Summer Gardening

Gardening has always been a part of my life.  In Texas, we re-introduced it with a garden of our own.  We watered, weeded and had pretty good success with tomatoes, carrots and beans.  We moved to Pittsburgh with grand dream of making sure we bought a house with good garden space.  Well, we have good garden space, it also happens to be the only flat part of the lawn we have as well as the only part that gets really good sun.  Add the need for a tract of lawn for the kids to play on and the deer that wonder through the back yard together and we decided to try container gardening.  We have a high deck off the family room making it quite accessible for watering and it gets decent sun.  I do have to run woodchuck/ground hogs off every once in a while but the plants seem to be doing well.

Left to right: carrots, cucumbers, corn, tomatoes, front center: peppers

I have three planters of carrots, two for corn, two for peppers, three for tomatoes, and three for cucumbers.  I also have a small planter wtih some herbs in it.  I've fallen in love with fresh Basil. Burpee had a special container variety of corn so I thought I'd try it just for fun.  We had a pretty intense storm the other night that blow my corn down so we'll see if it revives.  We also bought a short variety of carrots so they should do really well in our containers.  My cucumbers have blossoms and there are some tomatoes on the vines.  I'm excited to see what we get from this little garden and see how we can expand and improve on it next year.  I already know I'll do more carrots.  We love carrots.

Sage, Parsley, Basil