You can see this tomato tree on the Living with the Land ride in Epcot.  The ride takes you on a tour of green houses where they are doing some amazing things with growing plants and even fish and alligators.  This tomato tree blows my mind.  I think they said they harvest something like 40 bazillion cherry tomatoes off of it.

Take a look at the bell pepper plants:

I’m so impressed by this.  My bell peppers keep dropping all the leaves off their stalks and I’m not sure I’ll end up with any peppers at all.  Maybe if I build a giant green house in my backyard, I could have my own pepper tree

Links from around the web:

Anna from Cookie Madness has been in Disney World this week.  She posted a delicious looking recipe from Artist Point restaurant in Wilderness Lodge for Berry Cobbler.  She also posted a photo of a German Chocolate Chip Cookie.  Jim had one of those while we were there and I snuck a bite or two.  It was delicious!  Anna says she may have a copy cat recipe coming up soon.

Erin from $5 Dinners posted a recipe for Red Pepper Guacamole.  I wonder if Erin would bring me over a bowl of it?  I’ll provide my own chips…yum!

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve done some writing for the SC Johnson website.  You might want to check out my posts on How to Shop a Farmers’ Market, Packing Breakfasts and Snacks for a Road Trip, How to Feed the Family on Nights Filled with Kids’ Sports, and Summertime Veggie Plate Dinner.  I have been compensated by SC Johnson for these posts.

I hope you all have a marvelous weekend!  What kind of plans do you have?  I’m planning to clean, launder, go to church and visit with friends.  How about you?

Sweet success!  It was just one ripe strawberry, but it tasted good and it was from our very own garden.  My 6 year old shared it with me.  We probably could have left it to ripen in the sun another day or two, but we couldn’t wait.

I’m admitting my gardening ignorance here (not for the first time, either), but I had no idea that potatoes bloomed with such pretty purple flowers.

On the downside, we’ve got tiny black bugs eating up the potato leaves.  We caved on the idea of organic and my dh dusted the plants with a little Sevin dust.  I hope it works.  I wanted the potatoes for us, not to feed the bugs.  Don’t judge me because I’m not all the way green.  I’m working on it.  Sort of.

See those little green cherry tomatoes!  I can’t wait till they turn red.  We’ve also got a few small green peppers.  And I used some of the lettuce to make a salad this week.  It was very good and fun to harvest from the garden.

What’s growing in you backyard?  And how do you keep the bugs away?  Any organic methods out there that work?

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve updated on our garden boxes.  On Mother’s Day weekend we planted tomatoes, basil, peppers, cucumber, and parsley.  The cucumber got broken off, so that was replaced a few days later.  I’m not sure this one is going to survive either though, because we had a very late frost earlier in the week.  My basil took a hit, although it will probably survive.  One tomato plant looks kind of pitiful. 

The potatoes are doing great.  They grew so much this week, even since I took these photos.  The carrots are growing.  The lettuce is slow.  We started it from seed and it just isn’t taking off. 

My husband built the trellises last weekend.  He used 5 foot electric conduit and string.  Fancy stuff, but hopefully soon we’ll have tomatoes growing up it.  I can’t wait for that first, ripe tomato.

Here’s a close up of the trellis:

How does your garden grow?  Are things coming along like you hoped?  Any battles with critters or weather?  Is there anyone out there who already has sunk their teeth into a garden fresh ripe tomato?  Share with me!

I shared a few weeks ago that we are attempting to grow our own produce in the backyard.  Although we have no grand ideas about growing all the veggies we eat, we do have high hopes for tomatoes and a few other things.  My husband and kids planted a few things about 1 1/2 weeks ago and they are coming up now.

This is how the potatoes looked when they arrived from Burpee.  We cut them in half and planted 20 plants in 5 squares.  They haven’t sprouted yet.  We’ve never grown potatoes, so I hope we did that right.

In this plastic bag are 25 of the 50 strawberry plants we ordered.  I’ve always heard people say that the plants are very small when they come.  They weren’t kidding!  These things just looked like a bunch of dirty twigs.  But in the ground they went and you can see from the first picture, they are coming up healthy. 

We also planted lettuce and carrot seeds.  The lettuce has started to sprout.  You have to look very close to see the tiny leaves.

We had some trouble finding something to divide the garden into squares and finally settled on string.  Here, you can see how my husband used nails to secure the string.  Dividing the garden like this makes spacing the plants very easy.

I’m happy that things are starting to grow and anxious to plant the tomatoes and other warm weather veggies, but that is still a few weeks away. 

Do you have a garden?  What are you planting now?  Does anyone know if we planted the potatoes right?  Let me know in the comments how your garden grows.

The “dirt” in this garden is 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss and 1/3 vermiculite. You’ll need to figure out how many cubic feet of each you’ll need. Remember from math class that Volume=Length x Width x Height. For our box that’s V=4 x 4 x .5 (.5 for 6″ or 1/2 foot) That comes to 8 cubic feet total, or about 2 1/2 cubic feet of each ingredient.