Gardening Summer 2012 and New Neighbors

We have really enjoyed gardening this summer (especially after working all last summer to put our garden beds in - with a lot of help from the missionaries).

 

We have discovered that lettuce really likes to grow in pots and is somehow protected from all of our friendly neighborhood rabbits that are so happy to share our harvest with us. We planted some in our front yard garden in the ground, and we often look out the window to find one of these rabbits just chomping away at the lettuce (and they like beet greens and carrot greens too). But they haven't messed with the lettuce in pots. We've also learned that the lettuce doesn't like it to be 105 degrees. It all got scorched last week.... so maybe we'll plant again later for a fall crop. Before it got scorched though, it was really the best lettuce I've ever had.

For mother's day, Seth got me a bunch of flowers so we could plant a flower garden that I can look at out our kitchen window. I have loved having it there! (Above is a shot of it when we first planted, and below is what it looks like now. - Pretty nice! And as you can see, our tomatoes and peppers are doing pretty well in the back yard)

We also learned that the birds really like to eat strawberries, and they ate them all before we could build a cage for them.... so hopefully next spring we'll have some, and we will protect them this time!

 More tomato plants. We have 12 all together. I'm so excited!

The 3 pictures below are of our garden that we put in the front yard - good sun out there, and our landlords don't mind, so we are very happy renters. We are growing lettuce, carrots, beets, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, eggplant, cucumber and onions.

 Below are the squash and zucchini, and we have already had a bunch grow really big. Apparently they like the heat. They got huge though, and the instructions we had were wrong. They need more than 2 feet between them! Now we know for next year :)

And we are so excited to have new neighbors, Beth and Bob. They are a young couple from Cincinnati, and they are going to have their first baby in September (a girl). We have already had so much fun getting to know them, and they are the nicest, most friendly and helpful neighbors ever! We are so blessed. And next year, we can all work on the garden together :) and they can help us eat these tomatoes, because I think we have a few too many :)