Our Garden Tour

I have not always loved to garden. I was like most children I assume, that would complain and drag their feet when told it was time to weed the garden. As I matured, I discovered the incredible miracle that a tiny seed could transform into a large plant and produce a fruit which in turn, provided thousands of seeds. I now love gardening and love to find "new" heirloom varieties to experiment with. I wanted to share what plants you can find in our garden this year. This is mostly for my benefit so I can look back to see what I planted but I hope you can enjoy it as well!

1. Scarlet Runner Bean

I usually plant Kentucky Blue bush beans, but his year I decided to try something a little different and so I went with the scarlet runner bean. It was so lovely! It climbed and climbed and who knows how tall it would have climbed if the trellis had been tall enough! The blossoms were a gorgeous red color and added a pop of color to the whole garden. I wasn't super thrilled about the productivity of this variety and the beans didn't even start to come on until the end of August.

2. Dry Black Turtle Bean

This bean has purple blossoms! It is pretty fun to grow because you don't have to pick the beans until the plant is dead. You allow the beans to grow and mature and once the whole plant dies, the pods can be harvested and the dry black beans can be extracted. I also did another dry bean called the tiger eye bean which is yellow with dark orange striping. It looks so neat and I'm excited to cook some up!

3. Ambrosia Sweet Corn

There is only one variety of sweet corn that I will grow and that is Ambrosia. It is the best tasting sweet corn I have ever had and in addition to taste there are no nasty caterpillars that get into it! The husk that surrounds the ear of corn is so tight that the bugs cannot penetrate through it. Earwigs are attracted to the plant but they don't cause any damage from what I've seen. This is about the only variety in my garden that I am picky about.

4. Tomatoes

I love to experiment with tomatoes. When I was sorting through my seeds and getting ready to start them in the greenhouse, I discovered that I had 16 different kinds of tomatoes! Heirlooms are so much fun because they add such diversity. Big Rainbow, Green Zebra, Black Cherokee, and Brandywine have been some of my favorites. Because we have such a short growing season, I have found that placing plastic over my soil really helps the tomatoes and gives them a head start on the season.

5. Cantaloupe

We have never been successful with growing a good tasting cantaloupe. If they happen to reach maturity they usually taste just like squash. Squash isn't bad but when you are hoping for a juicy sweet tasting melon, squash is not the flavor you are looking for. We had a lot of space in our garden and I had some cantaloupe seeds, so I tossed them into the ground. I planted Minnesota Midget which are personal sized melons and Ha' Ogen which is an heirloom variety. They actually ended up tasting amazing this year! Ha' Ogen through us for a loop because they were green on the inside and it was hard to tell if they were ripe. The flavor was amazing!

6. Potatoes

Our state is known for growing these and they really do grow well here. I usually like to plant a red or gold variety because I like how tender the skins are. Last year I accidentally bought 5 pounds of potato seed. It really didn't look like much but we had potatoes coming out our ears! We harvested about 100 pounds last year! I made sure to hold myself back this time around.

7. Onions

I get such delight in growing onions. I prefer to buy the little starts as opposed to the small bulbs. I feel like the starts grow bigger and better. The trick that I've learned with onions is to not bury them deep and allow them to grown on top of the ground as they mature. They also need a lot of water. Since 95% of an onion is water, it takes a lot of water from an outside source for them to grow well.

8. Peppers

I grow peppers because I need them to make salsa and spaghetti sauce. They rarely grow well and they generally don't taste very good. I need to research these a bit more but in the mean time, they work.

9. Vines, vines, vines

Cucumbers and zucchini, are always staples that grow well. My son is obsessed with growing pumpkins and so we usually one half of the garden for growing those vines. This year, I guess the pumpkins weren't satisfied with their allotted space because they decided to grow everywhere. We planted a regular orange variety and then a cinderella white. The white one spread a good twenty feet in all directions. It was crazy! I had to constantly prune it back to manage the beast. We ended up with 15 flat white pumpkins and around 8 orange pumpkins.

10. Flowers

I really like my garden to look beautiful as well as be productive. The north end of my garden I dedicated for growing flowers. I grew sunflowers including a few of the mammoths, calendula and zinnias. I also experimented with growing some sorghum (broom corn) and amaranth. The results were beautiful and I enjoyed cut flowers inside my house for most the summer. All of these flowers were grown just from the seeds I put directly in the ground. Zinnas are especially easy to grow this way and provide a ton of color throughout the summer months.

That's it! That concludes the 2018 garden tour. Pretty simple and straight forward.

I failed to mention watermelon, but it has its own separate post so I don't think I hurt its feelings too much.