Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

Even in these fall months, I'm still amazed at what our vegetable garden can grow. Granted it will never make us skip the produce department in the grocery store, but it's really fun to taste freshly grown veggies straight from the backyard. We had such a success this spring/summer that we thought we would give fall veggie growing a try. This fall we are attempting a few different things, almost all from the Brassica genus. We are growing:

• broccoli (one of my very favorites),
• cauliflower (a close cousin),
• cabbage (growing it will force me to learn how to cook it!),
• brussels sprouts (just curious to try),
• spinach,
• and a variety of mixed greens, some spicy and some not (they really jazz up a sandwich).

Here is the garden a month or so after we planted it (we bought too many plants for both beds, so I had to expand to a few pots in the back!):And here it is now! My, oh my, how that garden grows! I feel like it is just bursting at the seams. (The leaf pile for making compost also 'grows' too this time of year. Notice in the top right of the photo that we not only filled up our ginormous 4'x4'x4' bin but had to extend it out --- temporarily until they compress down to fit --- another 3' or so.)I couldn't resist posting some cool closeups of the veggies I took while playing with the macro setting on my camera:

cabbage

spicy greens

broccoli (looking so pretty with morning dew on top!)

Of course, not everything is looking so lovely. Some of our poor brussels sprouts got attacked by the caterpillars. For days I just kept plucking them off the leaves. Those little guys are hard to find though because they like to chill on the underside of the leaves. We just hope we get some beautiful butterflies out of it!

The other night we got to taste the fruits of our labor. Our first broccoli head was ready to harvest. I felt like such a proud momma. "I remember when it was just a baby, no bigger than my little finger..." Here is it's glamor shot:Boy did it make a wonderful dinner. Fit for a king! Here it is all steamed up with Nathan's amazing grilled rib-eye steak topped with blue cheese and a classic sour cream-and-chives baked potato. I almost feel that if you've never tasted freshly picked broccoli, you haven't really tasted broccoli. It is so much more tender and sweet than the grocery store variety. It is incredible. My stomach definitely thanked me that night!