Five Times the Rum: Our Garden

As some of you may or may not remember, we started a garden a few months ago. It is the community garden here on the base. There are 20 plots and one of those plots is just for the children. In the children's garden there are 2 extremely hardy plants. I don't know what they are, but they won't die. Not even with the constant squashing, drudging, pulling of leaves, over watering and maybe even under watering that they undergo. Those are the kinds of plants I need!! I can't even seem to keep my palm tree alive!! Okay, so it lived for about 2 weeks before it started looking really sick. Now I am desperately trying to revive it. I think it may be too far gone. Oh well. Okay, so back to the garden. You have to sign up for a plot and if there are any available, you can have one. We were lucky enough to swing in and call that last one our own! Our old neighbors and good friends, the Villasenors took the one before us. We started out our garden with basil, parsley, carrots, green onions, broccoli, spinach and one corn seed that we took from Jessica. Sadly, the basil and parsley that I was very much looking forward too never seemed to even sprout. =o( Our broccoli took off, and now we are just waiting for some tasty little florets to pop up any day now. I love raw broccoli. Our carrots did so well. We actually just pulled them all up today....perhaps a week early, but they look pretty yummy anyway! I'll have to see if I can find a recipe that incorporates carrots into it, other than carrot cake of course. So, if there are any ideas, please, send them my way. Our green onions took forever to sprout, and now we have three meager little green onions growing. Its better than nothing, I suppose. The corn is doing well. Perhaps the most well off of any of the plants. Its red corn, and I'm sure we will start to see ears growing very soon. Then we have some very lovely plants growing that we didn't plant! I didn't want any squash, or cucumbers or anything that was going to vine out and take over my garden. Well, so much for not wanting it. We got it. lol. I'm not quite sure what it is just yet, but it looks like it may be a zucchini or a squash of some sort. And that awesome vine that I didn't want has choked out my spinach I was growing! Stinkin vine! And then we have our beloved tomato plant. I uprooted the plant and moved it to a different part of the garden in hopes that it would go into shock and die. haha. Apparently, tomato plants are very resistant, hardy and adaptable. It gave me a false sense of hope the first few days when it started to get crispy, but then a few days after that it perked up and started growing! Lovely. =o) I didn't want tomatoes because I didn't want to put an ugly cage in my garden. Well, I recently learned that tomatoes don't have to be caged or staked. They usually produce a better fruit if they are, but growing them uncaged works just as well. I have opted for the uncaged version. One, to uphold the beauty of my garden, haha (kidding..our garden is very bare...and quaint), and two because I can't seem to find the darn things anywhere I look! When I wasn't looking for them, they were everywhere I turned. Now they are hiding. Anyhow, here are some pictures of our garden from the very beginning stages to about a month ago. And then here is a picture of all of the kids and our very dirty, unwashed, just pulled carrots. Enjoy! (click the pictures to enlarge them!)

Our garden right after seeding it.