Zucchini

At first my zucchini did not want to cooperate.  All the plants died on me.  My mother-in-law had bought me two zucchini plants for the garden and it worked out well.  I ended up replanting some zucchini seeds because I wanted more than two plants.

When it was time to get everything in the ground, I ended up with seven zucchini plants. 

They got bigger and the blossoms came! 

Now we have a couple growing.  We lost the first two blossoms.  A zucchini started growing and then turned yellow and died.  From what, I have no idea.  I was contemplating putting hay underneath the plants so they are not lying directly on the ground, but then I decided not to.  We finally had the first one get big enough to harvest!! 

 I sent Ary out to pick her first zucchini.  Linus came over and wanted to help.

 They were really excited to pick the zucchini and be able to hold it.

Onto the murder of the zucchini, ha! 

Okay, no gory scene here.  I had enough gore this week with my foot!  I turned our first zucchini into zucchini cakes.  They taste very good.  I ended up eating all but two of them.  Shame on me!

I ran out of time when I was cooking them because had to run drop Ary off and then had a meeting at the church, so when I took this, they were cold......... still good but they are definitely better warm.  Next time I think I will cook them in the oven for a couple minutes to get a nice crisp on the sides as well.

Everything is planted in the garden and ready to go.

The garden starts with tomatoes, next green/red/carnival peppers, next zucchini, next cantaloupe and watermelon, next peas, next green beans, and finally blue potatoes.

The potatoes needed to be planted at a 15" depth.  With this clay, there was no way I was getting them down that far.  I decided to use the big pots to help.  I cut out the bottom of the pot, 10" pot, dug down a hole as far as I could, put the loose dirt back in the hole, added a little mound of dirt on top, and finally set the pot on top of the soil.  This should give me my 15".

So far it has worked.  I have new sprouts occasionally.  I still, today, have not had any flowers to know they are ready to be harvested.  I do have one potato that is peaking through.  

The peas were the first thing to be "harvested".  I say this loosely because I think I had a total of six peas before the plants died.  They were really good.

The pea plants died.  We had tons of rain and then no more rain and I may not have watered them as much as they were used to.  I will try and plant more peas next year.  The ones that we did get to eat were wonderful! 

Preparing the garden

This is where the garden was to be planted.  We actually had our trampoline here for a year and it started killing the grass.  I talked Travis into putting the garden here since there was no grass already.  If you can't see, the ground is horrible.  It's clay and rocky.  They don't call it ringing rocks for nothing.  When you hit the shovel into the rock, it definitely rings your hands.  I ended up getting 3 yards of topsoil/mushroom compost.  We had borrowed the neighbor's rototiller and it broke.  I was waiting for Travis to fix it so I could mix in the topsoil with the dirt but it was taking him too long.  He decided to try and mix it in with the skid loader.  Sorry, no pictures of this step.  It all happened quick and I wanted to make sure he didn't run over the flowers in my yard.

After Travis mixed up the topsoil and the clay, I decided to start planting.  I really wanted to get the plants in the ground.  Some of them were starting to die because they were too big in for the pot or there were too many in one pot.  This being my first year of serious planting, I had to start from the beginning.  I had to buy pots for the plants and it was getting expensive.  I decided to consolidate the plants, four per pot.  This was not the greatest idea, but you do what you have to, right?!

Last year the garden was at my mom's house.  We planted the plants wherever.  There was no rhyme or reason where we put them.  I learned from my sister and her husband that certain plants cannot be put next to each other.  This year I looked into what plants work well together and what did not.  The picture is of the start of planting.  It was really hot out.  I had some shade, as you can see, but I still had to stop and take many water breaks. 

Bad girl

I have been horrible at keeping up with the blog, what's new though.  I have great intentions and then just stop.  I am going to attempt to catch you up this weekend. 

Some of my plants suffered because they did not like the soil I used in the container...poor plants. This was my giant watermelon plant.  It was supposed to grow a to 200 pound watermelon.  Of course it died, grrr!