Garden Update for July 2021

One of the things I look forward to in July is the start of our garden harvest. It’s the month that we start harvesting our early tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, spring onions, and zucchinis. We still have a few strawberries coming in too!

This year we added a 3-tier platform gardening bed which we featured on the blog a few months ago. You can check out THIS POST to learn more about it. We absolutely love it and want to get 2-3 more for next year. We have never had to weed it and the critters stay out of our garden…all but the birds. However, we solved that by purchasing a large bird net from the garden center and now we don’t have to worry about them at all.

Here’s what we planted this season:

Cherry Tomatoes, Roma Tomatoes, Big Boy Tomatoes, Beefsteak Tomatoes, Green and Orange Bell Peppers, Onions, Sweat Peas, Zucchini, Cucumbers, Romaine Lettuce, Red Beets, Sweet Potatoes and Strawberries. We also have 4 grapevines (2 mature ones and 2 newly planted ones), 1 blueberry bush and 3 raspberry bushes.

Every season we enlarge the gardening areas a little bit and always plant something new. We’re thinking about adding a dwarf pear or cherry tree. We’re going to do some research on that before we decide. We’re hoping next season (2022) the two newly planted grapevines will start putting out grapes too. I would like to get enough for making home jam instead of always buying my concorde grapes from the farmer’s market.

Last week I walked out into the backyard and picked a couple of strawberries to slice up & put into my breakfast cereal along with our first yellow tomato of the season. There’s nothing like growing your own food!!!