TWO HUNDRED POUNDS plus

As of today, my garden has now produced 201 pounds, 4 ounces of vegetables and herbs. I thought it would do well if it produced 150 pounds of veggies, etc.

Now, now, you disbelievers. I have keep careful records of the production and have a good digital scale to measure the production. I, too, am sort of in disbelief.

The real measure of a person's gardening skills is not whether or not something grows, but rather how much you get in your harvest. I totally lost one of the seasons that I could have grown broccoli, sugar snap peas, cauliflower, lettuce, radishes, potatoes, and other vegetables.

We have now produced more than a third of a pound of produce per square foot and headed for a half. We have two more months of growing season and we have a lot planted for the fall.

I would like to try the broccoli and cauliflower transplants next. I want to see how cauliflower grows, because the way you get the white heads is you have to blanch the heads with their leaves. That means you keep the sun out to get rid of the green in the cauliflower.

The green is chlorophyll and without sunlight it ceases to produce the green color. Some of the methods we use in the garden seem a little bizarre but they work. Why should we try to mess with the perfection that our gardener forefathers and mothers have developed.

Go find something you can do better than some of the old methods. I have tried to and most of the time the tried and true is better than the new.

My oldest daughter always says, "I prefer the old and inferior to the new and superior." I couldn't agree more.