Our Garden

Monday, I picked up some Miracle Grow Organic soil to start up or seedlings for our garden.  I planted some chives, mild jalapeno peppers, red and green jalapeno peppers, garden beans and the tomato trees seedlings I recently got online for free at 1SaleADay and just paid shipping.  Each tomato tree will grow up to 8 ft. tall and will produce up to 60 lbs. each.  I hope it does what it claims because my family likes salsa and these veggies will create a lot of homemade salsa.

 Tomato Trees

Chives, Garden Beans and Jalapeno Peppers

We are thinking about growing a few more veggies for our second round of seedlings.

Garden Plans

I am thinking about what we should plant this year in our garden.  Each family member has a say in what goes into our garden.  I really want to have tomatoes because we love them.  Anything from spaghetti sauce to salsa.  I just found this tomato tree online for free, just pay $4.99 shipping/handling.  It includes 6 pre-seeded pots that grows up to 8 feet tall and each plant can grow up to 60 pounds.  I cannot wait to get this one and plant it!

What To Do With What Is In Our Garden

This year, we are growing onions, garlic, melon, roma and cherry tomatoes, long hot peppers and tomatillos in our garden.  We also have our staman apple tree and an asian pear tree.

Our garden recently started to produce crops - tomatoes (cherry and roma), onions and some staman apples from our tree.  Our kids locate and pick our produce to bring them in for washing and preparing.

Now the question is what to do with all that our garden produces this year.


This year, I am going to try canning our tomatoes rather then freezing them so that we can make them last longer and be easier to work with rather then being mush.  I am going to blanch them, take off their skins and can them.  We will continue to dice and freeze our onions from our garden (as we do with those we purchase from grocery stores) for use with future meals.  We find that this has been working well for our family when meal time rolls around.


The staman apples have not been lasting very long.  It seems like once they are picked, the kids and I eat them up pretty quick.

I am hoping to get enough apples from our tree this season to make at least one apple pie.  Last year was the first year we had our tree and it gave us one apple, well half an apple because our youngest decided to hit it with his stick when he was fighting it.  This years abundance of apples is an unexpected and welcome change.


It looks like our tomatillos and asian pears are coming along great.  Our peppers do not seem be going very well.  Our strawberry plants look like they are coming along but no fruit yet.


This year like last year, we will continue to share what our garden produces with friends and with people in our community.  Last year, we shared bags of tomatoes and some jalapeno peppers.   Some people used them in chili, some in stews, some in salsa, some fried green tomatoes and so on.

More Garden

Today we planted the rest of our garden. We planted some jalapeno peppers, tomatillos and beef steak tomatoes, from seeds of course.

Last year, our entire crop was all planted from seeds. This year, we planted most of our garden from seeds and some of it (yellow onions, garlic and strawberries) from seedlings/starter plants. We are keeping an eye on our garden to see how long it will take to grow or start sprouting. Our winesap apple tree is flowering pretty good now, so we are hoping that this year it will produce a little more fruit for our family to enjoy.

The onion starters are starting to get the greens pop out from the top and there are some small garlic plants from the garlic seeds. The small garlic is soooo cute. Everything else looks good, so we will keep an eye on it.

We have been noticing recently that a squirrel has been getting into our garden. He has been quietly reaaranging things but we just went through everything and regrouped whatever was out of place.

So far so good and we are looking forward to reaping the rewards from working hard in our garden this year. Whatever extras we may have will either be frozen for future use, shared with family and friends or shared via our local freecycle group.

Green Onions

I bought a bunch of green onions two weeks ago and they are still producing for us. You see after we got them home, we cut the bunch down to the start of the dark green part and stuck the bottoms in a planter with potting soil in them and watered them. The first batch of regrown green onion was cut this week and frozen for future use. The second batch will be cut this weekend and the process will continue. I plan on getting as much out of this one bunch of green onions as I possibly can. Why should we have to keep purchasing green onions every time we need them in a recipe (like we have done over and over in the past)? Each time it gets too long and we do not use them right away, it will be frozen for future use. However, we just found some fresh noodles at the asian market yesterday that looks like saimin (I hope it is) and we will probably use the green onions in that this time around. I hope it is delicious!

Just another way to stretch our dollars the smart way.

Update: The green onions died off. I wonder if I watered them too much. Anyways, I will pick up another bunch next time I go grocery shopping and repeat this method.