We have been doing vegetables garden for almost two decades. Every year, we rent a small public gardening plot from the city to grow our summer vegetables. In addition, we also maintain small backyard vegetable garden at the house. These two veggie gardens keep us busy throughout the summer season and provide much needed physical activities. We try to grow most vegetables that we commonly use in our kitchen including tomatoes, beans, zucchini, peas, squash, potatoes, and others.

Flower Gardening

Although we maintain some annuals and perennial flowers around our house, we don’t put much emphasis on flower beds in recent years. Previously we used to do lot of flowers around the house.

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Some highlights of our 2019 flowers garden is shown above. Now a days, we put much efforts on doing vegetables gardening.

Our vegetable gardens are “pure” organic, meaning not using MiracleGro, pesticides, chemical fertilizers & other chemicals. We fertilize our veggies only with leaf composting soil, and farmyard manure (if available).

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Our Best Harvests

This year we had the best harvests of tomatoes, squashes (zucchini, Pumpkin butternut), beans, egg plants & others (shown below).

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Few selected typical harvest are shown below:

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Extra Harvests

What did we do with our extra harvests? As usual, we shared some with our neighbors & friends, and the rest we preserved & stored for off season consumption. We have enough stored vegetables to last for some time.

End of Growing Season

Minnesota weather is brutal for most crops. There is very short window of growing vegetables and often we had to sacrifice our veggies in still fruiting / productive stage due to snow & frost damage.

This year, it was Oct 11-13 weekend night snow & freezing night temperatures brought vegetable growing season to its end.

This year we got our first snow and freezing night temperature on October 11 night. The freezing temp lasted for three consecutive nights with low 40F day time temperature. This was the end of the 2019 vegetable growing season!

We are already looking forward for the year 2020 gardening season!