We planted a pretty big garden of fruits, vegetables and herbs this year. I’ve always been a fan of keeping a small garden at home but it hasn’t always been a possibility with the various apartment dwellings I’ve lived in since leaving my parent’s home in NJ. Now that we’ve settled into our homestead (and I’m not pregnant and lazy or an exhausted new mom like I was for the last 2 summers) we got back on the gardening bandwagon and built some nice raised beds (thanks J!).

one of the 3 raised beds that J built.

We planted most things from seed as you can see from the pic above. We get seeds from Territorial Seed Co.The rest was from small starts and a few organic dutch baby potato buds bought at the nursery . The garden has:
Red beets (I wanted golden but they were out of stock).
Rainbow chard
Kale
Spinach
2 kinds of Strawberries
Walla Walla Sweet onions
Scallions
Chives
Arugula
Oregano
Cilantro
Fennel
Rosemary
Dutch baby yellow potatoes
Sugar pumpkin
Summer squash
Butternut squash
Basil
Mesclun salad greens
Red cabbage

the day the seeds arrived

Seattle has had unseasonably warm weather for the last 2 months and I really must credit the success of our garden to that. 29 days with no rain and near record breaking high temps make for very happy plants apparently. We kept our plants well watered in the interim thanks to rain barrels (So worth it if you have a house!).

Here’s the garden just a few weeks after planting (from seed remember?!):

a bright green flourish of kale and salad greens.

We’ve already harvested some of the kale – the tender, young leaves taste different than the mature ones – many of the herbs and just today, a few fragile and very fragrant strawberries:

the urge to eat them the very second that I picked them was overwhelming.

I’m really looking forward to harvesting the rest of what we’ve planted – especially the pumpkins!

~ by reesemcg on June 21, 2009.

Posted in food, green, green living, handmade, projects
Tags: gardening, home, outdoors