Potterwatchs Garden

PotterWatch's Garden

In my garden, I grow food for our family and for our chickens. I love having the chickens to toss all the weeds, leftover produce, and kitchen waste. I am new to gardening having only started my garden in the Summer of 2009. Luckily, living in Southern California, we can garden year-round so I have lots of time to practice!
This is part of the regular garden plot planted with beans, watermelon, crenshaw melon, and jalapeno.

Here next to the beans, I planted four cucumbers but one happily turned out to be a zuchini.

The garden as it looked on July 25, 2009. I was in the process of yanking out the pole beans and giving the vines to the chickens. I pulled a portion each day so the chickens didn't have more than they could eat.

We also had corn growing on either side of our front walk and a few young fruit trees in various places on our lot. I had tomatoes growing in a container on our front porch but not nearly enough supply to meet our demand.

Here are pictures of some of the harvest we got from the garden during the summer of 2009.

I have changed the layout of the garden a lot for this year. I just didn't have enough space to walk around the plants with the way it was before. So far it's working out well, but we will see how it goes when I have squash or melons planted.
The box on the top left has carrots, turnips and red florence onions. I have heard from friends in the area that their root veggies had a hard time growing properly in the hard soil we have, so my husband built a box for the root veggies to go in. To the right of the box is the start of our three sisters garden. We have the corn planted in mounds and will soon be planting the beans and squash. I just need to decide what kind of squash to put in! The dark green plants on the bottom left are broccoli and brussels sprouts. The broccoli has done very well so far and the brussels sprouts are developing nicely. The middle row on the bottom has celery, a couple kinds of lettuce, and beets (just trying the beets there to see what they do). The row on the right has cilantro, green onion, and zuchini. The buckets have five different varieties of potato, three fingerling and two regular.

Since the corn is planted in the back garden this time, I put some sugar snap peas by the front walkway. They are still small, but seem to be doing well there:

We are taking out some of the grass in the front yard so that we have more garden space. I am working on it a little at a time but I have managed to clear enough space to put in some tomatoes, jalapenos, and garlic. The kids in the background are planting strawberries in between the rose bushes. The tomato varieties I am trying this year are: Early Girl, Sweet 100, Sweet Million, Fireworks, Red Currant, Brandywine, San Marzano, and Roma.