Substance of Faith: The Sunflower & Other Garden Tidbits...

I've talked about my garden before. I love gardening even though I'm not very good at it. I just love watching stuff grow. Well, as Fall grows closer, the time to clean up our garden for the year is also coming up. Yesterday we spent a good amount of time out in the garden and cleaning it up a little bit in advance. I had planted 2 tomato plants- 1 of the big slicing tomatoes and the other cherry tomatoes. We've gotten tons of cherry tomatoes and none of the large tomatoes. (Next year we'll do 2 of the cherry tomatoes only- I like those much better anyway). Anyway, our tomato plants were growing like crazy. The first summer we were in our house I had planted a few tomato plants but they never got very large. I was somewhat surprised by how much expanding the plants did this past summer. I decided to trim back the tomatoes in preparation of pulling them out soon (basically, I cut as much of them back as I could while holding out hope for a few more tomatoes in the next few weeks). I easily filled half our green waste bin with the tomato cuttings. It was hilarious to me just how big those plants had gotten.
Ethan & I also got down and dug up our carrots. I have never grown carrots before and it was more of an experiment than a real attempt at growing carrots. Ethan had a lot of fun finding all of the carrots "hidden" in the ground. We actually ended up with quite a bowl full by the time we were done.
And to round things out, we also cut down our Sunflower plant (and plan on giving it to grandpa to harvest the seeds). Our sunflower plant was gigantic- the flower and the height. It was kind of like cutting down a sunflower tree.
I'm hoping our Zucchini plant gives us a few more zucchinis before it was done. My friend sent me the BEST recipe for chocolate Zucchini bread (I could seriously sit down and eat the whole loaf). If I can get a few more zucchinis, I can freeze them and make some yummy bread throughout the winter. And our pumpkins are finally turning orange. We've got three medium sized (perfect sized in my opinion) pumpkins growing. They will be great for Halloween...
Dave and I were already talking about the garden next year. I want to plant much of the same stuff, and maybe throw in a few more things. After I had planted the sunflower I read that planting sunflowers can make your other produce taste sweeter. I'm pretty sure that worked for us. Next year I think we'll plant a few more of the sunflowers. :) The nice thing is that Dave has finally taken an interest in the garden. He was talking about planning it for next year and how we can make it look nicer. He loves the location of the garden (along the west side of the house) and could maybe consider expanding it...