Vegetable Garden - Day 108

I can't believe that this vegetable garden has been growing in my backyard for over 100 days now! It has really come a long way, considering I thought all the plants would die in the first couple weeks. I'm glad Jared inherited his mother's green thumb :)

The cherry tomatoes are finally turning red! 

I'm not real sure what we are going to do with all these jalapeno peppers once they are ready to be picked  

Green bell peppers 

Jared picked off a bunch of the banana peppers yesterday. He found a recipe online for how to pickle them because if you just eat them raw, they taste like nothing. So he sliced them up and made the pickling juice. Now they have to sit in these mason jars for two weeks before they are ready for eating. Can't wait to try them!  

Vegetable Garden - Day 98

The vegetable garden is still going strong! New veggies are sprouting every day and I can't wait to enjoy them all. The cucumbers are growing like crazy so we are picking some of those every couple of days and they are delish. The tomatoes, green bell peppers, jalapenos, and banana peppers have finally started producing, but they are not ready for picking just yet. Here are some photos from the garden...

Cherry Tomatoes 

I took these pictures right after it rained, hence the water drops on the veggies 

Banana Peppers 

Green Bell Peppers...so tiny!

Jalapeno Peppers 

Happy Gardening!

Vegetable Garden - Day 83

Unfortunately, the most exciting thing going on in my life right now is my vegetable garden. So I am sorry to bore you once again with photos of my plants, but this is the only hobby I have right now. On to the latest news from the veggie garden...there are now tiny little green tomatoes and tons of cucumbers growing on our plants. I almost have enough cucumbers the right size to start making pickles!

Seeing as how I am only 5 school days away from summer break, I seriously need to take up a new hobby for the summer. Preferably something that is cheap and a little more involved than my normal hobbies of tanning, buying sundresses and drinking wine. Please send any ideas my way :)

Vegetable Garden - Day 70

I have really been slacking on updating my blog, so sorry...but have no fear I have new vegetable pictures to share, yippie! Mother's Day weekend, my dearest mommy-in-law came into town and helped Jared do yard work on one of the days she was here. She transplanted all of our vegetable plants into 5-gallon buckets and moved them all out on to our paver patio. At least now the vegetables aren't taking over my screened porch anymore.

We finally acquired enough green beans from our plants to eat some for dinner this week and they were delicious. However, my latest excitement surrounding the vegetable garden is the sprouting of our cucumbers! We noticed that two of them had sprouted this past Sunday and over the course of this week, they have grown so much. I can't wait to eat them because I love cucumbers and once I get enough of them, I am going to make pickles :)

Monday - the first cucumber, so tiny!  

Wednesday - getting bigger! 

Thursday 

Friday

  Saturday (today) - almost ready for picking!

Vegetable Garden - Day 52

We have vegetables that are ready to eat! It's official, we have finally harvested some vegetables...well, actually its only the green beans. None the less, we have harvested some green beans! There aren't enough of them for us to actually make as part of a meal yet, but they are one their way.

 
Our vegetable garden is flourishing quite nicely now and it's only a matter of time before the other plants start sprouting vegetables as well.

The cucumber plants even have these pretty little yellow flowers blooming on them, so it won't be long before those fall off and the little cucumbers start growing!

The vegetable garden has taken over our screened porch, which kind of sucks because I can't leave the dogs out there anymore and we haven't been sitting out there lately because there are 5-gallon buckets and gardening paraphernalia everywhere.

This year's vegetable garden is sort of an experiment, so that next year we can actually know what we are doing. Hopefully next year Jared will build a little garden area in our yard so that the veggies don't have to be housed in our screened porch. Oh well, live and learn. Either way, I can't wait to eat some of our homegrown, fresh veggies!

Side note...so I informed my 1st period students that this week was Teacher Appreciation Week; therefore, they should be nice and well-behaved (for a change) for their teachers this week. They all looked up at me and laughed, so I said, "no seriously, be nice to your teachers and thank them", and they laughed at me again...disrespectful little brats.
 

Vegetable Garden - Day 43

Our very first vegetables sprouted today! The little purple flowers have been slowly falling off of the green bean plants and today we noticed that there are little green beans beginning to grow on the plant. The work is finally starting to pay off...

Happy Easter!

Vegetable Garden - Day 40

I apologize for getting so behind with my blogging about our vegetable garden, but we have been a little busy. So here are some updated pictures of our crops :)

The green beans have these pretty little purple flowers on them that apparently bloom and fall off and then the beans sprout afterward. 

More green beans 

 

Jalapeño peppers

Cherry tomatoes 

Cucumbers

Hello Spring Break!

The absolute best thing about being a teacher, well except for helping the children of course, is the vacation time. Remember when you were a senior in college and you were all sad because that was the last spring break that you would ever have? Well, if you become a teacher then you get spring break for the rest of your life...amazing. When I was a kid I used to think that they gave us all these little breaks throughout the year to give us kids a break from school...wrong. All these breaks are really for the teachers because if we didn't have these breaks every so often, then I'm pretty sure that some of the students might not survive the school year.

Yesterday, we had a teacher planning day, meaning that I had to go to work but there were no students, meaning that my work day was a piece of cake. One of my co-workers is having a baby (really at any moment now) so we had a baby shower for her yesterday during planning day, meaning we spent our planning time sitting around eating. It was glorious.

After work, I went bathing suit shopping which is always a horrifying experience. I don't understand who they design these bathing suits for. I'm like a size 4, so if these bathing suits look retarded on me, then who the hell is supposed to wear them? Every bathing suit I tried on was either some weird style that's going to give me freaky tan lines, or some heinous color or design that could not possibly look good on anyone. I am trying one last option, going to the surf shops out at the beach, and then I am just going to resort to the Victoria's Secret catalog.

Once I finally made it home yesterday, I discovered that my garage door was broken. I managed to get it to go up with the clicker, but I couldn't get it to go down. So I disconnected the garage door and lowered it by hand, then I tried to get it to reconnect automatically but the track wouldn't revolve all the way down to reconnect the door. So when it came time for me to go to happy hour, I had to lift the dusty garage door all by myself, which was kind of heavy and really awkward to lift. Then I had to back my car out, put the garage door back down by hand, go around to inside the garage through my house to lock the door into place so that someone couldn't just come and lift the door up, and then go back out my front door. When my neighbor asked me what I was doing, I said "oh just disconnecting and locking my garage door, since its broken". He just said "oh, ok" with this weird, "how the hell did she know how to do that" look on his face. Remember, my dad is a home builder, so I actually know how to deal with things breaking around the house :)

It is Day 14 of our vegetable garden and rather than bore you to death with another full length post about the vegetable garden, here are some pictures!

 Our little vegetable garden set up on the back porch

Tomatoes and cucumbers are really coming along. Two of the jalapeños are up and we are still waiting for the banana peppers and green peppers to sprout.  

The green bean plants are getting bigger everyday! Soon they will be transplanted into a bigger home so that they can begin actually producing green beans for me to eat, yum. 

This picture doesn't do it justice...but all of my flowers are blooming like crazy! All these pink flowers and ladybug decor, a Phi Mu must live here :)

Vegetable Garden - Day 10

So this is what my life has come to...I get home from work everyday, run out into my backyard to look at my plants and get all excited about how they have grown another millimeter...and then blog about it. I am so lame.

Anyways, all of my green bean plants have sprouted and a couple of the other vegetables have as well. Slowly but surely there are some little green leaves poking through the soil for the other veggies, but nothing is growing nearly as fast as the green beans.

Fresh green beans coming soon! 

I seriously promise to blog about something more exciting than growing vegetables very soon :)

Vegetable Garden - Day 9

All hope is not lost. Some little green plants have finally emerged from the soil in our vegetable garden! I can't believe how excited I am about this, probably just thankful that I haven't managed to kill the poor plants yet. The green bean plants are really growing fast and one of the cucumber plants has broken through the soil, but I am still waiting for the others to pop up.

In the bottom right corner, you can see the leaves of the first cucumber plant. I am planning on using these cucumbers to make my own homemade pickles...get excited Casey :)

The green bean plants are all breaking ground and beginning to sprout. I am very excited about the fresh green beans in my future.

The largest plant in our garden so far! 

Vegetable Garden - Day 6

There are no new pictures to post of our vegetable garden because nothing has changed. Since Jared doesn't get home from work until after dark everyday, he has put me in charge of watering our plants. This was a bad choice, and these vegetables are probably doomed. I have only watered the plants twice this week, but I feel like I may have already drowned the little seeds. I haven't watered them in like 3 days, yet the soil is still pretty moist and nothing green has broken ground.

Today, I looked up how long it takes for seeds to germinate, in hopes of reassuring myself that there is still hope for my seeds. According to the internet, it takes about 7-10 days and my seeds have only been planted for 6 days...whew, off the hook. Hopefully, something will start growing around here so that my blog can be a little more exciting. Plus, I do not want to be responsible for killing the vegetable garden before it even began. Come on veggies, I need you to wake up and get with the program!

Vegetable Garden - Day 1

Jared has decided that he wants to attempt to grow some vegetables in our yard this spring. I'm all for this as long as I don't have to do anything with these plants because I will probably kill them. Surprisingly, he has opted to start small with a couple of easy veggies and if that goes well then we can do more next year. I'm glad he is going for this option because we tend to go for the gusto right from the beginning and then fail miserably.

These plants have a number of things working against them...Jared's busy schedule, my "black" thumb, and our psycho dogs that will probably try to eat them. Therefore, I have decided to blog the progress of our little vegetable garden because I can already tell that this is going to be yet another entertaining experiment at the Roche household.

Jared planted the seeds today, so here goes nothing. These little planters are currently inhabiting our screened porch until the plants are big enough to be transplanted into larger planters. We are attempting to grow green beans, jalapeños, banana peppers, cucumbers, green peppers and cherry tomatoes. Hopefully, we will have lots of delicious veggies to enjoy soon!

I know these aren't very exciting pictures of a bunch a dirt, but I like to have before and after pictures :)