After years of living here, we finally planted an actual garden this year. These aren’t all of the plants, but they’re the ones that are doing the best so far. In the future, I’ll have to update as the others get more interesting, and share about all of my container plants, too.

Bell Peppers

I honestly have no idea how big I should let these get before harvesting. I know they will change color, so while I do enjoy green peppers, I figure letting at least a few turn red will let me know when they’re ready.

Tomatoes

We planted a couple of varieties of tomato plants, then a neighbor gave us a few more, so we should have lots of tomatoes this year.

Those lovely tomatoes on the bottom got so big that they started to break the plant. Chris harvested them, and I did the yummiest thing I could think to do with green tomatoes: fry them.

Jalapenos

We have one jalapeno plant, and it’s an overachiever. We’ve already harvested four peppers and there’s about a dozen more currently on the plant.

You can see a few in the photo. There’s more hiding behind the leaves.

Pumpkin

The pumpkin was kind of an accident. We left an uncarved pumpkin sitting out front all winter. After the freeze in February it split and all the seeds were exposed. I through some soil on it and ignored it. Before long, we had about a million little pumpkin plants. I transplanted a few to the garden area and they’ve taken off.

Some of the pumpkin plants left in the front were huge, but they took over the walkway and started getting damaged from the dogs walking through them, so we removed them. Hopefully these will continue to grow. It would be so cool to have pumpkins from our own garden this fall.

Beans

A few months ago, my clumsy self picked up a bag of pinto beans the wrong way and spilled a bunch on the floor. I decided to try to sprout them by soaking. When they sprouted, I planted them in the garden. These three plants are the survivors.

I have no idea if they need more support than just being allowed to climb the fence. I guess we’ll see.

Amaranth

The last major plant that’s taking off is, unsurprisingly, the amaranth. Amaranth literally grows as a weed around here, and we actually started our amaranth patch from weeds. The leaves are an awesome spinach replacement, and the seeds can be cooked or ground into flour. So far we’ve never harvested the seeds, but we do use the greens. It is important to note that they do contain a lot of oxalic acid, so you have to be careful of that. I’ve heard blanching helps to reduce the amount of oxalic acid, so I do that when cooking with amaranth.

Here’s a video of Chris harvesting some of our amaranth, filmed by Beckett.

What are your favorite things to plant? If you’ve been gardening this year, I would love to see.

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Shop Sale!

All items in my shop are 15% off until Friday, July 16, so please, check it out. Here’s just a few of the things you’ll find.

Have you ever heard of a hummingbird moth? I hadn’t, until one day I saw this little creature that looked like a cross between a bee and a hummingbird buzzing around our Chaste tree. Luckily it didn’t mind me at all, so I was able to get a few pictures of them.

I really wasn’t sure what to think at first. It’s size and tail made me think of a hummingbird, but it had antennae. In person, the wings moved so fast that they were hard to see, just like a hummingbird, and it hovered more like a hummingbird than a bee. Fortunately, a quick Google search of “bee hummingbird” was all it took to find out more about this fascinating creature.

I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen one before now. They are a bit rare, but tend to love honeysuckle, and our yard has lots of honeysuckle. I guess this one prefers the colorful purple blossoms of the chaste tree.

I’m pretty sure the one I saw is a Hemaris thysbe, or hummingbird clearwing sphinx moth. I am a little concerned, as hornworms are the larval stage for the hummingbird moth, and hornworms love tomatoes. All of our tomato plants are in the back yard while most of the big flowering plants are in the front, so hopefully that will help keep them away from the tomatoes. So far I haven’t seen any of the hornworm caterpillars near the tomatoes.

We absolutely saw a few of these huge caterpillars in the front yard earlier this spring, though. They’re kind of hard to miss. If I had known the awesomeness they turn into, I might have attempted to watch the process somehow.

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