Garden mix up

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This is so silly. I was so proud of how big our cucumber plants were getting. See them? I had S stand beside them to show just how big they are.

There’s just one problem. Stephen kept insisting that they were yellow squash. I told him there was no way – that I wouldn’t have planted four hills of yellow squash (with five plants each!).

Then we got to looking at them, and there are indeed four huge hills of yellow squash. There are so many buds on the squash that in about two weeks’ time, we will have FAR more squash than we will know what to do with. The hills that I thought were the squash are instead cucumbers. We wanted to plant a lot of cukes so that we’d have plenty to pickle for ourselves and a lot to share with Stephen’s parents so they could pickle some. Except the squash are cukes and the cukes are squash.

If you look closely, the little plants in the front of the picture are the cukes. They have itty, bitty, cukes on the vines too.

I finally figured out what happened. I went to the farmer’s service center to buy our seeds, and bought them in bulk. A store employee came over to help us since both the boys were with me and I had a few questions about some of the seeds. He scooped them out for me, and forgot to label them. So he peeked inside each packet and labeled them. Apparently the squash and cukes were labeled wrong. We got the packets out tonight to look at the seeds again, and the cucumbers and squash are mixed up.

Although the difference in seeds is pretty obvious when you’re paying attention, I missed that when I planted them. Oh well. I told Stephen tonight that it’d be hilarious if I made a mistake again and accidentally planted 3 or 4 MORE hills of squash instead of cucumbers! HA!

Here’s a picture from the bottom of our garden. The bare spot in front actually has beets planted there. They’re up but they don’t show in the picture. We need to till more ground to do some more planting (later plantings of corn and beans, and of course the cucumbers). You can’t see the corn or the broccoli from this angle.

Yesterday there was enough broccoli to almost fill an entire ice cream-sized bucket (a local farmer’s market sells their produce in these buckets). S helped me pick the leaves off the bunches. He did a great job and was so proud of how big a helper he had been! I need to blanch it so it can go in the freezer.

Our tomatoes are doing great also. Some of them are waist high already, and most have little tomatoes on the vine. These are about two inches across.

YUM. Our gardens have never done this well and it is so exciting. I can’t wait to see how it does this year. There’s a lot we planted that’s new to us (green peppers, pickling cucumbers, pumpkin, watermelon, beets), but it’s so fun.

This is funny. S went out there yesterday and looked at the tomatoes on the vine. “Mommy! My watermelon is doing SO GOOD!” Well, his watermelon plants are doing well, but unfortunately for him, that wasn’t his watermelon! That’s ok. He’s learning.