The "Fruits" of Our Labor

It's been nearly three months since we planted our garden at Grammie and Papa's house. We received a call that it was "time to harvest." And boy was it! It was actually overdue on the zucchini's. There were about three of them that are uneatable because they grew too big.

We harvested all of the carrots, because the pumpkin had no place to go. I picked it up off the ground (where I can see it had already received a tasting from some little critter) and placed it where the carrots had been.

I'm pretty sure that we won't have any cantaloupe. Th

ere just isn't enough room! Next year, we are going to make our planter box MUCH bigger, and plant MUCH smarter.

We may or may not get a watermelon. The

plant seems to be getting big, but as of now, it's only flowers. It may be too late in the season, and they may have been overtaken by the zucchini, which is way out of control. Zucchini bread, anyone?

Here are the pictures from today. We will go back in a couple of weeks to check on more zucchini. I'm sure that more will be ready to pick.

Gardening at Grammie and Papa's

Last year Savannah and I planted sunflowers, pumpkins, and watermelons at my parent's house. The only thing that ever grew was the watermelons. The rabbits and ground squirrels ate the sunflowers as soon as any green come up out of the dirt and the pumpkins flowers never had a chance. The only reason we were able to grow watermelons was because Papa covered the foliage with chicken wire!

This year, we are going to outsmart those little varmints. This year Papa build a planter box. It's about 10 or so feet long, 3 or so feet high and about 3 or so feet wide. Papa drove the tractor while Wayne and I filled the box with dirt.



We added vegetable planter mix (not organic unfortunately) and Savannah helped to til it together with the native soil.



Here is a picture of us planting the sunflowers. We put them at the back of the planter box where they wouldn't shade the rest of the fruits and vegetables.





Next we planted watermelon, zucchini, cantelope, carrots, and pumpkins. It's probably too much for that little area, but we just couldn't make up our minds!





Last year, Grammie bought Savannah her own gardening tools. She had fun using them for their practical purpose!



The height of the box would keep the squirrels and bunnies from eating our garden, but we wanted to make sure that nothing would even think about approaching. A mini-sized scarecrow should do the trick! (Um, notice the adorable dress Savannah chose to dig in the dirt with? She said, "Mommy. You can always wash it.")



We're very optimistic about this years crop. We're just sad that our yard doesn't get enough sun to have the garden at our house. For now, we're grateful for Grammie and Papa helping us out and letting us grow our garden in their yard!