2014 Garden Report

So do you like how I post things a month or two after the event?  Yeah.

This year was an amazing year in the garden.  Certainly a year of plenty.  I don't think the garden has ever produced quite this well in all the years we have planted.

First up, we had enormous Athena melons, volleyball size cantalopes that were super sweet.

This is a serpent cucumber I planted this year.  This things grew huge.

And this is a regular Armenian cucumber.  These also grew better than normal.

This picture still doesn't really show their true size....

This gives you a better idea of how big these things grew.  

They make great weapons!

Then we had peppers.  Usually I'm lucky to get a few little peppers out of my garden.  This year they took off and the poor plants could hardly support the weight of all the fruit.

And then the tomatoes.  I have had a lot of tomatoes in my garden before but this year the vines were more loaded than any I've ever seen before.

These are a new cherry tomato I tried this year called blueberry tomatoes.  They are high in anthocyanins.  They start out deep purple and green then turn red when they ripen (but keep some purple).  Usually I grow really sweet cherry tomatoes but thought I'd try this this year for nutrition.  These are more zesty but are really good and super-heavy producers.

 I planted a watermelon species from Iraq.  They did really good.  This year was the best I've ever had watermelons do in the garden.

And of course I can't have a garden without my little Ukranian melons.  These little buggers are so good and it is difficult to describe their flavor because you taste many different fruits.  A friend nicknamed them "fruit cocktail" melons because of the different flavors you can taste in them.

I tried these wonderful French melons this year.  They are like sugar!  So sweet!  I had some trouble with some of them splitting before harvested so we gave them to the horses which they absolutely loved.  Each morning the horses were waiting by the fence for their treat.

This is a Valencia winter melon which is like a winter squash--they keep into the Fall and Winter better than the regular Summer fruits.

And we planted corn.  This is the first year we tried any corn.   Homegrown corn is amazing!!!!

And of course pumpkins!  Gotta have pumpkins!  I grow blue and green pumpkins.

And these are the grapes I put in last year.  They produced this year!  I figured it would be a couple of years before we'd get any fruit from them but they produced a huge crop of grapes that were like candy!

 Can you tell where the cows got out and got to my grapevine?!  This is why we eat cows.