Our vegetable garden
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Frank and I had a garden this year. Even though it was in good working condition, our hot tub (which was outside on the deck) was 27 years old and not getting much use. So we reclaimed the space by having the hot tub professionally cut up, removed from our deck and hauled to the dump. We replaced it instead with a deck vegetable garden. We've been talking about doing something like that for a while now and we really wanted to try our hand at growing food. We're aging and didn't think we could handle a traditional garden in the ground so a container garden was right up our alley. I found some self-watering containers and away we went.
Since we've never gardened before, we had no idea what we were doing or how things would turn out. We are learning as we go. We had some failures, but we had some successes too. We planted 3 kinds of lettuce, 3 kinds of tomatoes, 3 kinds of bell peppers, onions, cucumbers, zucchini, strawberries, and some herbs: oregano, thyme, sweet basil, and parsley. The herbs have done well since the beginning continue to do so. The lettuce did really well for a couple of months and we probably harvested 20 one-gallon bags worth of Romaine, Bibb, and Buttercrunch lettuce before it started bolting. The cherry tomatoes are still going gang busters and are so delicious. The strawberries did so-so. The bell peppers are limping along. Not sure we're going to get anything worth eating from the plants. The cucumbers did terrible (only got 2 cucumbers off the plant before the plant got sick and died a slow death). The zucchini plant got sick and died really early in the season before it even produced anything. Frank made a couple of batches of humuus using a lot of our sweet basil, and we've been picking cherry tomatoes like every 2-3 days and using them in salads. They taste yummy fresh. I've enjoyed this experience so much that I bought some grow lights, seedling starter kit, and about 20 packets of vegetable seeds so I can at least attempt to grow my own seedlings this winter. I've been keeping a log all season long so that hopefully next season we'll have an even better crop.
Since we've never gardened before, we had no idea what we were doing or how things would turn out. We are learning as we go. We had some failures, but we had some successes too. We planted 3 kinds of lettuce, 3 kinds of tomatoes, 3 kinds of bell peppers, onions, cucumbers, zucchini, strawberries, and some herbs: oregano, thyme, sweet basil, and parsley. The herbs have done well since the beginning continue to do so. The lettuce did really well for a couple of months and we probably harvested 20 one-gallon bags worth of Romaine, Bibb, and Buttercrunch lettuce before it started bolting. The cherry tomatoes are still going gang busters and are so delicious. The strawberries did so-so. The bell peppers are limping along. Not sure we're going to get anything worth eating from the plants. The cucumbers did terrible (only got 2 cucumbers off the plant before the plant got sick and died a slow death). The zucchini plant got sick and died really early in the season before it even produced anything. Frank made a couple of batches of humuus using a lot of our sweet basil, and we've been picking cherry tomatoes like every 2-3 days and using them in salads. They taste yummy fresh. I've enjoyed this experience so much that I bought some grow lights, seedling starter kit, and about 20 packets of vegetable seeds so I can at least attempt to grow my own seedlings this winter. I've been keeping a log all season long so that hopefully next season we'll have an even better crop.
