My vegetable garden for this year

For the last few years I tried to grow fresh herbs as well as vegetables and this year is no exception. I started off fairly small, but last year (I blogged about it) had a huge number of butternut squash in my garden. So this year, I opted for spaghetti squash and only one plant. I also planted tomatoes as well as peppers. My herbs from last year came back and I had some old onions and sweet potatoes that I simply added to the patch since they had started to sprout.

copyright Durhamonthecheap - my little vegetable patch

In the picture above you can see my one tomato plant. They had these and peppers on sale ad Aldi about a month ago for $2.50 and I bought a tomato and pepper plant. Since I will be traveling this summer, I did not want to have a lot of vegetables in my garden as I will not be able to water them regularly. The tomato is about a month old and you can see it has done very well. The one pepper plant from Aldi is right behind it, you cannot see it in the picture. The pepper plant is almost as tall as the tomato plant. Both plants have developed a number of blossoms, so it looks like I will be getting plenty of things to harvest again. The tomato has developed several small green tomatoes already that should be ready to harvest in a couple of weeks.
In the foreground is the spaghetti squash plant that I got from Lowes this past weekend for about $3.00. The back of the vegetable patch has two roses and a couple of Asiatic lilies. The roses were from Aldi as well and were less than $5, while the Asiatic lilies were bought at Lowes on clearance for $3.00. Overall, a fairly small initial investment. And with one more pepper plant from Lowes for $3.00 and both cilantro and chives returning from last years, the garden is set for this year.
I like to add some flowers to my little vegetable garden since the roses and lilies provide some color throughout the year. With the patch visible from the street, I hate to just have green vegetables and herbs in it and the colorful blooms of flowers on the side of the patch facing the road make for a more a friendly entry to the house. Below is a close-up of the roses from Aldi that so far have done very well. The yellow rose was planted about a month before the red one and had already 6 flowers, now starting a second blooming cycle. The red rose just started blooming for the first time.

copyright Durhamonthecheap - my two roses from Aldi that are currently in bloom

I have never grown spaghetti squash and initially had planned to use zucchini, but the spaghetti squash looked really healthy when I was at Lowes and so I decided on this type of squash for this year. I still have plenty of time, but I am already thinking about potential recipes for the spaghetti squash!