the fruits of our labor

There are definitely a lot of benefits to growing your own food. It’s cheaper, you control what exactly goes on or in said food, there is a a lot of pride in your accomplishments and it's actually fun. Now, I have to admit to you that I’m not the gardener in the family but I’m still going to brag about our garden.

The garden.

 

Tomatoes growing in the garden.

Our garden is pretty big (a little too big if you ask me). It’s a lot of work, especially for pretty much just one person to handle. There is the picking, weeding, debugging, keeping out animals, etc, etc, and Sean is out there every day making sure that our fruits and veges are growing (and he loves it).

It is actually pretty exciting to see what is picked every day. We have tons of tomatoes, lots of peppers, too many beans, and we’re getting ready for our squash, corn, okra and watermelon to start coming in.

Just some items picked in just one day!

If you want a plant that will produce a lot, try the yellow pear tomato.
You'll get tons of this sweet tomato.

We got lots and lots of onions earlier.

Some more lovely squash.

To me, the best things to plant (my favorites to eat and the ones that produce, produce, produce) are banana peppers, tomatoes (and there are a ton of varieties to plant) and squash. Now, of course more experienced farmers will get anything to produce a lot, but to me these are the easiest, especially banana peppers (you just cannot go wrong with this one).

One of my favs: the banana pepper. Another plant that will give you a ton of peppers.

So much that we are giving pickling a shot.

For this jar, we just added apple cider vinegar and some salt.

And you can also get a ton of beans but they may be the plant I hate the most. Picking beans sucks. It sucks big time. It especially sucks when you have multiple rows of the things.

Lots of bean plants mean lots of beans to pick.

The pink ones are more fun to pick.

Even Althea got into the bean spirit.

I’m not sure if our garden is 100% organic (because I’m not exactly sure what goes into all that) but I know that no pesticides have gone onto anything. We compost and my husband has actually weeded everything by hand and smushed every bug he has seen himself.

And well not every fruit is pretty but it sure does taste better knowing that what you are eating comes from your back yard.

All of these yellow pear tomatoes....

...made a delicious tomato salad. Just add fresh basil (also from garden), mozzarella cheese and olive oil.

All in all, I would say that we had a pretty successful garden this first year on the farm. Now, all we need is our chickens to start producing eggs and we are in business…