Diligent blog readers may remember that we started growing plants back last February. We planted zucchini, basil, impatiens, and butternut squash. We had drastically varying luck with them. The zucchini plants were strong and prolific. The impatien plants and basil were very small and fragile. My parents cat has some munching on them which didn’t really help anything, but was better than my cats who threw our plants on the floor and the sink repeatedly. Sometime in early May we transplanted them into the ground at my parents house.

My parents got these nifty planters and we installed them with some fresh dirt, water and covers. My mother also planted some green bean seeds herself. We also picked up some tomato, pepper, and lettuce plants at the store and from a neighbor of mine who is a very excellent gardener. Towards the end of spring things were growing pretty well. The zucchini plants were growing like crazy and flowering a lot too.

We also planted about half of the impatiens here at my house and half at my mothers. The basil plants were tiny, so we punted on them and my mom bought two regular basil plants so we could make pesto.

So what grew? not so much, but a few things. We ate a few green beans regularly, like these below.

If we waited a week we could even get a small serving of those green beans. By the end of the summer the impatiens grew very well and looked just as gorgeous as the ones we had bought the previous summer. I know I took a picture of the flowers themselves, but I can’t find it. So here’s some of the pretty flowers in the background of Celia playing with the drain hose.

At my moms house, the bought basil plants grew ok, not as well as the year before. The pepper plants didn’t do all that much, we only got a couple. The lettuce plants grew well until they stopped getting picked enough. The zucchinis grew until mid-summer sometime with tons of flowers, but absolutely no zucchini. Then they just all sort of shriveled and died. I had even tried pollinating them myself but still nothing. I’m not sure what went wrong, some people think little critters were getting in and eating the buds. Similar to the zucchini, the butternut squash plants grew well, but nothing happened after the flowers. The tomatos grew well from both kinds of plants we had and so my mom had an abundant tomato supply.

For next year? I think we’ll do the impatiens again as those worked well. The green beans were a hit, although fragile, we may just want to plant them right in the ground in late spring so we don’t have to transplant them. Josie really enjoyed planting, transplanting and learning how to harvest. I just wish we would have gotten some squash for all the effort! We eat a lot of them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 31st, 2011 at 12:58 pm by Jen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.