The Garden

We started the summer off building a garden in our yard. It was a lot of work digging out all the grass, but Jeff was perusing the thrifty nickle at work and found some free dirt for us from a horse ranch all we had to do was go pick it up. So we rented a dump trailer and then thanks to Jeff and his skills backing up the trailer through a small space we just raised the trailer with hydrolics and filled in the hole. It was really good dirt. You'll be able to see the difference in the pictures below between the new dirt section and the old dirt section.


Jeff working hard to clear out the grass to make the garden.



We planted a pumpkin (in the new dirt) and it took over the entire garden.
We are getting some huge pumpkins from it too. (Although it doesn't look that big in this picture)
We accidentally bought pole beans this year, so we decided to try and copy my dad's system but we were a little late getting it set up and most of the beans were so tangled it was impossible to make it neat and organized, so we just hung some twine string down and the beans climbed up by themselves. As you can see, we should have put another pole in the middle of the row too to prevent the sagging. It turns out bean plants are heavy. :)


This is what my arms looked like after picking the beans. One of these years you would think I would learn my lesson and wear long sleeves when picking. We have gotten a LOT of beans. I only canned 21 pints, and have been giving the rest away.


The corn (in the new dirt) grew a dark green color and really tall, you can see it is taller than the fence. It was also really yummy. I did my first batch of corn this weekend. I'll have pictures of that on here soon. You can also see the pumpkin growing through the corn. We have had to keep a close eye on it because a couple times we've gone out to the garden we have found vines that climbed up the corn with pumpkins forming on the top. I don't think the corn would be strong enough for that.

This is the corn that grew in the old dirt. You can see it did not do too well. We haven't eaten any of the corn from this batch yet. Maybe in the next week it will be ready.