First Pics of the New Year (click the pics to view full size)

 This is the view of the garde from the spot closest to the back door. 

 We have asperigus, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, sugar snap peas, 

beets carrots, bell peppers, and garlic.

This is the opposite view with the chicken coop in the background.

 One of the tomato plants is already 5 feet tall.  

I also always plant French marigolds along the bottomof the terrace, 

both for their beauty and their beneficial properties for the garden.

 You can see the cucumber runners and climbing strings attached to plant hangers.  

This gives them theroom to grow up, since I don't have room for them to grow out.  

They have dozens of blooms already.I won't be long and we"ll have plenty of these 

white type pickling cucumbers.

 Here you can see the companion plantings around the tomatos.

 There are mainly carrots and beets.

 The big boy.  These heirloom tomatos get big.

Several dozen tomatos have set.

 Lots of blooms on the yellow crook neck squash too.  

You can also see the beets growing in back.

 A little visiter on the flat leaf parsley.  

Don't know what it would turn into, so ended up chicken food.

 This is the garlic patch.  My first attempt.  We'll see in about a month.

 The red ones are new additiions. 

We traded them for a really broody one we had.  

Huge eggs.

 And this is part of the 10 lbs of bacon that I cured over the last week and 

smoked and packaged yesterday.  I just love the way it looks.  It tastes even better.

 This was a really thick belly from a pastured pork from a farm in Iowa.

I used a sweet dry rub for the cure, but then added a lot of pepper.  Good contrast.