Walk in my Garden

My garden this year has taken on a life of its own and definitely not followed my plans. 

First I did not realize how much of a weed strawberry plants are. 

I tried to fence these babies in and must trim them weekly but they just keep growing back with a vengeance. 
This picture also shows one of my absolute favorite additions to my garden this year.  I can reach that faucet while standing on the sidewalk and it's hooked up to a soaker hose.  I will admit the garden has been watered a lot more frequently since the installation of this.  So cool!

I'll skip past the onion patch where the onions are all harvested or dead and move on to the green peppers.  I love bell peppers!  They are one of my favorite things to eat and cook with.  Every year I just can't get very many from my plants because just when they are ready to give me a ton of peppers it will frost over and kill them.  It doesn't stop me from trying to grow them every year.  (By the way, sorry about my stupid shadow in the picture.  Jeez, you wouldn't think I'm a photographer or anything.....)

Next up are my tomatoes.  They always seem to get out of hand on me.  I didn't plant as many this year but they're still producing plenty for the amount we can eat & can.

I tried planting seeds this year but when I planted my starters they all died.  Next to the tomatoes were supposed to be mini cucumbers.  After a few weeks I had a vine growing and flowering, so I thought it was the mini cukes coming back  to life.

This isn't a mini cuke plant.  So now I'm thinking either my seeds were incorrectly labeled or I had a seed from my compost bin sprout.

I'll skip over the potato spot since I've already harvested all of them.  At the end of the line is hot peppers.  I'm sure I've already mentioned these babies are hot and they are growing like weeds!

There's about 5 in this picture with several flowers.  I've used them in salsa but there's just too many!  I ended up finding out how to dry and grind them up and now I have a nice supply of hot chili powder. 

This is supposed to be a picture of my compost bin.  The reason you can just barely see it is because one of my decorative gourds that I had last year decided to grow.  Since it is growing out of what I like to call "super-soil" this thing can grow several feet in one day and we've had to cut it back several times so it doesn't overtake our lilac bushes.  

And there are a couple dozen of these on the plant.  This has been a fun surprise to watch grow and after I've harvested all of them I'll just throw the plant back into the compost bin. 

On the rest of the fence are these. 

They have kind of a sour taste and I think they would make awesome grape jelly but I haven't had very many this year and certainly not enough to make jelly.  The grape vine was truly an experiment.  Menards clearances out their gardening supplies at the end of the year so I think the starter was $1.  I figured if it grows it grows, if not oh well.  Surprisingly each year it has done better and better with this year being the first year to produce fruit (I think I planted it three years ago.)  Maybe next year I'll have enough grapes to make a jelly.