Garden Update- the good, the bad, and the ugly

I think I’m done writing about El Salvador for a while. There are a couple other posts that I’m working on related to El Salvador, but I want to think and reflect on them some more before I post them. So, I will now return to posting random posts about my everyday, less exciting yet good life back in the US.  Mostly I'm going to post about the fruits of my vegetable garden and what I'm doing with those fruits.

So, my vegetable garden hasn't done as well as I would have hoped.  I'm going to blame it on the fact this was my first year growing plants from seeds, a late spring, really hot dry weather, and a lack of proper care while I was away in El Salvador.  

The good: The cucumbers have done well- I've picked at least 15 and there will be probably about 6-10 more.  The jalapenos are doing excellent- lots and lots of pleasantly spicy peppers.

Look at all those nice jalapenos!

cucumbers!

this poor cucumber is oddly shaped because it decided to grow through the trellis fence 

The bad: Tomatoes.  The cherry tomato plant I planted did ok.  I've picked about 20 little tomatoes and they are really yummy, and there are still some more green ones growing, but there should have been so many more.  The regular tomatoes have made me very sad.  The plants grew very slowly to start with.  I started growing them inside, but I started too late.  I thought they would grow really quickly when I put them outside in the nice soil, but they didn't.  I eventually bought some organic fertilizer to give them.  When I got back from El Salvador the plants were huge and I was really excited.  But I didn't see one single tomato on them.  About a week later there were finally some little green tomatoes on the plants, and now there are more little green tomatoes.  I don't know if they will grow to a decent size or if they will have time to get ripe before it gets too cold.  We'll see...

A couple almost ripe cherry tomatoes

the pathetic little green tomatoes

the tomato plants look good, but there just aren't any tomatoes

The ugly: I had planted some cilantro in a couple of pots, and they clearly did not get watered and they were very dead when I got home from El Salvador.  And the broccoli plants grew and grew, but no heads of broccoli ever formed.  I guess broccoli likes cool weather so I think I planted them too late and it got really hot too soon in the summer.  I just pulled the broccoli plants out of the ground and planted some cilantro where the broccoli had been. 

A nice surprise: Acorn squash!!!  I didn't plant acorn squash, but when I got home from El Salvador I found 2 acorn squashes growing amongst the cucumbers.  I'm not sure how the acorn squash grew- maybe there was a seed mix up at the seed factory (but I'm pretty sure that all the seeds I planted looked like cucumber seeds) or maybe a bird stole a seed from somewhere and brought it to my garden or maybe there was a seed in some compost I used.  Or maybe it was a miracle.