It has been a long time since I really gave an update on the garden (aside from the pickle canning of course). I guess the second year isn’t quite as exciting as the first year. In fact, the first time around we were snapping pictures of every new fruit or vegetable that poked it’s head out, but this year we don’t even bat an eye at massive, award winning, 20 pound zucchini. Actually though, the garden this year is head and shoulders above our garden from last year. There are a couple of big differences.

First off, we are doing a lot less weeding. I don’t know if it is because we got the garden sooner and thus were able to nip more weeds in the bud, if we were just smarter about our weeding, or if our garden is just laid out so well and so full, that the weeds are just crowded out. Or it could be that we just don’t care about having a weedy garden as much. Whatever the reason, this is saving us a lot of time and effort.

Second, our garden is planned out much better, in some cases because of the knowledge we gained last year. We are even rotating things out, for example, we had a huge crop of lettuce before it eventually made way for other things, since it is over quickly. We planted squash that is timed out such that the zucchini will be finished and ripped out in time to make room for the squash. We’re also working on our second crop of carrots.

The lettuce was out of control, we couldn’t give it away fast enough. Currently, we have more zucchini than we know what to do with. We’ve gotten tons of beans, most of which we’ve frozen. Now we are starting to enter tomato season.  So far only our cherry tomatoes have been taking off, but we have some types of tomatoes which are all ready at the same time, like Roma, so we will be expecting a tomato avalanche shortly. We also have at least 8 good sized green peppers waiting for us and we’ve even gotten a few hot peppers.

So, even though I haven’t been posting as much as last year about the garden, rest assured it is going (and growing!) strong.