How My Garden Grew

Well, now that gardening season is about done in AK, I'm finally getting around to posting some pictures of my garden. First, the apple of my eye, or should I say, the berries of my eye, my strawberries:

This picture doesn't really do them justice. They were huge and juicy and delicious, and my plant was prodigious. I was just getting to the point where I was going to harvest about 10 or 12 berries at once, when tragedy struck:

A horrible, horrible moose came through and ATE all my strawberries! To add insult to injury, he also ate all of my buds on my rose bush, just as they were about to bloom for the second time in the season. Then, to throw salt in my wound, he came back and ate the rest of the strawberry plant! I have about 3 green berries left, a couple of sad leaves, and lots of barren stems. If I could catch that moose, I would hit him with a stick. Or glare at him menacingly from the safety of the kitchen window. But it would be a mean, mean glare.

Now for the real garden:

Yep, that's it. The bushy things are carrots, and then the whitish plants are zucchini, covered in powdery mildew. I didn't do so hot with the zucchini this year. But the carrots are growing great guns, although at the time I took the above picture, they were about this size:

I plan to leave them in the ground until the first frost and then harvest. They're supposed to be sweeter that way. The zucchini plant did produce one lone zucchini:

which fell off (signifying that it was done, I guess) so I cooked and ate it today:

I have one more thing to show you, this time from my indoor "garden". After 5 long years, my orchid is finally blooming!

I am so excited. I had about given up on that sucker. It had been so long, I had actually forgotten what the flowers looked like. I thought they were just a plain magenta, but they're actually very intricate. Aren't they pretty?

That's all for now. And that's probably all for the garden, at least until I harvest the carrots. I hope those guys turn out okay. My first year of gardening hasn't been so hot. Maybe next year, when I have a larger garden, it will be a bit better.