You might have noticed I haven’t posted anything about the garden this year. No pics of flowers or summer vegetable harvests unlike years past. Yes, we did plant a vegetable garden this year, but the harvest hasn’t been that big yet. And I’ve just been enjoying it and the flowers rather than posting pics everyday on Instagram or Facebook.

We’ve picked 4 large zucchini so far. No reason to post a pic of every single one of those.  Everyone knows what  a zucchini looks like. I chopped up the first one and froze it and gave another one away.

We’ve had a decent pick of cucumbers and sweet peppers, enough to make 6 jars of pickle relish last week just to use them up.  And they’ve been useful in a few yummy garden salads.

We have not had an abundance of tomatoes this year. The few we’ve picked have been small so we’ve used those up in salsa or salads. I’m hoping we get enough to be able to can some salsa in a few weeks.  The picture above was the first ripe one we picked a few weeks ago.

I also planted garlic last September and we finally harvested it last week.  Yep, it took that long to grow it and this was my first time.  It was worth the wait.  I now have more garlic than I know what to do with!

Besides tomatoes, sweet peppers, garlic, cucumbers, and zucchini, we also tried planting bell peppers again this year. The plants are not producing anything and look horrible in comparison to the sweet peppers. I wanted to try again but can’t say I will next year. Not sure why the sweet peppers perform better.

The corn did so well last year so we planted it again this year. However, our neighborhood tends to have a rat problem in the dead of summer.  The dogs always corner a rat in the yard or we come across a dead one sometimes. This year a rat ate all of our corn! Yep, it looks like we are growing corn cobs. The rats ate it right on the stalks. So, I’ll be buying corn from the farmers market to put in the freezer this year.

Last year we also planted our own thornless black berry bushes. They are doing very well this year and we’ve already picked a few handfuls of berries. We probably won’t have enough for jam this year but maybe enough for a nice cobbler.

So it’s been a tough, and interesting year, for the garden this year.  Yep, all the flowers are blooming nicely.  We didn’t buy as much new stuff this year because there’s no room to plant it. Hard to believe it will already be July next week, isn’t it?  Summer is barely here and it’s already flying by.