The 3rd annual veggie garden

So...it's that time of year again to start growing veggies.  We didn't start our veggies from seed this year indoors, we just bought plants from Home Depot (on sale!) and Davidson's Nursery here in town.  We planted a lot of tomatoes.  Mostly roma, because those are my favorite, and a few small round tomatoes.  I'm really hoping we get a lot and I can make salsa and spaghetti sauce!  This bed here has corn, tomatoes, and peppers.

This other bed has basil, cilantro, parsley, rosemary, onions, green beans, and a cucumber plant.  My question is "how do you know when onions are ready to be picked?"  The stems on ours are getting quite long and I'm afraid to dig them out yet!  I guess I'll have to google it soon and find out.

Here we've got red, yellow and green bell peppers and one jalepeno pepper.  I'm itching to be able to make my own salsa with stuff from my garden this year.  Please Oklahoma summer heat, do not kill my plants this year!

I like cucumbers and I kind of wanted to buy a viney plant and see if it's going to take over my garden or not.  I'm hoping it doesn't, but I'm thinking I'm going to buy a little trellis or something to teach the vines to grow up and not crowd the beans I planted next to it.

Speaking of beans, here they are!  We planted two rows of green beans to get started with this year.  That way, if they grown and produce, we can plant a second harvest.  Or if they just grow but don't produce anything, I haven't wasted a bunch of seeds for nothing.  Beans really do grow fast, as I just took these pictures last week and the beans are seriously like 3 inches taller.  Now I understand why in science class growing up, you always planted beans to study the parts of a plant.

This should be fun.  When we bought this cherry tomato plant, it already had a bunch of green tomatoes on it.  Now it has a lot more, but none of them are ripe yet.  It's a small plant, but heavily one sided and it fell over the other day.  Luckily, the stem didn't break, but this baby is already staked and reinforced.

We also did plant some tomatoes by seed so we could have a second harvest later this summer. We planted in three spots, so after we weed out the puny ones, we should have three hearty looking roma tomato plants.  We also just put sprinkle out a bunch of seeds and weed them down to just one as they grow.  Although, I think I've finally learned this year that we could get away with just putting down like 4 seeds in each little spot and weed from that.  Almost always, all the seeds end up sprouting so there's not really a reason to put down 20 seeds in one area.  Anyway.

Woo hoo! And corn!  Now, if you remember last year.....our corn was awesome looking and super fun to watch grow.  Unfortunately, we didn't get to enjoy any of it and ended up digging out and throwing away all four plants because ants started making their homes in the husks and stems and completely destroyed them. It was super gross and disgusting and was not worth fighting for.

This year, we planted 8 corn.  And again, probably needed to only put 1 corn seed down in each spot because obviously each and every one sprouted and I've had to go out there twice and weed it down to just one and dig out the seeds.  Silly me!

And finally our basil plants!  Yeah I know we had a huge bush of one basil plant last year and now I've planted three and will probably (hopefully) have three huge basil plants this year!  Basil is awesome. It's the perfect garnish to any italian dish.  Fresh basil with mozzarella on tomato slices is the perfect summertime snack, appetizer,  or light dinner.  And the pesto I made last year is still in my freezer waiting to be used and the basil and dried is used often as well.  So, what do I plan on doing with this bounty of basil this year!  Well, share it with my friends and neighbors of course!

All in all, I'm really excited about the prospects of the garden this year.  We've had good rain so far and everything is growing great as of now.  I hope that we have a mild, only sorta hot, summer and get some rain every now and then and things will really start to grow!