A Potpourri of Garden Produce

Ok-this photo looks verrry strange. Jen, what is wrong with it?

This morning's harvest. Despite the blistering temperatures, my little garden bravely soldiers on! My production from last year is down, because of my poor, sick tomatoes but in the month of May I harvested:

10.3 lbs green beans
9.5 lbs zucchini
30 ears of very small corn
1.5 lb jalapenos
1 lb green chilis

Last year's May production was over 37 pounds~ I didn't divide up the poundage. This year we've decided to put the garden to bed in the next month. I'm going to put black plastic on the soil and sterilize it until September (average temps well over 100 degrees so I'm sure it will sterilize nicely!). I want to get rid of any bad "bugs" that attacked my tomatoes.

The good news is that we have bees again. Two years ago we had a swarm of Africanized bees in our neighbor's yard and we had to have them exterminated. I think bees have a good "memory" because last year I didn't see very many, so we had a low production of squash and cucumbers, melons...none. But they are back this year merrily buzzing away and fertilizing the zucchini, melon and cukes. Everytime I go out there, I say, "I'm friendly, I'm friendly, I like bees, " so that they won't get me!

So there's good and bad this year. I've got 14 quart-sized ziplock bags full of green beans in my freezer so far and I'm feeling smugly self-sufficient at this point......ha.....it will last two weeks with green beans every day....But I'm not going to get any juicy, beautiful red tomatoes, just a few yellow pears that are hanging in there.

So I'm now surfing blogs and salivating over their gardens and will do so until next fall when the fun begins again!