OK, as promised, here are some pictures of my vegetable garden.
http://s684.photobucket.com/...
The originals are twice the size I'm showing here, so if you right-click them and select View Image, you can view them in all their full-size glory.
Here is a picture of one of the pumpkin mounds, taken this past Friday. By Father's Day, the largest leaves were about the size of dinner plates.
Butternut squash:
Here are the other two "sisters":
This is a concept I picked up on courtesy of the US Mint, which is issuing a dollar coin featuring what the Iroquois call "Three Sisters" agriculture. Imagine that! I've been casually collecting coins since I was a kid, and this is the first time I actually got something educational from this pursuit. Anyway, the corn and beans go together. The corn provides support for the beans as they climb, and the beans put back the nitrogen the corn sucks out of the soil. The pumpkins and squash cover the ground, choke out the weeds (I hope), and discourage critters. Each thrive in the same plot of land, and produce more than if they were grown separately.
Here are the three sisters all together:
They're really starting to look like something.
Here is our potato patch:
Last year, our potatoes lasted until mid-February cooling it in a large plastic tub in our garage. They were as firm as baseballs, and really, really good. So we're doing them every year.
Another unexpected success story from last year:
These are Roma tomatoes. Last year, we expected the regular slicing kind, only to get Romas, which are only good in sauce. But it was such good sauce, we got 12 this year, so we can fill the freezer.
We also have wild black raspberries.
These were new last year. My guess is a bird landed on the barbed-wire fence you can barely see at the lower right and took a crap there, leaving some seeds. Now we get black raspberries. They're really good on cereal or ice cream or in muffins or pancakes.
Finally, the lettuce:
We can't cut this stuff fast enough. One 95 cent packet of seed makes more than we can eat.
I'll be posting more pictures as the season progresses. Meanwhile, feel free to post your own pics here and brag on your own victory gardens.