My Vegetable Garden ' Enjoying The Harvests

It has been a while since I have updated my readers on my vegetable garden progress. You can catch up on this series if you weren't around when I started planning my vegetable garden. I started out with great aspirations and had made some improvements from last year with an extra garden box that we used for beans. We got ahead of ourselves in the transplanting stage and were forced to start over. The few weeks of growing the seedlings were flushed down the toilet (figuratively, not literally) because we didn't wait for the weather.

In my last update, I shared our alterations and improvements. We had a furry neighbor eating out plants that we had to put a stop to as well as some other important updates. It has been several weeks (if not a couple months) since that update, so I figured it was time to tell you all how it's going.

What's Growing Well

In the past two months, we have mostly positive moments. We enjoyed the first harvest, which consisted of a couple green beans (from the only plant that survived our earlier planting) and it has picked up since then. While many people who rent don't take advantage of having a vegetable garden, we have enjoyed every minute. If you remember, we planted green beans, green peppers, tomatoes (2 plants), and cucumbers. Here's a detailed look at our progress:

Green Peppers:

One of the vegetables that is doing well is our green pepper plant. We have already enjoyed two green peppers and there are at least 3 other peppers growing on the plant. A friend of mine grew green peppers last year, but only had 1 pepper for the entire season. So, I feel like this is a huge success. More importantly, I absolutely love green peppers, so it's even more of a success in my book.

Tomatoes and Cucumbers

We have also had pretty decent success with our tomatoes and cucumbers. We have two tomato plants, one cherry and the other one being 'regular' sized tomatoes. We've had at least 20 cherry tomatoes already and 3 regular sized tomatoes. While we often eat the cherry tomatoes before getting inside (they're a great snack), the large ones make a great components to one of our various salads. yummm!

Our cucumbers are doing okay. We've had 4 or 5 of them already with one more growing. I'm afraid that the plant is going to stop producing soon since I don't see any other cucumbers growing at the moment. This is about what we got last year, but I still have my fingers crossed.

A picture of our cherry tomatoes ripening. The cucumber plant is behind it.

 What's Been Struggling

In case you haven't guessed it already, the one downside to our vegetable garden has been our green beans. While our one plant was the first one to produce anything out of our garden, the other plants that were part of our second planting of beans, have been slow to produce. When I say slow, I mean, they are just now flowering. *sigh*

For the longest time, I thought we didn't have green beans. The reason being is that all of the second phase plants trellised up the fencing and poles. The first plant (again, that survived the first planting and was weeks ahead) did no such thing, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw this happen.

Can you see how far they are from the ground?

Anyways, because we have only had one plant to produce anything, we only got a couple of green bean pods at a time. Which, is basically nothing. In hindsight, this was poor planning on my part because you can't just eat raw green beans. I mean, maybe you can, but I'm not going to. While I am looking forward to seeing how the rest of the plants produce, I'm not holding my breath. In fact, I am already planning on excluding green beans from our garden next year ' that's how much I am disappointed.

Reflections

I have thoroughly enjoyed growing our garden this year. It is always nice and relaxing to water the plants after a long day at work. I know I have already said this in one of the earlier updates, but it's definitely true: gardening is a cheap hobby. While there have been frustrating or disappointing moments and I have already made plans to improve our garden for next year, it is nice to enjoy the benefits of your hard work. This is true with all aspects of life, isn't it?

Are you growing a garden? How's your garden going?