Bucket Garden Harvest

This year the family planted a garden.  We did it a little differently, though.  We planted our little garden in buckets.  You know the kind... those 5 gallon buckets you can buy at any home improvement store.   We simply bought a bunch, I drilled holes in the bottom of them to allow for proper drainage, and we filled them with potting soil and planted little start plants.

We focused on two things:  tomatoes and peppers.  We bought 4 kinds of tomatoes (yellow grape tomatoes, red grape tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, and beefsteak tomatoes) and 3 kinds of peppers (red sweet peppers, orange sweet peppers, and jalapeno peppers) and didn't bother with other potential crops simply because we wanted to see if it would work.  And it did!

Beefsteak on the vine...

 

Beefsteak after Mum took her garden sheers to clip it free from the vine.  It's huge and going to go great with the chicken burgers Mum plans on cooking.

Here are the Roma tomatoes.  We have at least 12-14 per plant, making our final haul (once their ready) at least 24-28 Roma tomatoes.  Mum will put them to good use.  She loves using Romas in her Pico de Gallo and in her pasta sauces.

And these are the red grape tomatoes.  From one harvest, Mum must have had at least 20 little tomatoes from the red tomato plants and at least as many from the yellow plants.

And here is one of the many sweet peppers we have hanging from the stems.  This little one will soon start to turn red, and it is the smallest of the bunch.  Our jalapeno plants have a good 12-14 peppers per plant (we have two plants), which means plenty of peppers to work with.  However, they're very small right now.  I'll probably wait to photograph those until they're bigger.

It is amazing what a little soil, water, and sun can create - even in a bucket.  There is this immense satisfaction knowing what went into the food you are consuming.  No pesticides and fertilizers, while we knew where the soil came from and what was in it.  Everything was natural, organic, and delicious.  And now that we know our bucket garden works, next year will mean more tomatoes, peppers, and a few other things.

How about you? Did you plant a garden this year? If so, what did you plant? Be sure to share in the comments.

Happy Tuesday!

Snapdragons

My garden is bursting with an abundance with snapdragons, which is a good thing because I love snapdragons.  And since the weather has been dark, cold, wet, and windy for the past few weeks, these little velvety pops of color have been a nice treat to stare at through the window in my office.  But today, I decided bring those petals inside.

Look at these babies.  Fabulous, aren't they?  I'm definitely a firm believer in if you can't go outside into the garden - bring the garden inside to you.

Lilac Time...

I love this time of the year because the lilacs come out to play.  Last year's weather was so wet and cold, the lilacs struggled and what little did blossom didn't last long nor were they really worth the trouble.  However, this year the lilacs have more than made up for last year's disappointments.

We have three giant lilac bushes bordering part of our patio.  The provide not only an amaing fragrance when we're outside relaxing, but they also make a similar noise to bamboo when the wind pushes through the branches.  The combination is almost lulling.

Even better, we're able to cut stems and bring them into the house - filling each room with their own fragrant bouquet.  I love having lilacs in the house.  It reminds me of my Grams.  Mum's mum loved lilacs and often smelled like them (that and freshly baked bread).

How gorgeous is this bouquet?  Makes all the time in the garden pruning, trimming, weeding, and fighting all those bugs worth it.  Fabulous.

Off to the Garden Center...

We went back to the garden center.  Every year we always say we're not going to plant anything but just maintain because we'll be too busy in the summer to do anything but maintain.  Plus, it doesn't help the cost of water is so ridiculously high in this area (especially with all the rainfall we get around here) that it's like paying rent twice each month.  But, like every year, we go back on our agreement and plant a little garden.

So we went to the garden center...

Garden Center Fun...

One of the best places within a 30 mile radius is Christianson's Nursery and Greenhouse.  It's this fantastic place where you can spend several hours exploring building after building filled with all sorts of garden goodies.  And for me, the best place in the business is the antiques shop.

How can you not want to go into this little antiques shop and explore?  The place looks so welcoming!

The Garden Center

We went to one of our local garden centers to look for two things:  cilantro seeds and mosquito pellets (they kill mosquitoes and mosquito eggs in standing water).  Mum's had serious problems with trying to grow cilantro in her herb garden, so we thought we would simply purchase seeds and try going cilantro in our mini greenhouse from seeds.  Well, at least I thought we should give it a go.