The vegetable plants are as big as they need to get and they re all producing. We are now harvesting daily!
Instead of showing the garden itself, I’ll share some photos of the harvest and a couple of the garden! We’ve been dealing with hungry little insects and bugs and spraying and spraying the plants
Every morning I go out to the garden and harvest whatever is ready. Maintaining the garden and picking the vegetables have turned out to be difficult because my back gets inflamed within a minute of starting to bend over. The rows seemed to be well spaced before the vegetable bushes grew to full size. Now we feel they are too close together which is something we’ll change in future gardens.
Our corn has produced 12 corn on the cobs. They are so delicious!!! As time has passed the quality of the corn has gotten better and better.
When each corn stalk produced one and sometimes two corn cobs they started naturally withering and dying. We’ve pulled up around 10 stalks so far. There are around 5 stalks remaining. New corn seeds were planted where there is available space and the next crop of corn has sprouted. The picture below looks pitiful but they are doing what they are supposed to. I cut the top half off when they need to come up out of the ground so Roy knows which ones to pull up.
These are where there were originally beautiful potato bushes.
Now, most are gone which is what they are supposed to do. The potatoes growing under the ground take what they need from the plants above ground until there is nothing left of the bush. 
The almost nothing you see below means things are going right! They need to be in the ground a while longer before they can be harvested. 
Cucumbers are being harvested every day and they are big cucumbers.
I pickled four jars full a couple of weeks ago. Once we started eating them we realized I shouldn’t have pickled these really big ones since their skin is tougher. I’ll be pickling the cucumbers while they are smaller from now on. 
We’ve been enjoying garden fresh tomato and cucumber salads every day. The lettuce in this picture also came from the garden! I think this is the part of our vegetable garden adventure we are enjoying the most! We grew these from seeds, isn’t that cool!
At least a dozen usable bell peppers have been picked. A few nonusable bell peppers were picked, the bad spots cut out and then the remainder chopped up to use for seasoning in my cooking. Three nice eggplants were picked so far. Several eggplants are hanging on their bushes getting bigger every day.
I stuffed 12 bell peppers with ground meat, rice, garlic, onions, bell pepper, etc. They were frozen in groups of three. 
This is the pot of eggplant that is being smothered with ground meat and seasoning. We were able to make two large casseroles of smothered eggplant. One casserole we’ve already eaten and it was delicious! The other is in the freezer. It looks totally different when the eggplant is cooked and smothered down!
The number of tomatoes in the bowl below are being picked every day. We’ve either popped them in our mouth to enjoy or put them in a salad.
We pick about the amount of okra shown below every day. We’ve picked around 40 okras so far. They are all being chopped up and frozen. When we get a big enough bag we will fix smothered okra.
Our bigger tomatoes are just now starting to turn red. Some of the bigger tomatoes have developed “blossom rot” which comes from a deficiency of calcium in the soil. Roy researched it and found that lime needed to be added to the soil so he bought a 40 pound bag and treated the soil of the tomatoes, bell peppers and eggplants since those last two can be affected by blossom rot.
The okra plant makes this beautiful flower as it is growing. You can see behind the flower in the picture are several budding okras. 
Our one and only artichoke plant is doing well. No artichokes yet but it’s a neat plant to watch it grow! 
The first of our green onion crop has been harvested and chopped using it in our cooking.
Now for the fruit
Our eight blueberry bushes were moved this year so we didn’t anticipate much of a crop and that’s what we got. We let Madisyn pick the three blueberries and she shared them with me!
Our watermelon vines have one watermelon that is growing every day. First is a close up of the 4-inch watermelon and second is the vine the watermelon is growing on.
In the garden down by the pond the watermelon vine is finally growing and flowering. 
The cantaloupe in that same area is blooming really. I am hopeful there will be fruit growing on each within the next week.
The fig trees are growing really well and figs are all over the trees.
The garlic and yellow onions are still growing and aren’t ready yet to harvest.
Our militon vines are having an issue with yellowing and dying leaves. While those yellowing leaves dry up and fall off, lots of new green growth is blooming all over the vines. We researched this whil the yellowing occured and learned that the new green leaves may start growing so we are happy to see that happen/ Militon plants don’t start blooming and producing until around August or September so we’ll see how they do then!
The sweet potatoes are still a big bunch of vines that haven’t shown any sign of being ready to go away so we can dig up the sweet potatoes. If these sweet potatoes do well and we decide to do it again we will NOT plant it in the middle of a garden. The vines are so long and even though we let them go up and down a fine, they still take over a lot of area in the garden. The big bunch of leaves on the right are the sweet potato vines.
Different types of inspects and bugs have attacked the plants in different ways. We’ve purchased three different types of insect sprays to wipe out these bugs that love the plants. With the vegetable plants close together it is difficult to spray the whole plant. Lots of lessons are being learned so that’s good!
After I finished writing this yesterday I was in the garden and found 3 eggplants on the ground that had fallen off the bushes and had a bad spot on them. Between that and the spots on a few bell peppers recently I decided to pick all the eggplants and bell peppers that were almost the right size to pick to avoid the possibility of a bad spot on them. This morning I did that and here’s what I picked. This mornings harvest included picking some smaller cucumbers that are better suited for pickling than the larger ones were. It only takes a couple of days for these cucumbers to grow from the small size to the large!
That’s it for now on our Spring 2019 gardening adventure!
BECAUSE HE LIVES 