Our Spring Vegetable Garden 2018 & Garden Fresh Recipes

Come take a peek at our raised bed expansion and what we're planting this year in our Vegetable Garden! 

 

Have y'all started on your spring garden? For the last several years we've been growing our own vegetables, preserving what we grow and sharing our harvest with family and friends. We started our garden expansion at the end of March and planted everything by the first week of April. Now were just sitting back and watching everything grow.

I've been so busy with work and home that I haven't had a chance to post our garden progress until now. When we moved to Royse City back in 2011 we weren't able to plant a garden until the following year. In 2012, we started with a small 8 x 10 foot raised bed and have been expanding ever since. By the spring of 2016 we had pretty good sized 8 x 16 foot garden, but keeping with tradition, this spring we expanded our garden one last time. 

We were able to move one of our sheds to another location and add 8 additional feet to our raised bed. We now have one large 8 x 24 foot raised bed with two additional 3 x 6 foot smaller garden beds. I think we are finally content with our garden space, so I don't see any more expansions in our future, but you never know. ??  

(March 24th 2018)

We live in North Texas so we can start planting our vegetable garden a bit earlier than most areas. Sometimes we can even get two planting seasons and plant a second crop of green beans, potatoes, onion, carrots and squash. By the end of March we were finally ready to add the garden mix and get our fingers dirty!!!   

(First week of April 2018)

To finish up we added two trellises. One for green beans (pole beans) and a second large one for pickling cucumbers along the back of the bed. We sowed some seeds, but also used plants. We went to Covingtons Garden Center this year to get our vegetable plants and we couldn't be happier with what we selected.   

After we added all our seeds and added the vegetable plants we were lucky enough to get two rounds of rain to get us started. As you can see from the photo below everything is coming in nicely!!! I love gardening season and all the excitement of seeing the first seeds sprout through the dirt. I can honestly say it never gets old. 

Here's what were growing this spring!

• Corn
• Boston Pickling Cucumbers
• Green Beans  (Pole Beans)
• Yellow Straight Neck Squash
• Zucchini Squash
• Big Boy Tomatoes
• Heirloom Tomatoes
• Green Zebra Tomatoes
• Mucho Nacho Jalapenos
• Hot Jalapenos
• Red, Green & Yellow Bell Peppers
• Green Onions (White Lisbon)
• Georgia Rattlesnake Watermelon 
• New Potatoes
• Kennebec Potatoes
• Cilantro 
• Dill
• Pepperoncini 
• Strawberries

The corn has taken off and is doing really good (May 2018). 

Zucchini and yellow squash!

I love heading out to the garden in the morning and seeing all the beautiful yellow squash flowers. The last couple years haven't been the best for growing squash (aphids & blossom end rot) so fingers crossed this year is a better year. Hopefully we solved the problem this year. 

We used seeds to plant the yellow straight neck squash and plants for the zucchini, but as you can see they're both growing like crazy. 

We decided on pole beans (green beans) this year since they have a longer harvest (8 weeks) versus bush beans with only a 3 week harvest. 

We're growing Heirloom and Big Boy tomatoes this year and a new variety called Green Zebra Tomato..

The Peppers are doing pretty good (jalapeno and 3 bell pepper varieties red, yellow and green). I'm hoping for a pretty good harvest so I can stock up on jalapeno pepper jelly again this year. 

We are also growing some Boston Pickling Cucumbers again since they did so wonderful last year. I had cucumbers coming out of my ears and enjoyed making batches of bread and butter and kosher pickles.  

The potatoes are growing like crazy!!! We have Kennebec Potatoes in the large raised bed. 

And new potatoes in a smaller 3 x 6 foot bed. 

We also have strawberries from the last couple years, but recently built a screen top to keep the birds out. So far it's been working really well. 

We had about 7 peaches grown on our peach tree last year, but this year our tree is covered with loads and loads of baby peaches. 

I'm hoping everything goes well with them this year, so I can freeze several bags of fresh peaches for winter. We also planted two new apple trees (granny smith and  yellow delicious) near our red delicious tree, because we were unaware that apple trees were not self pollinators. It will be while before we see apples, but hopefully in the next couple years we will see a few.  

Our blueberry plants are also doing better than last year. We had one bush die so we replaced it and this year and now blueberries are starting to come in. 

We also moved the Muscadine Grapes to the other side of our yard. We originally had them planted on the side of the yard by our garden, but the Texas heat kept burning them up. This year at the beginning of spring we dug them up and moved them to the other side  of the yard where they only get morning and early afternoon sun. I thought they would die of shock from the transplant, but look how awesome they are doing! All those leaves are really coming in now. 

I'm happy to report that ever thing is growing beautifully in the garden and I can't wait until harvest time. 

Before I go I'm also including a link to my Garden Fresh Recipes page so you can see all the delicious dishes I make with what I harvest. 

If you're looking for a simple produce gathering apron check out my post on how to make a DIY Produce Gathering Apron.