Our Winter Vegetable Garden

For those of you that read this blog on a regular basis, you know I have been working on getting vegetables to grow for the past several Summers. Our Summer garden was a bust. I did get to eat one tomato and something else ate the others. Same with the cucumbers. The biggest issue in the summer, is not only the heat, but the bugs that eat the plants. Since I am trying to grow without the use of pesticides it is quite a challenge. So, I decided we could try a Winter garden, when most of the insects and other pests are hibernating. I will tell you about each item below. I did not take pictures of our flowers, but most of them are thriving quite nicely. If I did not mention in previous posts, any natural garbage, like peelings, coffee grounds, etc, I save and then toss around the bases of the plants. This adds much needed nutrients to our awful dirt, without any added expense. Roses especially need extra potassium so potato peels and banana peels are awesome for them. We also have a rabbit, some of you know that, and when we dump his potty pan, we use it as a fertilizer for the plants. This actually works quite awesome.

Those are two of the four largest tomatoes.  I just found four or five more starting, and lots of buds.  Now this is peculiar to me, because tomatoes like it hot, hot, hot.  And while it has been warm here and there it definitely is not hot.  Tomatoes will not grow below 50, so at night I take the whole plant into the garage where it sleeps.  This plant is the same plant I had over the Summer months, and I just keep letting it grow.

That is a broccoli head starting to grow.  It is very small right now, but I am hoping soon we can eat it.  I had two other broccoli plants as well, but they didn't make it.  That too is quite peculiar, because I planted them at the same time, in the same dirt with all the same everything. 

These are peas.  I picked three today, that I will eat at some point.  There are at least ten others that are not quite ready to pick.  These were made from seeds, and peas seem to do quite well here.  No one really likes peas, but me, but these are sugar snap peas and I think they will note a big difference.  Peas will continue to grow, I am told, as long as I keep them picked.

These are carrots, again from seeds.  They are not ready yet, but I am hoping within a couple of weeks they will be.  These do quite well also, and we planted more seeds.  Behind you can see the beginnings of more pea plants that we planted just maybe a week ago.  There is also onions, but I am not sure if you can see them.  Hopefully they too will be ready in a couple of weeks.

That is one little tiny lettuce plant.  They say lettuce grows quite well, but it is very fussy.  It needs to be almost constantly moist in the dirt.  Though I do water every day, it seems to need more.  It is finally starting to grow a bit more now.  We planted these from seeds but only the one plant is growing.  I am hoping to get at least some lettuce.  We eat a lot of lettuce.