Tag: Growing food

Baby cucumbers 🥒

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We have baby cucumbers! 🥹 I discovered about 10 cucumbers growing in our back patio garden.

Why is it such a thrilling feeling to discover your fruit and vegetable plants have started to produce food? I had the biggest smile on my face when I saw the tiny cucumbers. ☺️

A couple of weeks ago, I was worried the cucumber flowers weren’t going to get pollinated because I hadn’t really seen any bees in our patio garden.

But last weekend, I noticed a few honeybees flying back and forth to the cucumbers. 🐝 I felt relieved.

Gardening is teaching me to be more patient and have more trust.

And I loved showing the kids the little cucumbers!

They were excited to search through the big leaves and count how many cucumbers they could find.

I can’t wait to harvest our cucumbers once they’re ready! I told the kids we’re going to use the cucumbers to make homemade dill pickles. 😊

💜 XO

Happy Friday

Three things to reflect on in honor of September 11th.

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A front porch garden harvest 🫑

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One of the things I love about growing food in a small space is I can walk out onto my front porch and harvest foods we need for the next meal.

This morning, we harvested from our front garden a green bell pepper (first one of the season!), two jalapeños, a banana pepper, and black seeded simpson lettuce.

Zaya (5) harvesting a green bell pepper on our front porch! 🫑👧🏼
The jalapeños needed just a little more time, but Travis said they still tasted good with his tacos. 🌶🌮

And from our back patio garden we harvested romaine lettuce, cilantro, oregano, and sage.

It wasn’t a big harvest, but it was the perfect amount we needed to make tacos for dinner! 😊

It makes me happy to grow a simple kitchen garden. At first, I didn’t think it would make much of a difference because we don’t have a regular sized yard.

But this gardening season has taught me it doesn’t matter if you have acres of land, a big back yard, or just a small patio, you can grow something!

Zaya said we needed to take a selfie to show our little harvest. 📸😅

If you have a small space, you can focus on growing kitchen ingredients like peppers, lettuce, herbs, and carrots for home cooking. You can even grow these plants on your front porch (like I do)!

Every little bit helps, and it will bring you so much joy! 😊

💜 XO

📸 feature image taken by Zaya 🥹

Happy Friday!

Four fun things for Friday, including a new art exhibit I’m excited to see.

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Attack of the ravenous cabbage caterpillars 🐛

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I discovered cabbage caterpillars in two of my broccoli grow bags. 🐛😫

I can only blame myself because I literally saw those white butterflies flying around my brassica plants, and I didn’t even bother to cover the plants with protective netting until a couple of weeks later. 🤦🏽‍♀️🙃

Lesson learned! Cover the plants right after you plant them!

The caterpillars ate up the broccoli leaves good, too! Wow!

So, I put on my gardening gloves and handpicked all of the caterpillars out of the grow bags

It was hard to find some of the cabbage caterpillars because their green bodies blended in with the broccoli leaves.

I think my broccoli plants can be salvaged. I immediately covered the plants with tulle for protection.

I used the kids’ construction straws to make hoops for the taller plants. Hey, sometimes you just gotta use what you have on hand! Lol 😅

Saved me about $15 so I didn’t have to buy a box of garden hoops on Amazon. 🙌🏾

Thankfully, only five out of the twelve broccoli plants we have in the garden were affected by these ravenous cabbage caterpillars.

💜 XO

A little garden harvest 🌶🫛

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Just a little garden harvest of banana peppers, green beans, and basil (to season tonight’s lasagna dinner).

The kids helped me water the front garden (because of this excessive heat 🥵), and they noticed a few beans and peppers looked ready to harvest.

A little garden harvest in the morning 🌶🫛
Harvesting green beans 🫛
Harvesting banana peppers 🌶

All week the temps have been in the high 90s. 🥵 We’ve had to deep water the gardens—the front garden in the morning and the back garden in the evening.

I based the watering schedules on when each garden gets full sun. It’s been working pretty well for the plants, too!

More banana peppers growing! 😍

I noticed my energy has been low all week because of this excessive heat.

I focus on working in the garden early in the morning and later in the evening when it’s not too bad out.

I’m ready for it to rain so I can get a break from watering the garden and the temps will hopefully go down. 😆

💜 XO

Tattoo collector

American traditional tattoos—I love the classic, vintage imagery and bold colors and lines.

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The cucumbers have flowers 🥒🌼

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Our cucumbers have flowers now! 😍🥒🌼 I noticed the bright, yellow flowers this past Saturday.

Travis and I were geeking out about it. Lol! 😂This is the first time we have grown cucumbers, so we are very excited!

We’re growing eight pickle cucumber plants. I plan on making dill pickles with our cucumber harvest, so I’m also growing dill in the same grow bags.

The cucumber plants are also showing signs they’re ready to start climbing. Thin tendrils have emerged and started curling around the trellis. 🥹🌿

I think it’s just amazing how the plants know to reach out and wrap itself around nearby objects. They’re like little hands searching for something to embrace. 😄😍

Over the weekend, Travis installed a simple homemade trellis behind the cucumbers. He just used nails and twine. Super easy!

We also ended up transplanting a few of the plants into separate grow bags so they don’t crowd each other and have enough root space to grow.

I can’t wait to see the cucumbers start growing! Shouldn’t be too much longer now. 😊🥒🌼

💜 XO

P.S.—here’s my midsummer seed order and a few new blooms in the garden.

Even the public library has seeds 😲🌿

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I went to the library to drop off my returns, and I discovered they offer a seed catalog! 😲🥳

So naturally, I grabbed a few seed packets to add to my midsummer seed order. 😆🌿

The seed packets I chose were Chinese giant sweet pepper, okra, cilantro, and parsley.

I know it might be a little too late to start the Chinese giant sweet peppers, but I’m going to try planting a couple of seeds.

The other day, I accidentally spilled some of my cilantro seeds, so that’s why I grabbed another pack.

I went ahead and planted the pepper and okra seeds in seed trays. Then, I added some cilantro and parsley seeds to the herb pots I currently have growing.

Just making the most of this growing season! 😁🌿

💜 XO

The old journal

A visit to an art thrift store leads to a journal discovery.

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Midsummer seed order

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My midsummer seed order has arrived, and I am excited! I took advantage of MIGardener’s 20% off sale because the deals were really good. I was impressed with how quickly I received my order, too! 😁🌿

I love watching their YouTube channel. I have learned so much about gardening and growing food within a year’s time all thanks to Luke, owner of MIGardener!

The seeds I bought

Parisian carrots, purple carrots, midori soybeans, painted pony beans, flor de mayo beans, light red kidney beans, midnight black turtle beans, Charleston Wakefield cabbage, gold rush wax bush beans, sugar beets, peach melba nasturium, and Tom Thumb dwarf pea.

This time I focused on foods we can grow in our grow bags and get started end of June.

We also wanted to try crops we haven’t grown before such as sugar beets, painted pony bush beans, and midori bush soybeans.

I just love MIGardener’s seed packagaing. 🌿

It’s all a learning journey

Last year, when I did a late summer seed order, I bought fall crops such as lettuce, green onions, spinach, carrots, bok choy, and collard greens.

The problem with that was I planted the seeds too late in the growing season, so we didn’t have a fall harvest. 😕

It was a learning experience for me, though, so I wasn’t mad about it. It taught me how and when to plant seeds for a fall harvest.

And I still have a bunch of seeds from last year’s order, so I am ready to plant our fall crops on time this year! 😁

💜 XO

P.S.—here are our new garden blooms so far and the new herb shelves Travis built for me. 😊

New blooms in the garden

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I love how one day I will check on the garden and I can’t seem to find a single new bloom.

But then the next day, all of a sudden it seems like a flower has bloomed, there are green beans growing, and little green tomatoes have appeared. 😅

Yesterday, I noticed we now have green beans growing. 😍 I am so excited to see so many green beans sprouting, even though I don’t like to eat green beans. 🤣

My kids love fresh green beans, so I am excited to grow a food that I know they love. I can’t wait to harvest the green beans and cook them for the kids!

This is the first time I have grown spider flowers (cleome). I found the the unique flowers at a local farm store.

I intentionally planted four spider flowers near the food plants so it could attract pollinators to the garden.

I wanted to add something different to the garden this year, and I think the spider flowers were a perfect addition. The magenta petals are so beautiful!

And the tickseed flowers have bloomed, too. I actually planted these seeds last summer, but the flowers never grew. So, this was a nice surprise!

💜 XO

New herb plant shelves

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I’m so excited because I finally have outdoor shelves for my herb plants! 😁🪴 Travis worked on building the shelves all weekend, even on Father’s Day.

He was so proud of his work that he snapped a picture of the shelves and said, “Now when I go to work and someone asks me what I did this weekend, I can show them I built garden shelves.” 😄

We’ve been finding more efficient ways to grow food in a small space. Growing vertically, like with our new herb plant shelves, makes it possible for us to grow a great variety of herbs without taking up a lot of ground space in our small patio garden.

Now when I am cooking and need herbs from the garden, I can just walk out on the patio and reach for the pot I need on the shelf.

I love my herb plant shelves! 😍 Travis did a great job building the shelves. I said, “Now that I know you know how to build shelves, I’m going to ask you to build more shelves all the time!” 🤣😁

💜 XO

6-7 chicken nuggets

The new addition to the “6-7” trend—chicken nuggets! 😂🐔

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Our happy place this spring

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All we do is spend our spring days at local greenhouses, and I’m perfectly happy with that! 😊🌿

Soon it will be officially summer (next week to be exact! 😲), and I’ll be focusing on maintaining the garden and transplanting some of my plants that I started from seeds.

Also, the season for buying fruit/veggie plant starts is starting to wind down. It’s a good time to catch deals on leftover plants.

Today, I stopped by one of my favorite farm stores and took advantage of a BOGO sale. I bought candy onions, celery, romaine lettuce, Italian parsley, and asparagus (just for fun 😉 because I know this crop won’t be ready this season).

I’m trying to fill in some empty spaces in our garden! 😄

How’s your gardening going so far?

💜 XO

P.S.—here’s what we bought at the beginning of garden season.