It's harvest time!

Here is a picture of our harvest from our garden. It isn't much, but it certainly could have been worse. Let me tell you the story of our garden and you'll understand why it could have been worse.

Ryan and I have not planted a garden together since we've been married. We've lived next to Grandma and Grandpa and they always planted a garden big enough to feed several families. So we've just never worried about it. In the past year, however, a lot of stuff has changed with Grandma and Grandpa and due to circumstances, they do not plant a garden anymore. Thus, we decided to try our hand at it. We used their garden spot since we didn't have one in our yard yet.

It was a late spring to begin with, but we were even later getting the garden planted. We did 4 rows of corn, 3 rows of carrots, 3 rows of potatoes, and 2 rows of onions. Within the first week or so, Grandpa decided to plant one more row of potatoes. Unfortunately, he dug our newly planted onions up to plant the additional row of potatoes. So we now had onions growing sporatically throughout the row of potatoes, and the growth of them were stunted a little.

A few weeks later, as things were sprouting through the ground, all was looking good. Then about 3/4 of the carrots and the one end of 2 rows of potatoes got sprayed with weed killer, which doesn't discriminate against killing garden plants either. Some of them did pull out of it surprisingly. Although, they were stunted as well.

A couple of weeks later, when everything was growing good again, I went out to check it out, and someone had gone and chopped off the tops of most of the carrots. My poor carrots. How I got any of them to survive, I'm not sure.

Anyways, the corn was progressing nicely and we didn't have any other mishaps the rest of the summer....until about the first week in September. Just when the corn was ready to start eating, mother nature decided to get in a lick or two. We had a nasty wind storm come through and knock all the corn stalks down almost to the ground.

Here we are in mid October. We did get to enjoy some new potatoes and some corn. We got a couple decent onions. The rest were pretty small. We had an abundance of carrots considering a lot of the crop got wiped out. We didn't thin them so we had to dig them with a shovel to get them out of the ground. And we ended up with a decent crop of potatoes that will be perfect for soups this winter. There were only a handful of bakers.

All in all, I'm glad we got what we did out of the garden and hopefully we'll have a little more luck next year!