The First Fruits... Um Vegetables

The first fruit (vegetable) of the garden was...

A tasty cucumber!

When I was living in Cedar City in the summer of 2003, the house I was living in with several other girls had a large back yard. A roommate and I got ambitious and planted some corn, cucumbers and something else. I don't think we watered it enough because our corn was puny and demented and our cucumbers? Well, they were nasty. Bitter. Bitter.

So I was a little nervous about our first cucumber here. Would it be bitter? Did we pick it too soon?

Nope! 

Isn't it beautiful? It was about 13-14".
We consumed this sweetie with cottage cheese topped with pepper and paprika.

Several weeks ago while I was watering the garden when it still looked somewhat like this (in the original garden post), a guy came up to me and asked, "Um... have you ever grown squash or zucchini or squash before?"

 I answered, "Nope! Is it obvious?"
"Well," he said, "One of those plants is going to cover your garden, and your neighbor's garden."
"Oh." I said. "I have six."
"Yeah, you'll probably want to take all but one or two of those out."

He wasn't kidding. You see, I got a package of six plants for about $2 of both zucchini and squash, and couldn't bear to throw them out! I did give a few plants away early on, but I didn't think it would matter too much just planting the rest. I put off thinning the garden out a few weeks after the guy talked to me, but finally got around to it when I saw the leaves getting to be larger than the size of my hands. Then bigger than both my hands. I moved a few plants to a neighbor's open garden and feared they would not survive the transplant shock. But they kicked through... vivaciously!

When I walk past it in the mornings going to work, I just laugh at how HUGE our garden is getting. It's awesome.

Here's a photo of the whole community garden:

As you can see, some of the plants in the various plots are doing better than others.

This is ours. Those zucchini leaves were the first of anyones to poke through the fence like that.

The people with the neighboring plot put up a little fence between our plots so my plants don't overshadow (literally) their little lettuce plants. This plant is up to my hips now.

And a little zucchini friend pokin' its way through the fence too.

And a future friend (yellow crookneck squash) just bein' born.

Soooo excited for these tomatoes! No more waxy ones from the grocery store for us!