I can't complain, at least about my garden, we've had a nice season so far. Over the past few weeks I've picked about 8 tomatoes, with many more ripening on the fine. We've had 3 heads of broccoli, and more is still growing. Our spinach gave up a little early, but I collected enough to freeze about two cups of leafy greens and make two quiches. Our beans were doing very well last week and I got about 4 cups of beans before the cucumbers and tomatoes started to take over. They're still growing, but I'm not sure how many more beans we'll get. I've had enough Rainbow Chard to make at least 3 meals and set 2 cups aside in the freezer. We've also had about 4 HUGE cucumbers (that I still need to make pickles out of). I just harvested our garlic, and it's tiny, but it DID grow, despite being transplanted and grown by someone who didn't know to cut the flowers off early...
Here's a bigger overview of our garden, please ignore the pile of junk that's still eagerly awaiting being taken to a dump. I really will get around to calling a trash removal service one of these days...
(Our tomatoes are taking over the world...sort of)Today we picked a few potatoes and our first ear of corn. Visiting my mother's house I got a little paranoid that squirrels would come snatch our corn away before we got a taste so I went ahead and picked an ear, even though I wasn't sure it was ready.
So this isn't the exact corn we cooked, I forgot to take a picture before hastily striping off the husk. I couldn't wait to see if we had real corn. We did! It was beautiful (even if a little small).
(This picture highlights our potatoes, newly knotwood free. We spend a couple of hours deknotwooding the back yard)
So what do you do with your bounty? Well, cook of course. I made a 95% local dinner tonight. The pork is from a local farm. In the vegetable mix there's a bit of squash we had delivered from Boston Organics (but it also comes from a local farm) and a few white beans I picked up from a group of Mennonite women at the local farmer's market (along with some of their "farm fresh" eggs). Other than the spices everything is from a 100 mile radius, and either bought outside of a regular grocery store or grown in our garden. Delicious!
2 comments:
You have such a nice variety! I think you have a slightly cooler climate than we do. All our lettuce-like veggies went to seed almost a month ago, and the sugar peas have quit also. I have onions out there, but they're getting trampled by other plants and I have no idea when to harvest (one trio was from a store-bought onion that was sprouting, so it had no planting instructions)
We have a tomato plant and a cucumber that are vying for dominance on one end of our garden, and a watermelon plant that is attempting to take over the rest of the actual yard. I was going to move one of the (no-kidding) 6-foot long runners that had jetted out into the grass, but then found a football-sized melon growing off it. We now have an excuse not to mow (at least not to mow the area near the garden). There were 3 other melons ranging in size from golf ball to softball too, most of which were in or next to the walls of the raised bed. The kids are thrilled :)
My cucumber plant is a pickling variety (6" or shorter cukes), and we've eaten some and pickled some and I'm beginning to wonder if we should set up a farm stand in the driveway to get rid of the rest. And all of our tomatoes are grape- or cherry- sized since the kids like to snack on them. Though the giant grape-tomato plant has been sufficiently fertile that I'm thinking I may can some tomato sauce after all.
We're in zone 6, which actually surprised me because it's the same zone I was in in Albuquerque. I didn't really plant any lettuce this year, I figured it was readily available and have been disappointed by the lack of lettuce at the local farmer's market. I won't make that mistake next year! Now my chard on the other hand, I don't know what to do with. There's only so much chard a person can consume.
Your onion, by the way, will probably flower but not produce a larger onion. Apparently onions have a 2 year life cycle, which is something I didn't know before volunteering on the farm. But you should be able to gather the seeds from the onion flower, plant them in the fall, and have tons of onions come up in the spring. Or so I'm told. My onion that I planted seemed to get choked out by the garlic, I don't see the plant anymore, let alone a bloom.
By the way, I'm jealous of the watermelon plant, we didn't get around to any melons this year. Well, I did get a free plant from a friend, but it's still in the miniature state and I don't expect it to grow up and sprout before the end of the growing season, although I might be surprised. But it is kind of amazing how much room those creepers use. Last year we had a pumpkin that took over an entire quarter of our community garden plot.
This year our cucumbers are out of control. I accidentally planted, or forgot that I planted, cucumbers in the same bed as my tomatoes, so they don't have a vertical surface to grow up. I should have taken a picture of that section of the garden, it's like a sea of leaves.
I could really use a good pickling recipe if you've got one. While we've got a ton of tomatoes growing on the vine, I'm worried that I'll ever have enough to can. On or two will get ripe at a time, never enough to can, and I'm worried that they'll go bad before I pick some more, so they all pretty much get eaten. We've got some heritage varieties, although I couldn't tell you which they are, I lost the tags almost as soon as I bought them. One variety seems to produce green tomatoes, or maybe they take forever to turn red? Another one is almost purple. Then there's the set of tomatoes I grew from seeds, they're much, much smaller than the others but now starting to show small tomatoes too. Surely with all those plants (a total of 14 plants) I should have a bounty at some time?
Now I need to figure out what to plant in my formerly spinach area. I've been waiting for the seeds to save before I pulled the plants, and I think they're almost ready to be harvested. I have no idea what to plant however, considering it's the middle of the summer.
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