tomato harvest

Despite growing up in a family that always had one or even two large gardens, and of course helping work in the garden, I didn't absorb much of the details and feel a little lost when it comes to gardening.

This year we decided to make one of our flower beds a small garden and I planted a few things - a cherry tomato plant, two other tomato plants, some hot peppers, some fruit plants, and several herbs.  I found that it was more fun than I thought it would be to water the plants, watch them grow, and start to produce!

Despite having fun with my garden, it didn't really do that well.  The herbs all did fine - the basil and mint being the best.  Two of the fruit plants died and the other won't produce anything this year.  The jalapeno plant did great and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with all of those... my aunt said they're easy to can without a pressure cooker?  I actually thought I had bought a bell pepper plant, but ended up with hot peppers... oops.

My very best plant was the cherry tomato plant.  It grew and grew and took over everything.  The wire stand I put in it for support is doing very little and has been outgrown.  My two other tomato plants were doing ok until this thing took off, but now they look rather sickly - not sure if the two events are related?

Here it is overtaking everything:

So I could tell that one day, all of a sudden there were going to be gobs of cherry tomatoes ready to eat.  Now is that time!  And I love it.  They are so good and the best snack.

So my verdict on my small taste of gardening?  I think it has made want to continue to learn more about it (mom?!) and take on a bigger garden in the future with more unique plants.  Chad thinks it's fun too.... so we'll see how ambitious we are next year.  :)