The summer growing season is over and we cleaned out our garden and I thought I'd reflect back on this season. Last time I shared about our garden, we built two more beds and started a bunch of seeds. Almost everything we planted this year seemed to do really well... which I'm sure was mostly just luck. I tried to take a step back and water less, but we were also really busy this summer so I let the garden do it's thang.
Once the veggies started growing (late June?) we started harvesting them on a fairly regular basis. I liked to try and walk around the garden at least every other day to get some outdoor time and take a peek at the garden progress. I would harvest anything that looked mostly ripe so we could wash and eat (or share) that week.
I was out front one day and saw that our tree had something that looked like fruit. I shared a picture on Instagram and asked whether I should eat it (I tried it before I even got any feedback). One of my friends said it looked kind of like a Cherry Plum and they used to eat them out of their yard all of the time. Well my taste-test didn't poison me, so we picked more and the girls loved them! Not sure if we'll have these plums every year (according to the internet, they need to be pollinated and I don't see a similar tree close to us), but we enjoyed it for this year.
This year was really fun because the girls were really into helping. The girls both loved to water the plants, spot baby veggies, harvest, and help carry our veggies in/wash them. We spent a lot of afternoons having our afternoon snacks next to the garden, which made that little spot of our yard that much more special.
This year, we started growing sunflowers. I purchased this variety pack of sunflowers (affiliate link) and it was fun to watch them grow and see what we would get. I originally planned to plant them all along our fence, but it turns out there were a lot of bricks, rocks, and broken glass along the fence so clearing it out was a much bigger project than I anticipated. I only planted sunflowers along one little section of our fence so we could get a feel for how to grow them. We got a range of colors and sizes and the girls loved checking out the flowers when we were back there.
Overall, I would say this was a very successful garden season. We got a lot of veggies, enjoyed the process, and learned a lot. We're already looking forward to next year with some plans to build some paths between the garden beds, come up with some structure for the vining plants to grow on, and hopefully clear more space along the fence.