My first Gardening Journal: It’s harvest time!

Hello dear garden hivers here at @gardenhive ! I hope you’re doing well and still enjoying planting. Today, I want to give you a quick tour of our homestead as we harvest the fruits of our labor.

First, let’s visit our cucumber garden. We planted them more than a month ago, and it’s time to harvest now. Cucumbers are usually grown for 38 days before we can harvest them.

Since cucumbers are yielding abundantly, we often sell them to the merchants who come to our place to buy fresh farm produce. In a single harvest, we can pick around 200 kilos of cucumber, and the best thing is that we harvest almost every day.

Our bottle gourds are also fruiting abundantly, and merchants often fought over them to get enough supply from our fresh harvest. The best thing about bottle gourds is that they are not prone to pests, and they grow easily in areas with enough sunlight and water.

String beans are also producing more fruits today. We can gather around 15 to 20 kilos in every single harvest. Similar to our cucumbers and bottle gourds, we also sell them to the merchants on a wholesale basis. And they will be the ones to sell these vegetables in the market.

Similar to bottle gourd, squash plants are also not hard to tend to. There are insect pests pestering them, but we can easily drive them away using our natural spray solution. However, squash yields fruits later than any other fruit-bearing vines that we have. They bear fruit after around 75 days after planting. And here’s the catch: we have to wait for the fruit to mature well before harvesting because they are not that good when harvested young.

Aside from the fruit-bearing vines, we also have lady’s fingers, locally known as Okra, and Chili peppers in our home garden. Our okra plantation is quite wide, so we always have an abundant supply. We also sell them to the merchants. Commonly, okra is not hard to tend to, but some varieties are susceptible to pests, especially plant-eating worms. This variety that we planted is the susceptible ones so we need to spray insecticides at least once a week to drive away the worms.

Another shrub that we have is eggplant. We often call this ‘all-around’ vegetable since we can do a lot of dishes out of it. We can make fritters, omelet, plain sautéed, sautéed with soy sauce, or we can just add them to sour soups, cook them with coconut milk, or just grill them and dip them in soy sauce with calamansi or Philippine lemon.

And before I forget, we also have bitter melon in the backyard. Only that they are just around five vines that I almost forgot to add here. They are fruiting well, enough for our consumption, and we can also sell some. Bitter melon is one of my favorite vegetables. When I was young, I used to eat it raw. I bit it like a guava while still hanging on its vine, and so my mother always scolded me for ruining the plant, lol.

Gardening takes time, effort, and dedication, but these are nothing when they are giving you harvests that are more than enough for the family’s needs. We just have to take care of them well so they will also produce more yields. It’s a give-and-take relationship – mutualism.

That will be all for today’s quick garden tour. I hope you enjoy having a peek at our small paradise at home. Happy planting!

| photos are mine, banner photo was edited in Canva |

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