we'll hopefully be able to get something there!

It's been so much fun to pick fresh vegetables to cook for dinner. For a little money and just a little time each day, we've been able to stock our freezer to the point where it is overflowing with the crops our little garden has produced!