First Harvest of 2011

Our first (real) harvest of 2011!

I'm not really counting the few strawberries or the onion we collected almost 3 weeks. In addition to the few berries we harvested early last week, we collected a whole pint of strawberries on Tuesday. The plants are in a raised bed and are doing really well, so much better than last year. The berries are small but sweet. Unfortunately we have no blueberries left. There's a mesh net over the bushes, but some birds or squirrels or other critter managed to get through the mesh and eat the rest of the fruit that were on the plant.  I hope you enjoyed the berries, you little jerks! I guess we'll try again next year.

We collected two small yellow squash and a handful of green beans.

We also decided to pick the small Golden Bell pepper that was on the plant, despite the fact that it wasn't ripe yet (i.e, yellow). We're hoping this stimulates the pepper plant into producing more fruit. 

Our first little broccoli! We have four broccoli plants. Two of them bolted at the end of May, but the other two plants are doing fine. We decided to harvest a little chunk of broccoli before the plants have a chance to bolt again, but we didn't cut all of it. This is what's left on the two plants:

I'm actually a little surprised that the broccoli plants seem to be doing fine. It has been so hot and humid over the last week, and I thought these plants didn't do well in the heat. We steamed up the beans and broccoli with our dinner last night. They were good!

And now I have something to really look forward to: Some of the tomatoes have started to turn red. This has got to be one of the most exciting things about gardening, especially because we have so many tomato plants.  There isn't much color in the garden until the tomato and squash plants start making fruit. We have bonnie grape and early girl tomatoes (above), and the plants look healthy. I hope they stay this way, and now that July is coming, I really hope I have lots of tomatoes to harvest.