A Very Belated Gardening Post!

After a long break from Hive, I am going to try to get back into the writing habit once again. I spent most of seven weeks with my youngest daughter while she worked through a rough recovery from childbirth, visited my sister for a week once my daughter was functioning better, and then helped my other daughter and her family move from one nearby town to another. I've been doing plenty of resting for the past four days, and hope to be "back in the saddle" again soon.

For starters, here are some photos from our garden this past summer.

This photo was taken in late July. A row of beets can be seen in the foreground with green beans coming next, and potatoes in the distance.

Turning around an looking the opposite direction, I photographed the winter squash (foreground), summer squash ( behind the winter squash), cucumbers to the left in the back, and rhubarb to the right in the back. 'Way back by the fence are some gladiolus and small lilac bushes.

Here is a better look at the flower patch at the back end of the garden.

It was an unusually hot summer, with many days in the 90s and a few over 100. We watered at least once a day, sometimes twice a day. The only crops that really suffered were the berries. Our raspberries were small and the first ones just shriveled up on the stem. The blueberries didn't even bother to blossom. The strawberries were few and far between, misshapen, and small. About the time they began to improve, the yellow jackets took over the patch.

Knowing I would be busy with a grandbaby in September, I wisely chose not to plant oodles of tomatoes this year. I opted for one cherry tomato plant in a pot on the deck. I bought the plant at the local high school, where a class or a club grows the plants from seeds in a greenhouse behind the school and then sells the bedding plants. Alas, the one I purchased was mislabeled; it was not a cherry tomato. It produced exactly four small tomatoes.



There's half the crop right there. Not good quality at all!

A teacup is my favorite prop to show the size of things. This is one of the larger (and lumpier!) potatoes we dug.

We feasted on zucchini, yellow crookneck squash, and slicing cucumbers for as long as the crops and the weather lasted. Two dozen winter squash are in the root cellar, and one of the crisper drawers in the fridge is full of carrots. (They didn't do as well as last year, though. We found many smaller and/or misshapen ones.)

A visual aid showing some of the funnier looking carrots.

I canned so many green beans, I lost count of the number of jars. The beets did well, and I canned several pints of those, too. My husband dug the potatoes; they produced nicely, and we have enough stored away for the winter, I'm sure.

I don't know if we will have a garden next year. My husband's health continues to deteriorate, and I'm not sure he will be able to run the tiller when the time comes. We are both getting older, and keeping up with a large garden is a great deal of work, even with all the weed barrier I used this year. The Farmers' Market is looking more appealing every day!

All photos taken on my Android phone.