Buckets of Garden Vegetables

I’m happy today. You know why? Because even given the relentless heat (in the high nineties or higher), and regardless of the lack of rain, and despite the many bugs trying their best to destroy our vegetable garden, we’re still able to harvest a wide variety of tasty, healthy, nutritious vegetables.

We got loads of green beans even after harvesting them a few times in recent weeks, more cherry tomatoes than I care to admit to, bell peppers, potatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, squash, melons that nobody knows exactly what kind they are, and more.

And the best part is that there’s (hopefully) plenty more to come. Granted, the bugs are attacking plants left and right–especially the Japanese beetles–but they seem to be dying off or moving on and, if we’re lucky next year our guinea hens will help to keep them better under control.

In any case, it feels good to be growing our own food again. One of these days we’re going to get our act together and start canning, freeze drying (yes, I bought a large Harvest right freeze dryer recently which I SUPER excited about), and doing our level best to prepare for what’s coming.

I encourage you to do the same.

If interested, here’s two recent photos of our garden. This one is roughly facing north, but you can’t see much besides the potato plants in the foreground because of the giant sunflowers my father-in-law planted next to the potato plants. Perhaps the only really interesting thing in the photo is the rainwater harvesting setup I’m slowing working on to the right (more on that to come later):

And here’s a photo roughly facing west. The sunflowers are on the far left, followed mostly by tomatoes, green beans, a large gap of nothing planted for some reason, and then corn and squash plants, along with similar sprawling plants, on the right:

There are other plants not shown, such as more corn and squash elsewhere, along with assorted berries which haven’t matured quite yet.

Anyway, it’s a start, and we’re happy to be providing for ourselves considering inflation and the coming food shortages.

Stay strong out there and please, please do your best now to care for yourselves while you still have the opportunity.