My first harvest!!

These are truly exciting days! It has been awhile since I have given you a garden update, and boy, what a difference a month makes! We have had a less than stellar summer here, which translates to alot of rain, pretty chilly and only about 12 days of full sun and heat. So, I have been concerned that things in the garden wouldn't have time to ripen before fall swept in with a vengence.

Well, my little garden is a garden of TROOPERS! I went out tonight to inspect things and I was thrilled to finally see that a few tomatoes were turning into COLOR:
Now, it seems pretty clear to me that these are yellow tomatoes. I planted both yellow and red, but in my excitement, I forgot to label everything. Christopher thinks they may turn red, but I am fairly certain that the red tomatoes don't go from green to yellow to red. They just turn red. Aren't they PRETTY??? I can't wait to pick them!

Next to the tomatoes I have the tomatillos and I did such a happy dance when I saw this:
Look at that little tomatillo husk!!! The husk appears first and then the tomatillo grows inside of it!! It's looking like I may get TWO tomatillos! We'll see.

Then, winding it's way up the balcony we have these babies:
They are called Cranberry beans! They better be good, cause they killed all the peas and they have a lot to make up for.

The jalepenos are flourishing:
Look at that BAD boy!! Only problem is he turned out not to be so bad after all! It WASN'T HOT! What is up with that?? Parts of it were, but the majority of it tasted like a green bell pepper. Hmmmm. It's a mystery.

If you remember, I have a bag that I am growing potatoes in and a large pot containing carrots. Both of these projects drive me crazy cause I can't SEE what is going on under the soil. Because of this, I tend to dig things up that aren't ready to be dug up. Tonight that happened in the potato bag. I just decided to dig down a little and see if there was anything there. And look at what I found:
Isn't that precious?? It is about the size of a marble. It's the only one I could find, so I hope he had lots of brothers and sisters down there. I guess we'll see in September.

My impatience and curiosity has also led to the premature pulling of at least 3 carrots well before their due date. But tonight, I was moving all the carrot 'hair' around to see if the soil needed water and I suddenly saw the TOPS of a bunch of carrots poking up above the soil!!!

I had such a surge of excitement course through me!! The last time I had pulled a carrot, it was about 2 inches long and, consequently, I had received a stern talking to from Christopher about how I needed to not pull anymore carrots until they were good and ready! Well, I had NOT pulled any carrots since then, but tonight I could see their tops peeking out and they were about as round as a nickel.

I think we all know what happened next.

I pulled.
And pulled.
And pulled.
And pulled.
And pulled.

5 times. I was suddenly holding the most beautiful baby carrots you have ever seen:

Then, I took them inside and gave them their first, and last, bath:
Check out the one on the far left! I clearly planted 3 seeds to close together as the one big carrot is growing 2 little ones! The carrots I planted were a 'grab bag' of orange, purple, white and yellow, tonights harvest yielded 3 white, 1 yellow and 1 orange! I haven't seen any purples and alot of the tops I can see in the pot are orange. So we will see!

Then we ATE them! They were so SWEET and good! I'm not a lover of carrots, but I so enjoyed these! I think just the knowledge that they were something I actually GREW, from a tiny SEED, made them taste delicious!

Can you believe we have made it this far????

Wow.