Our garden...progressively!

I shared about our recent addiction to the square foot gardening method....now to my favorite part....harvesting!  It started small...our first harvest was just enough buttercrunch and red sail lettuce for small salads...

But now I can see some luscious salads in my future!  And the swiss chard?   Yummo...apparently, the earwigs think so, too.  Bummer!

Loving this Red Sail lettuce....such broad tasty leaves and it is still producing during this hot June weather....pretty hardy stuff.

And then there's the peas.....just starting out here, but with the promise of lots of  yummy goodness.  I LOVE pea pods, but they are always so expensive.  Solution - we're growing our own with plans to freeze any excess for this winter.

We didn't have a very good radish crop, but did enjoy a few with some of our daily salads.  One thing I learned was that next year I will stagger my lettuce plantings a little further apart (had a glut of salad greens for almost two months).

Doesn't that look pretty? 

Broccoli, cabbage, peas, onions, spinach, chard, lettuce, onions, and carrots with some herbs (basil, chives, oregano, parsley, and cilantro) thrown in for good measure. Add the marigolds for a little pest control, and other flowers to brighten the whole effect....and now our garden is a beautiful part of our landscape!

 The radishes may be gone, but the broccoli and cabbage are sure looking good!  Homemade broccoli salad, anyone?

I'm really getting excited now.....PEAS!!

AND parsley...

onions....

Broccoli is looking about ready for harvest.

Well, it's been quite awhile since we first started on this process.  It all started with building the boxes in Feb/March.  Since then we've had quite a bit of fresh produce.....

• Lots and lots of lettuce
• Spinach and chard....used some fresh and froze some for later use
• Radishes - a few good ones
• Strawberries - not that great a harvest....going to leave them in for next year and see how they do.  If they don't produce well, they're outta there....I'm not wasting space on unproductive plants! 
• Cabbage - fresh cole slaw (oh, yummy) and froze quite a bit for soups this winter.
• Broccoli - the best broccoli salad ever and the rest put up in the freezer.
• Peas - did I mention I LOVE pea pods?  Well, some didn't even make it into my harvest bowl!  Somehow they made their way to my mouth before they could hit the bowl.  But we enjoyed them steamed...taste buds, awake!   And I have quite a bit in the freezer.  Can I just say that I am loving the look of that freezer now?  Maybe next year I will try canning.
• And the herbs - it is so nice to walk down the deck steps and cut some fresh basil for caprese salad.   Summer at its finest!

So now that the radishes, spinach, cabbage, broccoli and peas have completed their productive lives....well, they are being replaced.  The bush beans are coming up, the peppers are ready to be transplanted along the "trellis", the tomatoes are in bloom...already have 15 tomatoes of varying sizes, the zucchini is going in, and I'm ready to put in some beets and some more carrots and bush beans....staggering that harvest (see, I AM learning something in this process).

Next time I'll share some of our recent adventures...and that's my challenge - to get current with my blogging updates!  In the meantime, I think I'll just sit back, count my blessings and watch the garden grow!