Garden bounty

This year, we expanded the garden in our backyard, which has allowed us to experiment a bit more than last year. We actually have two gardens, a small one next to the house, and a large one in the yard, in addition to several pots of herbs.

The small one contains six tomato plants, two green beans, parsley, and two jalapeno plants. The large one contains peppers (three bell, two banana, one Hungarian wax, and one Anaheim), Brussels sprouts, okra, zucchini, corn, carrots, kale, chard, asparagus, eggplant, and cantaloupe. The last one was a surprise to us. We have a compost bin that we've been using for about two years now, and we used a good amount of the compost in the garden this year. The bonus/problem with doing that is you take the chance of basically planting any seed that stuck around in your compost, and apparently a cantaloupe snuck in and really took off while we were away on our road trip. Luckily, it came in in a corner of the garden that was mostly empty, so we're letting it keep going, and there are already two melons on the vine!

 Salsa verde tacos made with peppers from the garden

Tons of pickled banana and jalapeno peppers from the garden (This is only about half of our first batch.)

You can also see a large squash plant just outside the garden fence. That was another result of the compost. The bin used to sit right there, and I guess that seed got left behind when we moved the bin. We let the squash grow in because we were curious what kind it might be, and it turned out to be an acorn squash, so even though the location obviously isn't ideal, it sounded too good not to keep it. It's already produced nine or so squash.

So far, we've enjoyed a steady stream of zucchini, okra, peppers, kale, beans, and chard, and the tomatoes are just starting to come in, though B's been devouring them as quickly as they appear. Thank goodness we planted six of those! We can't wait to see what the corn does!