Garden pictures -May, June, July, August and September. :)

 Hey folks! Summer time is my busiest time. i had every intention of blogging about our summer and garden progress, but the crazyness of life sort of took over. Summer seemed extra short this year. My garden was planted late due to traveling and weather. We went on a couple of small trips including a super cool Florida trip to Harry Potter World and a trip up to Michigan. I got behind with planting and kind of feel like i spent the entire summer just trying to plant the garden. Somehow i still ended up with a pretty good harvest.

i got a new pressure canner this year, and canned beans, tomatoes and corn.  We harvested over 100lbs of potatoes, and around 50lbs of sweet potatoes. We usually harvest more sweet potatoes, but the voles found them again.  i completely abandon everything during gardening season, so i completely failed log any of it.  i did take a lot of pictures though, and thought i'd share some.

As with every year, we deal with many gardening challenges. This year was no different,and i'm listing them here for my own benefit.  Cucumber beetles were terrible this year, and infected almost all of my summer squash with mosiac virus. The white patty pans seemed to be most resistant, and i was able to grow an abundance of them. We had a ton of rain in the spring which also caused problems. Many of my neighbors lost their tomatoes just from the rain.

My tomatoes had Septoria leaf spot, this year. They really struggled, although i was able to harest a lot of tomatoes the plants themselves just looked terrible. The ast couple of years my tomatoes were hit with late blight and bacterial canker, which almost wiped them out. So although the septoria was annoying, it was somewhat managable.

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i'm sure you can tell i had a lot of fun taking pictures of my harvest.  i really enjoy the colors and variety. This was my first year growing the Blue Beauty tomatoes. They are absolutely gorgeous. Athough they a rough start, they continued to produce long after the other had died back.  The flavor was okay, nothing spectacular...but the deep blue, purple color definitly made up for it.  i'll be planting them again next year, just for the color. :) 

i didn't not plant much of a fall garden this year. i do have a variety of leaf lettuce, kale, carrots and sugar snap peas planted.  Our weather is quickly turning cold, so i'm pretty much done with the garden until spring. This winter i'm looking forward to slowing down, finishing some projects and starting some new ones. 

In seed-time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. ~William Blake