How Does Your Garden Grow?

This is one of the first pictures that I took of the garden. Everything has grown a lot bigger now.

This is our first year ever to plant a garden. Jared has done all of the work really. I have just pulled a few weeds with the help of my sils and harvested some cucumbers when they were ready, but all of the sweat that goes into digging, planting, and maintaining the garden has been accomplished by Jared (and if you know Jared, you know how much sweat that is! haha.. love you, babe!) He planted cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, okra, sweet bell peppers, jalapeno peppers, and serrano peppers. At first, everything seemed to be dying between the crazy weather changes and the two solid weeks of rain that we had earlier in the spring. In fact, he planted several of the cucumber and squash over again because they weren't looking to good. We weren't too upset because we knew it was our first year, and it's a learning process.

Well, things have really started to flourish! We are getting cucumbers GALORE (I have a feeling some of those original cucumber plants made it after all), and Jared harvested about 5-6 squash this weekend with more to come. We've gotten one bell pepper which I used in some lasagna tonight, and it was fabulous. He's gotten a couple of peppers. Several tomatoes are growing, but he says something keeps eating them before they get ripe enough to pick. Having a garden is really fun! It's cool to go out every day and see what new things have grown. Next year we are hoping to do more- potatoes, corn, lettuce, etc.

The first three cucumbers we harvested.

Jared cooked some pork chops the other night and cut up some of his serrano peppers to eat on his. Tell me those pork chops don't look perfect!! They sure did taste good too!

I can't remember if I have posted pictures of our deck before.

Here is a picture of our backyard from one corner to the other. It seems especially huge now that we've gotten the fence up.