Much Belated Summer Garden Post

I have been going to blog about this for months, but since it was kind of an ongoing project I kept putting it off. Well now that this project ended about a month-and-a-half ago telling you all about it is way overdue. So here we go. This past summer one of our friends from church roto-tilled her backyard, divided it into plots and let anyone who wanted to come plant their own garden. We had never really tried growing anything but had wanted to for awhile so this was a new and fun adventure for us. This friend lives about 2 miles away and we would rollerblade over to her house with Kat in the jogging stroller and work on the garden together. We planted starter plants of pumpkin, butternut squash, zucchini, green onions/chives, and green bell peppers. We also planted lettuce and parsley from seeds. We figured we couldn't go wrong with plants that had already been started for us, but we were pleasantly surprised with how well our lettuce and parsley did as well. In addition to the things we planted in the garden, we also grew herbs in planters out on our porch at our apartment. The herbs we grew (also from starter plants) were rosemary, basil, sage, oregano, green onion, and a red bell pepper plant (I threw that one in for fun because this was before we found out we could plant at our friend's house). It was a really fun summer project and so nice to have fresh vegetables and herbs! Now, on to the plethora of pictures! :)

Here is when Kathryn and I first planted our herbs:

Oregano and basil plants:

Red bell pepper and rosemary plants:

A couple of weeks later we got another planter and planted sage, a green onion, and more basil. Here is what everything looked like at the end of the season:

Green onion and oregano:
Basil and sage:
Rosemary and red bell pepper (yes, it only produced one-I learned my lesson:)

Now here's some pictures we took of our garden plot:

Kat had a lot of fun playing in the dirt and pulling off pieces of the big zucchini leaves

Zucchini:

Butternut squash:
Pumpkin (if you look closely you'll see the orange string marking our plot and then see how far out of it the pumpkin went!):
Lettuce (with some green onions/chives in the background):
Green bell pepper (with more growing room this one actually produced 4 or 5):
Parsley:

I think my favorite part of the garden was our pumpkin plant. It grew four good pumpkins. Here are a couple of pictures of Kathryn with some of them:

I became attached to our cute pumpkins, and since we never ended up carving them for Halloween, I've tried to make them last as decorations...
But now that we have below zero temperatures and they are shriveled and frozen solid it's probably time for them to meet the dumpster. Sad day!