I know some of you are growing your own food.

We've been in harvest and preserve mode for a while now.

It's been a drought year, though, so if we don't water an hour every night, everything stops producing.

How are the rest of you doing?

Same here, except we don't have a garden yet plan one for next year at our new house... we`ll have room for as many raised garden beds as we can dream, and there's already a nice fence posted area... just gotta add the fence

The drought is BAD. If I don't water the lawn or the plants they start dieing quick... I feel bad watering things around my house for "LOOKS" and can't wait to move and only water what needs to be watered to grow and produce for us I saw the new house had some grapes growing still and no one has lived there in a year, crazy different than where I am now..

-Todd

This is the first year I was "serious" about gardening, meaning that I read up and tried to do it "right".

I prepped a 2'x 8' area along the SE wall of the garage. I started four tomato plants and four pepper plants indoors. They didn't get enough light so they were scrawny. I left the tomato plants out too long when I started hardening them off and they got sunburn so I had to buy some to plant. I stepped on one pepper plant and a cutworm got another so I was down to two stunted pepper plants. They are just starting to produce peppers now.

The tomato plants are doing well and I'm harvesting about one very large ripe tomato per day or so.

Meanwhile I seeded a few zucchini plants at each end of the garden and they've been doing so well I'm sick of them by now and they are starting to go bad in the fridge before we eat them. I also planted carrots and lettuce but the zucchini grew so huge so fast they were completley overtaken.

I have a quart jar of dry black-eye peas from a 4x4 plot. Okra has been coming in at a quart a week for the last 5-6 week. Wild mustang grapes are ripe. The june bugs are pretty much gone but more and more crickets are appearing.

-Blast

"...Okra..."

Oh yuk! My ex liked to try to stuff that down my throat...

Nothing wrong with okra if done up right

Maybe I have never had it properly prepared, the ex never was all that great a cook...

The best is okra is soaked in buttermilk, battered, and deep fried. I can feel my arteries harden just thinking about it.

Is it supposed to be slimy???

There used to be a New Orleans cook on PBS (his name escapes me now) that always said you had to "deslime" okra before you cooked it. Not into any food that has to be "deslimed".

Justin Wilson!

I'm envious of you urban gardeners. Small, neat, easy. We have some 9800 square feet in cultivation, vegetables and fruit trees. It's beginning to feel like a bloody farm. Work, work, work.

Will try to post some "produce porn" on Flickr tonight.

:-)

I threw some plants in the ground last spring. The okra did great, and the tomatoes grew but did not produce any fruit. Something keeps eating the bell and poblano peppers, but the jalapenos were left alone (and quite hot). At one point, some rats were eating the leaves of the pepper plants, until I set some traps.

It's been a hot and dry summer, and I really didn't put much effort into it. I just wanted to try a few things to get a little experience. Next year I'll get an earlier start to stay ahead of the heat. I'm also going to try some automatic watering, and companion planting.

In case anybody was thinking it's easy, I've learned that it isn't.

If you cook it any other way than frying it can be slimy. Of course if your X was a bad cook having your food slide down without a chance to taste it might have been a good thing.

So far we've been having a great year in the garden. Our garden is about 90' by 90' excluding the wheat.

I successfully grew a patch of spring red wheat - sowed 10 lbs and harvested about 50 lbs - and my harvesting skills are lacking as I am sure that I was also seeding the next crop at the same time.

We planted 6 different varieties of potatos to see what would grow well here, and have had a great harvest still ongoing.

we had a great run of peas and beans, zuccinni and summer squash.

I'm pretty sure our corn cross polinated and the sweet corn went straight to starchy, but the dent corn still is looking good. The sweet corn will be going to the pigs.

We have melons galore too - you'ld have to ask the DW which are which, cause I can't keep up with the varieties she planted.

Grapes, asparagus, and artichokes we started this year for future years all did well too.

Our tomatos have been off from last year's volume, but our neighbors all seem to be in the same predicament - a late frost really stunted them this season. The frost also trashed several of our fruit trees.

We've been dehydrating, pickling and preserving as much as we can.

I tried growing red brandywine tomatoes this year. Not a single tomato. The flowers bloomed and mysteriously fell off without setting any fruit.

- Tomatoes have done very well (heirloom, very yummy, had to freeze a bunch since I didn't feel like canning until I could do it once)
- Cucumbers died, probably due to lack of water while I was on travel
- Carrots were actually decent this year (raised beds have nice deep, soft soil)
- Green beans were very nice. I grow a combination of bush beans in the garden and pole beans in a teepee. Bush gives one or two harvests

Early crops (broccoli, cauliflower) didn't do so well, mostly from neglect. The peas did pretty well, but the kids usually eat them off the vine before they can be brought inside.

About ready to plan for another round of cool weather crops for the fall.

I use the square foot gardening (http://www.squarefootgardening.com/) approach and can grow quite a bit in 2 4x4 blocks.

Holy cow, lots of scrambling in the garden last night. Sudden change of forecast -- frost warning!!

This comes after sunset, so DW and I are outside with headlamps, harvesting what we can and covering things we care about most with old sheets, towels and tarps.

The greenhouse with tomatoes and peppers had already been closed in. Root veggies were hilled up and will be fine.

I was up at 5:30 a.m. with a water hose and sprinkler head, trying to wet everything down and keep the frost from forming. Last ditch effort. In the low spots the water would start to freeze as soon as I turned my back. We'll see if it did any good.

Not as dramatic as hurricane season, I guess. We often get a few frosts and then weeks of nice Indian summer. Different sort of "disaster" -- starry sky and dead calm, frozen grass crunching under your feet, and a summer's work on the line.

I enlarged my garden this year from the five 4x10' and 4x10' beds to one about 30x80'. Too much at once. And it wasn't helped by my brother, who decided that he needed to rototill the neighbor's garden before mine. It wouldn't have been so bad if the tiller hadn't broken down, and then got a flat tire before he could get to my garden.

I've also been having trouble with the neighbor's Mastiff getting into my yard. Once here, she panics and knocks down the gate or the fence and lets the chickens in. They've scratched away much of the mulch without me knowing it. They did a real number on the young watermelon plants.

I'm still having trouble with my soil. I put the lime on too late to do much good. I had intended to bring in several loads of composted dairy manure, then lost the tranny in the pickup. So I was reduced to dragging home some horse manure in my decrepit old cart (wheels but no tires) from the end of the street. The street is longer than I thought.

One batch of potatoes is ready to harvest, the other is still green. The tomatoes and peppers are way behind, due to an unusually cool summer. Some cucumbers so far, but not overwhelming. A few zucchini -- unusual...

I planted some melons, but what is growing doesn't look like what I planted. Funny-looking for melons.

Beware harvesting your own seeds. LABEL THEM immediately. The English shelling pea bed somehow turned into sugar snap peas, 6' LONG and sprawling all over instead of 18" tall and tidy. The chickies didn't help that little situation, either.

Planted all the beds and realized too late that I had forgotten the leeks. The poor things are strugging in a 1x3' nursery bed, planted too close for comfort. Maybe I'll get one pot of potato/leek soup out of them, as they're only the size of green onions.

The butternut squash that did so great last year aren't doing so well this year. Again, the lack of warmth, maybe. Or the soil.

One good thing this year: no bugs. Fewer bugs of all kinds since I got the chickies. Some of the weeds they avoid like poison, but they do a good job on the bugs.

I had decided on doing a fall garden, then suddenly got a P/T job AND my regular job picked up, so maybe I can start something on my next days off.

More manure. Plant cover crops. Let the 4-hen demolition crew in after harvest to clean up. Start some fall greens and sweet peas.

"In case anybody was thinking it's easy, I've learned that it isn't."

That's the truth!

Sue

I will say the radishes did not do too well...

My youngest came inside and was all proud to tell me that she had weeded the garden for me.

Hard to get angry at a 4 year old who wants to help, and yet she had carefully pulled every radish seedling out of the ground...

Hilarious! A friend of mine used the same technique to get out of weeding duties for life. :-)

I suspect they weren't pollinated. Do you have bees around? If not, grab a Q-tip and make buzzing noises as you go from flower to flower.

Tried that with my finger (minus the buzzing noises) and it didn't work.

Grew my first garden this year. Mixed results.

Posted out a bed a bit shy of 20' x 30'. My neighbor rototilled it for me, and then I fenced it in (deer, rabbits, groundhogs, squirrels and chipmunks).

We got a late start to the whole process (June), and the kids put some seeds - corn, carrots and sunflowers - into pots to start. By the time we got an actual garden bed set up, the seedlings were growing too thickly in the pots. When I went to transplant them, they were wispy and barely able to stand. Luckily, the corn's done well - it's almost ready to pick.

Had to add chickenwire to the bottom two feet of the four-foot-high fence to keep out the baby rabbits, which ate the sunflowers and nibbled some other things. It's worked fine - nothing else has been nibbled.

So, this would be a learning year. Some of the things I learned:

Don't plant stuff in the gap between zucchini and yellow squash plant hills. The spacing looks great when everythings a sprout, and becomes a problem when the 4- or 5-foot radius of leaves overshadows and hides the carrots and leeks. They don't grow much after that.

I don't need to plant three hills of pumpkins - especially as I watch them spread and the tiny "whiskers" start grabbing the tomatoes and smaller plants.

Tomatoes are doing well - so well, that they grew out the top of the wire frames that support them, tipped some over, and grew so far over the others that they're basically killing themselves by bending double with the weight of the tomatoes they're producing.

Zucchini and summer squash have been fantastic - but then I got a white mildew which has killed them, as well as the pumpkins and cantelope. I (too late) read that this can be treated with a mixture of one part milk to five parts water, sprayed on the leaves frequently. I'll know for next year and catch it early.

Herbs did well, mostly - especially parsley, thyme and rosemary. I've killed at least three different window box attempts at herb gardens as an apartment dweller, so this was satisfying. Cilantro grew well, but went to seed very early. So did fennel - grew very nicely, then went to seed and I never did get to have any.

Watermelon and lettuce never went anywhere.

Anyway, I have lots of ideas for next year, and it has been satisfying to eat what has come out of the garden.

Dave

Our 2 1/2 year old son did the same. He was supposed to be picking radishes, which we planted in mass as a cover for other seeds coming up. When my wife turned around to see that he had picked several other plants - pumpkin starts for one, she about blew a gasket.

Her second planting of pumpkin seeds are now doing great, and our son is able to walk through the garden picking ripe tomatos or green beans - snacking on them as he goes - I think that's a pretty good way to raise a boy these days.

fried fried an pickled okra

If we were growing all our own food, we'd be dead long ago.

Although we got a good harvest of tomatoes and zucchini, the root crops all failed this year. Also, we learned that we really need like 2 acres totally clear land for enough sun. And there's no way we could grow enough grain here.

I simply didn't have the time to properly tend the garden as it was, at least the peas came in fine.

Indeed, it's very humbling.

Well, it's not a survival garden*, but the raspberry patch I planted this spring is coming along nicely. I'm glad I planted some "ever-bearing" varieties, because some of those are producing already! That's what I missed most when I moved a year and a half ago. I had a really nice raspberry patch, but I forgot what I planted 15 years ago. Now I'm keeping track of what I planted. I also put in a lot of effort amending the heavy clay soil.

* unless maybe you count surviving the sticker shock of raspberry prices in the store.

"...zucchini..."

Oh yuk. Don't make me tell you why I hate that stuff...