First Harvest

There's lots going on in the garden. I've cleared out the front garden, possibly with the help of child labor (we'll talk about that later). My two plot neighbors took the back patio area on as a project and made a really awesome rock garden (they might've found astroturf buried under rocks, with weeds growing through it). I buried a pumpkin with a friend, It was a 'love pumpkin' that she had bought with her partner, whom she had just broken up with and then it collapsed in on itself, so we buried it, as you do (or should do) with past relationships. It was solemn and ridiculous, just how I prefer things.

What's most exciting though is the garden is suddenly exploding in growth! The Potatoes have grown past the rim of the trench and today I mounded the soil up around their vines for the final time, next stop HOME GROWN POTATOES. All my Green Beans have their second set of leaves and so soon I'll have fresh Green Beans! Some of the Tomatoes are now double their starting size and all are covered in flowers and most have tiny little fruit on them!

Best of everything though is yesterday I harvested my first meal from the garden:

Fresh Arugula! The Arugula needed to be thinned and waste not want not, so I made a light lunch of Arugula microgreens. Granted, it was only 1 oz. of food, but drizzled with a balsamic vinegar reduction and olive oil, seriously, so delicious.

And tonight I had my second meal from the garden. Pasta with a deconstructed tomato sauce with mushrooms accented with fresh from the garden Basil. Yes, of course the only thing from the garden was the Basil, but for real, it made it so yum.

I'm so excited for the garden to really start producing food and to be able to make full meals with produce from it. Every day there'll be more and more! Here's a few more photos of the garden to show its progress:

 Green Beans!

 Baby Tomatoes!

 The New Tomato Stakes (details in blog post to come!)

 Cucumber sex! Er. Well Cucumber flowers, which is sorta like sex, but with pollen. They're growing up the trellis quite nicely and have tripled in size since they were planted. I CANT WAIT TO MAKE PICKLES AND CUCUMBER DILL SANDWICHES!

That's about it. The latest seeds I've planted are some Romaine Lettuce (to be shaded and hopefully prevented from bolting [going to seed] by the cucumbers), a mess of Carrots, a new crop of Arugula, more Beets to replace the first seeds that washed away, and a quick crop of Radishes, that'll be kept cool by the towering Potato vines. Next time I'll tell you all about how I discovered someone in the garden crazier than me!