Well, I thought I should probably give you an update on the progress of our garden. Earlier this year we had planted a new garden in the front entry way. You can read about and see pictures of this in our blog by clicking here. All we did was water it but it seemed to grow as if covered in Miracle Grow.
We were worried that the garden wouldn't fill out because it was its first year so I planted a couple of sunflowers. The one above is a Mexican Sunflower. I grew some last year but they didn't do very well. It only had about 5 flowers on it. This year it did quite well. I also planted another sunflower next to it. I thought it was another Mexican Sunflower because it was not very big when I planted it, but I guess I was wrong because it was quite a bit bigger.
12 feet four inches to be exact. It was quite a shock, but it was pretty cool. It was almost a high as our second story window. It turns out that it was from the seeds that I bought that were called American Giant.
Here is Eric, Bella, Blue and I standing next to it. And also a picture of the head once it was fully grown. Somehow after staking it with rebar it still standing with its head on after the first frost in November. That is one strong sunflower.
It wasn't the greatest growing year for some of our vegetables because the spring was quite cold and our starts did not do very well. But we did have one huge surprise. Last year we bought a small bag of ornamental gourds from Costco to decorate for Halloween. After they began to go bad we threw them in the compost. In the spring we noticed a couple of small gourd plants coming out of the compost pile next to the greenhouse. We decided to let them grow and see what happened. We did not actually expect to get any gourds because they were store bought, but it couldn't hurt to see what happened. So we left them in the compost pile and watered them once in a while.
By September it became difficult to walk to the greenhouse (left). By October it became impossible without stepping on the plant (right).
By the time we pulled the plant out to harvest the gourds in October the plant had covered the entire walkway, grown under the deck, climed up the walls of the greenhouse and around the back side, over the fence into the neighbors yards and around the other side of the steps and into the garden next to it. The majority of the gourds were pear shaped yellow and green striped (see right). It took a numbers of hours to pull the entire bush out, harvest the gourds, wash and count them. We ended up with 500 gourds this year. So we then began to give gourds to anyone and everyone we saw. Too bad that they are only decorative.
Here are a couple other pictures of flowers from our garden this year. A single petal dalia that I got from my grandma and another sunflower.
