Our Community Garden and Green Tomatoes

This is what our living room looks like right now--tomatoes, tomatoes everywhere!

Ripening some of our tomatoes

It might not seem it, but Lee and I didn't go all out with a huge garden this year, since we knew we'd be busy throughout the summer.

Okay, okay we never have a huge garden--we live in an apartment complex, for heaven's sake! We do have a single 4x4 square foot garden on the side of our building that Lee's parents let us build when we first got married. It is small, but for some reason it is hardest thing EVER for us to water it every single day.

We finally opted to plant only five heirloom tomato and two cucumber plants this year. We just might be able to keep them alive.

Since we were using only 7 of the 16 squares, we invited our apartment neighbors and their two boys over to plant a couple of pumpkin seedlings. Another family in the complex heard we had unused squares, so one of their boys planted another pumpkin and a corn/bean combo plant.

We had a veritable community garden at our apartment complex!

Crazy garden!

We also got smart and decided to ask each family to take a couple days of watering and we'd water the other days. I couldn't believe how excited these boys were about the garden! Yes!

They diligently watered on their assigned days. One of the boys couldn't wait to tell us when he spied the first tomato.

First tomato

And to show us the first pumpkin that appeared.

Not quite ripe pumpkin

Our garden was actually doing well this year--so relieved!

The pumpkins were finally ready to harvest a few weeks ago. They were small, but the perfect size for those neighbor boys.

Cute pumpkin boys

Our tomatoes took a while to get going, so we had to cut take them off the vine while still green since we were expecting a cold snap and some snow for a few days here in Utah.

So many green tomatoes...help!

Whoa! Does anyone have a good recipe for fried green tomatoes they want to share with us?