How did your garden grow?

I just pulled up the last plant from the garden. This was my first real attempt at gardening, and I guess if you keep that in mind, it didn’t turn out too bad. The sugar peas were great, but I didn’t realize that they don’t produce very long. We did get our fill of sugar peas early on though. The tomato plants produced a lot of green tomatoes, but they didn’t seem to want to turn red very fast. Still, along with all the onions and peppers that grew, we were able to make and can several pints of chunky salsa. Alicia absolutely hated the smell made while processing the tomatoes, and made sure I knew it about every 15 minutes or so. Even though, most of the garden produced fairly well, I did have quite the experience with sweet potatoes. Lets begin by saying that, it’s good to have a sense of humor! My neighbor gave me some sweet potato shoots, but I was a little late getting them planted. Then the hail came, and knocked all the leaves off, leaving only a short stem. Of course, I didn’t bother “hilling” them either. I kept those little shoots watered though and they eventually began to vine out. When it came time to dig them up, my dad and sister were bragging at how big and how many sweet potatoes they had. I was eager to see how big mine were, but wanted to leave them in the ground another week or so. That way I could have bigger potatoes and do my own bragging. When I dug them up, all I had was these stringy carrot looking things, not much bigger that the root itself, and very few of them. So much looking forward to bragging rights. Of course, dad’s plants produced plenty of potatoes and he shared some of his produce with us. I am looking forward to next years garden, and then I’ll remember to hill those potatoes…maybe I’ll throw out a bit of sand to mix in the soil too.