Secret Garden

Seriously, I found a secret garden at my house. Which is ironic considering all the time and effort put into the non secret garden.
I have a pretty good garden space at my house. Russ & I thought it would be so much fun to plant a garden this last spring. We planted a little late...maybe a lot late, and we planted all seeds but boy were we excited!

We planted a good $20 + of seeds and watered that baby throughout the hot summer.
You name it and we planted it. Zucchini, cucumbers, big tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, beats, peas, beans, cilantro...I could go on and on.
Nothing.Was.Growing.
We watered. Then we watered some more. And then I took one look at my water bill and one look at my chunk of dirt and had to put the kibosh on the garden.
Russ however was not ready to give up so I would catch him sneaking in some watering.
I told him if he wanted to keep watering it was fine if he wanted to pay my water bill, so he knew he was busted.
Then one day after a couple weeks of not watering, we got some growth!
We had our first pea! Seriously, it was sad how happy we were about this pea pod.
And it was perfect, it had 2 peas...one each!

Then we found this cute little guy. We called it the pearl pod.

And then, the greatest news of all! We had zucchini! Well, we thought it was zucchini but turned out to be squash. But we didnt care!

See that sad garden behind him? That should be FULL of veggies. But we'll take it!
We hadnt watered or cared for the garden in weeks. I noticed that there were some "weeds" or what I thought were weeds, growing in my walk way between my grass and my shed. So I just kept mowing over it every week.
Until one day Russ discovered we had baby tomatoes!!!

So here we are, taking all this time and TLC to plant this garden. I pay hundreds of dollars in seeds and water, and I mowed over the darn plant that we didnt plant and it grows tomatoes?!?
We had big plans with what we thought would be a massive harvest.
Like homemade salsa!
Sunflower market, Albertsons, and Russ's dads successful tomato plants really came in handy for us this year.


I swear we spent a whole week in my kitchen making salsa. We made 3 different kinds!
I loved the color of these peppers.

The kitchen(and Russ) was a total mess!

We had so much salsa!

Then we got done and were like...what do we do now? Neither of us knew how to can or had canning supplies so we had to freeze most of it! Mmmm mmm good.
This isnt even all of it. We had another huge bowl in the fridge.

This one was my favorite. We had fresh corn off the cob, and lots of beans and deliciousness!

We really were domestic. We also went up into the mountains one night and picked berries for hours! We picked so many raspberries that we were able to make a whole batch of jam!
I would suggest not wearing shorts when climbing a mountain to pick berries. OUCH. It seriously looked like I was attacked by a cat. I finally had to wrap my jacket around one of my legs.

Not only did we make raspberry jam, we had also gone up to Brigham City for Peach Days! It was a fun little old town festival. We had yummy peach cobbler and ate at Maddox.
We bought a box of peaches & made some peach jam too! Holy cow, I need a bigger kitchen.


Next year, plan on all of your freezers being this full because we are going to be so dang successful we arent going to know what to do with all of our produce.