Our Little Garden

This year we were able to have a little garden by our apartment. Growing up, Andrew always had a lot of fresh tomatoes and other produce from the garden of the Wells family home. Last year, he was coveting delicious fresh home grown tomatoes. We like to eat tomatoes, but the ones from the store barely deserve the name tomatoes. They just don't have as much flavor or juiciness. So this year we took advantage of the little garden plots that are available for residents of university student apartments. We planted about 6 tomato plants, pepper plants, a little lettuce, and and some basil and oregano. Andrew grew up gardening, so he sort of knew what he was doing, but it turned out that we planted the tomatoes too close together, and we didn't have baskets for them, so they all grew together into a big bramble.
It turned out that the lettuce grew well for a little while, but soon became wild and bitter, so it was not a huge success, and the oregano did not grow very well either. The basil has been big success, and we were even able to make our own fresh pesto. But the tomatoes have become the real stars. We have we have been able to harvest a lot of small tomatoes from 5 of the tomato plants, but a real success has been gathering huge juicy beefsteak tomatoes from the one beefsteak tomato plant. I estimate that we got over half of our total harvest from just that one plant. With all these tomatoes, we have able to experiment and make a lot of delicious food. We've had some of the best be BLTs I've ever tasted, featuring a cream cheese spread that Ashley found  a recipe for. We've tested out some recipes for homemade spaghetti sauce where you slowly cook the tomatoes down all day long, and it has yielded probably the most delicious pasta sauces that we've ever tasted. We've made some fresh salsa with the peppers, and we even experimented with sun dried tomatoes. But mostly we just enjoy the fresh tomato slices on sandwiches and salads or just plain with a little bit of salt and pepper. It has been so fun to walk down to the garden almost everyday to harvest a couple more tomatoes, or to water, or to cut some basil. The walk is good exercise for us, and its nice for Rose to be able to get out of the house as well. Here are a couple pictures of our wild tomato garden and some of the fruits of our labors.