Ever since “going organic” was all the rage, I’ve had rather conspiracy theory about the whole shebang. And I must admit every time I walk through the produce aisles at Kroger I sort of snicker to myself. See my theory looks like this:
Farmer Joe checks out his south field and realizes that his produce is looking rather puny. So he decides to make this work, cause I mean, who wants to buy ugly undersized produce right? So he labels his produce as “organic” and triples the price and wahla! Money is rolling in and his ugly produce is rolling out and some poor unfortunate soul just got duped.
Now I realize that this is probably not what happens, but the rather cynical part of me……well I think it could be possible. I mean, you don’t really know where your food has come from or where it has been unless you’ve grown it in your backyard! Now that’s what I call real organic food!!
Anyway, two months ago a blogged here about planting our garden and wow has it grown in those two months. I’m not a “farmer” gardener, more of a leisure gardener……..and a gardener for teaching. We planted two new veggies in our garden this year……green beans and carrots. Both started off as seeds (unlike the tomato plant we purchased at the nursery). And it was so fun to watch those bean plants literally pop out of the ground. Jeremiah was especially interested in reporting everyday on how many plants had pushed through the dirt.
The great thing about green beans……they are very hardy and resilient AND my kids love eating them raw (personally I’m not a fan of raw green beans,but hey if my kids want to snack on raw veggies, go for it!). Natalie will literally pick a few handfuls of beans and munch on them as she plays outside!
I wanted to see how our carrots were progressing, so I pulled one out this afternoon and we ate it for lunch. I’m pretty sure my carrots are WAY too thick to really grow very big, but the flavor was ok, so we’ll just call them our baby carrots!
Much to my children’s happiness, our squash have completely died. This was not a good squash year. My plants never got very big and neither did the few squash we got…..they were rather small, but tasty.
The tomato plants were doing great until about three weeks ago when we had a really bad storm…..they all were blown over and honestly have not recovered, but we are getting some tomatoes……actually today we had our very first tomato sandwiches…….SO yummy!!
Ben is not really a fan of tomatoes, but he calls the cherry tomatoes grapes and will correct anyone who dares to call them otherwise! We do have something thieving our tomatoes…..every time one turns slightly pink it suddenly disappears……I’m pretty sure the thief has dark hair and sparking brown eyes!
Carlos’ watermelon is actually doing very well. We lost one plant early on…..but the two remaining plants have about 4 melons and they are growing! I hope they taste good, for Carlos’ sake. We planted cantaloupe last year and they grew to a decent size, but tasted like dirt…..perhaps they weren’t ripe? I’m not sure.
I do love tinkering in my garden and my kids love finding and eating fresh and truly organic veggies.
House of Smooches 