Summer Vegetable Garden
This summer we have been focused on growing fruit, vegetables and herbs in the garden instead of flowers. It is a big change as you know I love the flower cutting garden, but this season I wanted to experiment with growing fresh produce and learning how to cultivate interesting edibles from seed.
As we have a suburban home that is landscaped with many trees and very little full sun, it was a challenge to find a way to integrate the edible garden, but many of our vegetables found a home in pots on the sunniest parts of the patio and in other containers throughout the yard. Here is a large zucchini plant nestled near the plant rack filled with greenery and herbs.
For fun we added this garden bed to a section of the lawn that receives full sun. The elevated style of bed was chosen so the grass would continue to grow beneath and it proved to be more resistant to pests and easy to tend as well. Inside we are growing cantaloupe, bush beans, more zucchini and cucumbers on the trellis at one end.
Growing from seed provides more options for unusual and gourmet vegetable varieties. This is a Persian Baby Cucumber called "Green Fingers" from
Seed Company, where I purchased many of my seeds this spring.
These container snap peas called "Little Crunch" peas make a delicious addition to the early summer menu and also can be eaten straight from the garden!
Soon to be harvested are these mini Sugar Cube Cantaloupes. They are personal-sized melons that grow in containers. We have some in the garden bed and a few more pots trellised throughout the yard with melons hanging from their vines. Looking forward to this special treat!
Of course no vegetable garden is complete without a few sunflowers to draw pollinators and add color. This year I planted Autumn Beauty sunflowers from Ferry-Morse Seed Company. They are lovely and have been in bloom for about a month with no signs of slowing down. Miniature eggplants, peppers and a few mini pumpkins to line the windowsills in October are also growing. The garden is always full of seasonal surprises!