I've been a casual gardener for a couple of decades. It's a whole lot of trial and error. But when it works, it's fantastic.

It's exciting when the zucchini plants actually grow and produce beyond big orange flowers (as pretty as those are). Some years are better than others. We've had two other successful zucchini from the raised bed earlier this season, and now three more today. Tonight's dinner = zucchini fritters. 

The jalapeño plant has been happily potted for a couple of years now. It was orginally planted in the raised bed, then I transplanted it to a pot before bringing it inside for the winter. It gets a lot of west-facing sunshine. 

The strawberry plants have their very own raised bed. If you haven't eaten fresh strawberries, and I mean, non-store bought strawberries, you are missing out.

I have one regular blueberry bush and a pink lemonade one. I'd pretty much given up on them years ago, but after thinking they weren't getting enough sun as the gigantic maple tree in our back yard has grown and created too much shade for where they were planted, I moved them. They do a bit better now. The pink lemonade blueberry bush cracked in half during a thunderstorm a couple of summers ago, but it's grown back and is doing better. If you're wondering, yes, they do taste like pink lemonade :)

We have a lime and a lemon tree. They live outside all summer and come in for the winter. 

The cucumbers (not pictured) have been going strong for a couple of months now, and consistently so year after year. I tried pickling them once. That did not work well, so they get eaten or given away.

The tomatoes (also not pictured) haven't done so well this summer. At least, not the new tomato plants (two). I let the unusable tomatoes fall into the soil of the raised bed, and the plant that has produced the most cherry tomatoes this year was one that grew from a random seed in the soil from last year (presumably). 

The soil is organic, and the compost mixed in is from our composter. The composter is simple - cone-shaped and buried partway in the ground with a lid. Vegetable and fruit scraps, coffee grounds, grain (from when my husband brews), and ash from the fireplace get thrown into the composter, and we occasionally mix it around. When I say "we," let's be honest - I mean, my husband. The composter is tall-ish and awkward and it's not worth pulling back muscles over. So I let him take over on that chore. Unbleached coffee filters used to go in, too, but we've moved away from the pour-over coffee machine to an espresso machine and make Americanos now. I think the compost mix has been missing the paper from the filters, so I've started adding torn up brown paper to balance it out. I know brown paper egg cartons work well, too, but I haven't come across too many of those recently.