How does your garden grow

I have a garden.  And by "I" I mean Kyle, he builds it each season, he waters it, cares for it, and does anything that involves work when it comes to the garden.  I am blessed to be the one who picks, cooks, and eats from the garden. 

Running on the side of our wall we have our blackberry bushes, we planted four 18 months ago, three of them made it and this is their first season to produce.  They have thorns like you wouldn't believe, so brutal.  Kyle has since learned that their are other varieties that don't have thorns and one that produces both in the fall and spring, live and learn.  Also if you're patient we've discovered that they spread, so you could start with just one and have more as time goes by.

In the first bed we have our onions we planted this winter, these are in all three beds and when they mature we will have onions to last us half the year, you have to hang them up to dry in panty hose (really you do) but that way they'll last until you're ready to use them.  In the front of the onions are some left overs from the other beds and one of my favorite things on the planet, basil.

The next bed has our tomatoes, yummy, you cannot plant enough tomatoes in my opinion, if you have too many at once give some away and make salsa with the rest.  From our fall garden we got a ton of huge tomatoes, then we had an early freeze so Kyle picked them all green (around 100 tomatoes...I really think that's right but I am horrible at estimating things like that) and placed them in a box, put newspaper on top, and stacked more, over and over until we had them all in there, that way we could eat on layer at a time, slowly over the next two months, it worked great.

The last bed has our green beans in it, which we've discovered you have to find the right variety, we've had some that were really tough and stringy, but this variety* is really good.  We also have our eggplant in this bed, which we've never done before, so far it's looking great, and I'm really excited because I love eggplant and it tends to be pricey.

Our general rule of thumb for planting is to plant the fruits and veggies we love and are expensive.  So for example, we don't plant carrots because they run about 75 cents for a bag of 8, even though we love them, we only have so much space.  So what's in your garden this spring?

*if you want any info on the varieties we plant email me and I'll ask my handyman hubby, he knows but I just don't.