Still not much is happening...

The cucumbers as well as the tomatoes and red peppers are flowing in like no one's business...But everything else is on a halt. I think that those three things might be it for the summer; nothing else seems to want to produce! Except maybe the string beans...But we'll have to see about those!

Here are some pickles me and my mom made: 

They're more on the sweet side, and I don't really like sweet pickles, so we're going to try a dill recipe as well. They're a huge hit in our house though, everyone else who has tried them loves them! 

Here are some of the tomatoes:

A squirrel (or some kind of stinker) keeps going after the roma tomatoes! We've only lost two so far, but they were pretty low on the plant, so I'm hoping we don't lose many more...The roma ones are my favorite. The pear ones are good, but a bit sour for my liking, and the plum tomatoes (the two pictured behind the roma in the front are our first ones!) are a bit bland compared to the roma. They're still good with some salt and pepper though!

And here's a little bug that I found up in the front yard near the flower bed that I thought was cool!:

I've never seen a bug like that before! I especially like it's colors :)

Well that's pretty much it...Sadly I don't have much else to post about. But so I have some material for the fall, what are some good vegetables to grow in the fall in the Pennsylvania area?

Thanks for reading!

--Seana

Long time no update...

So obviously, I haven't updated this in over a month...What happened was that we had a really bad flood here a couple weeks ago. The water was over three feet high in my yard and I assumed everything was gone. That didn't turn out to be the case, but there were plenty of other things to worry about with the flood that honestly, I kind of left the garden abandoned. Everything in my basement, shed and garage was destroyed.

My rabbits (who were living outside) almost drowned, so finding somewhere else to put them has been a challenge.

There has been a lot going on so I've just been doing the bare minimum with the garden every day.

When I first went out to really examine it and see the damage done, I was actually really surprised. The tomato cages had completely fallen over, but they were fine. No branches broke, there were no rotten tomatoes. They were all good. We picked them back up, hosed them off and now they're all fine. The bell peppers, as well as the red hot chili pepper plant, which were completely submerged under water for nearly an hour, are both fine as well. The red hot chili pepper plant has already given us lots of little peppers! The bell peppers are getting close. The cucumber were completely unharmed.

Now, all of those plants were ones that were big and well established. The smaller ones didn't do so well. The leaf lettuce was barely growing anyway because of the wild rabbits, so that's gone. The peas are also not going to survive out there. The string beans are surprisingly okay, they just need to be thinned out. The corn is doing great. The broccoli is doing pretty well too, both of them need to be thinned as well. The mild jalapenos haven't showed any progress, but they're still alive. The carrots never really sprouted much, but the ones that did are still fine out there. The watermelons are dying to get into the ground (no they still haven't) and if it isn't too late (which I'm sure it is), we're going to plant them ASAP.

We are setting aside a day to completely weed the whole thing. The weeds have nearly taken over the garden. We are also going to thin everything out, even though it's incredible late for that. We're at least going to try and salvage anything we can.

Today when I went out though, I found lots to grab:

We got a bunch of cucumbers (some which are way overgrown), four red hot chili peppers, a roma tomato, and a little pear tomato! The tomatoes are doing really well, so that's good. I'm going to try to get back on track with posting on here once everything out there is situated, which will most likely be within the next few days. 

Well thanks for reading!

--Seana

New seeds planted!

Me and my mom did quite a bit in the garden today! We still have more to do but we're saving that for tomorrow. Unfortunately, we had to plant a lot of seeds really late because we had no where to put them, but today, we planted corn, broccoli, carrots and we moved some mild jalepenos that we have growing in pots into the ground.

Here is the corn:

And here are the peppers we moved:

The other stuff we planted was too small to photograph.

But aside from that, we also weeded (is that a word?) EVERYTHING. There are now tomatoes on all three plants, which I didn't get to take pictures of because I didn't have my phone of my camera on me at the time. The bell peppers are moving slowly but surely. There are two little tiny babies on there. The red hot chili peppers are going crazy. They're big enough now, we're just waiting for them to turn red. 

The leaf lettuce is ready to be thinned out, which is going to be done tomorrow, along with planting cauliflower, some more onions, strawberries, and asparagus. We're also putting the watermelon plants in the ground tomorrow. The green beans and peas seem to be doing fine. The remaining iceberg is doing okay too, but we're going to plant some more tomorrow to make up for the ones we lost from the rain. 

The cucumbers are growing like crazy. We've already pulled four and eaten them in the last three days, and we pulled quite a few to make pickles with last night. We're going to be making them tomorrow, also. So we've still got plenty to do, but the garden is coming along nicely! I guess that's all for now!

--Seana

First cucumber! :)

Me and my mom pulled the first cucumber today! I wanted to wait a few more days but I just couldn't :)

It tasted like I figured it would; like a cucumber! At first I felt like something was missing; it didn't taste exactly like they did when we buy them at the store. But it wasn't chilled because I was too excited to wait :) So I stuck it in the fridge and surely, a couple hours later it tasted just like a real cucumber! Well, it IS a real cucumber :)

It was so exciting! I had everyone in the house try it. It was the first thing either me or my mom have ever grown from seed that we've eaten. It's kind of amazing :) We're pulling another one tomorrow because this one was gone quickly after the photos were taken :) There are a couple more out there that are probably big enough but we want them to grow a little longer first. Now I just need to figure out what to do with them all!

We know we're making pickles with some, cucumber salad with some, using some with regular salad, and eating some raw, but we're going to have cucumbers growing out of our ears! Does anyone have some good recipes involving cucumbers?

Ps. Why does my cucumber have those white dots where the prickles were? Is that okay to eat? I hope that doesn't mean I picked them too soon...Oops!

Well, that's all for today! :)

--Seana

Rain Rain Go Away :(

Hi everyone. Yesterday we had some really bad storms here. They ended up flooding the iceberg lettuce and quite a bit of it died :( I'm hoping the rest will be okay the next time it rains. It didn't hurt much else though. They were the smallest things in the garden; they'd just began to sprout. 

On a happier note though, I have a bunch to update on. Pretty much everything in the garden has made progress since the last time I posted. The bell pepper hasn't done much, but there is another flower:

But none of the other plants have flowers yet =/

The cucumbers are getting big still:

I'm guessing in just a couple more days, it will be the size I want! :) For the last week or so, we've been noticing that our cucumber plants are growing into our neighbors yard. She said she wouldn't mind but the guy who does her lawn might cut them off, so I figured we should probably move them back so they were only up against our fence. I did about half of them, but sadly I accidentally broke quite a few tendrils that were wrapped around the fence. I hope I didn't do too much damage =/ 

I also found this really weird bug on one of the stems:

It looks like one of those wishy flowers! It was so fuzzy that I couldn't even believe it was a bug...I'm thinking it's some kind of caterpillar because of they way it moved. I didn't move it, which was probably a terrible idea, but I HATE caterpillars. Just taking this picture made me cringe. I definitely didn't want to touch it. I'm going to do some research and if it's harmful to the plants, I'll find someone else to remove it. Does anyone else know what it could be?

The leaf lettuce is really shaping up! It's actually starting to look like lettuce:

So that's exciting.

The peas are all up too:

They're doing well. 

As well as the green beans:

I'm actually surprised at how big they are by now!

The red hot chili peppers are also doing well. These are the two biggest ones:

 But there are a bunch of those all over :)

And last but not least!:

3 little baby tomatoes! I was so worried that these weren't going to do anything and then these little guys showed up! These are the beefsteak; the others don't have any tomatoes yet. But they DO have flowers! 

Well, I think that's it. I need to work on making these posts a little shorter :) Sorry!

--Seana