Surprising Garden Growth

It has been three weeks since my last posting here, we left on our road trip to the family farm in Illinois on 5/11 and returned yesterday 6/1.  The trip was fabulous and we saw beautiful farm land and grazing area all over Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, South Dakota and Idaho.

The growth of the garden is so exciting, we can hardly believe the rapid growth of everything we planted.  

I was also thrilled to see that the pole beans knew just what to do with the tepees, they are climbing right up, and the base of the tepees look so verdant and green with the squash planted right below!

The only garden casualty as a result of our road trip was the newly planted onions.  They did not continue their growth in our absence, I have no idea why, but there is literally no trace of them left.

One of the prettiest things happening right now in the garden is all of the flowering, little yellow flowers on the tomato plants, white flowers on the strawberry plants, large golden buds/flowers on the zucchini, small pink flowers on the black wax beans, and even a beautiful purple flower on our casper eggplant.

And to my surprise the sunflowers have also blossomed!

We had our first bite out of the garden yesterday, a small but very ripe and sweet strawberry!  It was wonderful to pluck it right off of the plant and eat it while we were standing in the warmth and peace of our very own garden.

Today we pulled both a red beet and a golden beet, sliced up the beets and then chopped up the wonderful large leaves and put them in our salad, it was both delicious and satisfying!