Garden Thread

Harvest is happening here too!  In the last week we've had:

2 Superette banana peppers
3 very green Carmen peppers, a new-to-us variety that I'm assuming will ripen to a crazy-sweet red, but even severely underripe had tremendous, wonderful sweet flavor
2 heads of garlic; the first was not that close to being ready, the second was perfection
3 pickling cucumbers
1 red onion!

The tomatoes remain defiant.  But the peppers have crossed into that "completely out of control" stage where I don't even realize how many peppers are actually on the plants.  This is how we end up with so many rocket-fucking-hot peppers, where I don't realize they're there and they sit forever before I pick them.

We cooked green beans from our very own garden with dinner tonight, and they were amazing.

I forgot to post, but Wednesday evening sealed it: no more quick runs over to the garden, or leaving it alone for a week at a time. The green beans are in. From the first picking of my two rows, I made 3/4 gallon snapped and bagged. Now it's real work.

The shishitos are looking great. I picked a dozen finger-length peppers, which is expensive-grocery-sized. My Japanese in-laws are already flipping out at pictures in advance of their August visit. Egpplants are getting big, I pulled another palm-sized bell pepper, and I got my first non-Sun Gold tomatoes. Wifemate did a great job weeding too, so everything is looking clean.

THERE IS A TOMATO RIPENING IN MY GARDEN.  THIS IS NOT A DRILL.  REPEAT, THERE IS A TOMATO RIPENING IN MY GARDEN.

It's one of the Heinz 2653 tomatoes, a variety neither of us remembers ordering.  I just looked it up and Fedco describes it as an "early-ripening" small paste tomato.  Goddammit!  Here I thought the first tomato was a sign that the others would follow, but now I discover it's just a really early one.  It's JULY 18.  This is NOT especially early!

Some bucolic scenes from stately Dick n Hisses Garden:


The first tomato!  Picked a shade under-ripe, but that's normally how I roll because I hate when I leave tomatoes to get fully ripe and then a squirrel or bird comes along, takes out one or two big bites, and then leaves the rest to fool me into thinking it's a perfect, glorious tomato.



The start of last week's garlic harvest.  We ended up with two of those trug tubs full of garlic (stalks still attached.  Not two tubs of garlic heads.  That would be... a lot of garlic).



The staggering vastness of this year's blueberry harvest.  The bush set quite a few berries, but the birds didn't share very well.  There's still a fair deal of green berries out there, but we're not very hardcore about trying to get to them.  We will graciously concede this crop to the wildlife.

Hudson Valley Seed Library has a summer overstock sale!  Tons of seeds are 40-50% off!  I just ordered a handful of things for fall planting -- carrots, baby boc choy, and snow peas.  I never do very well with fall plantings, for a variety of reasons.  By this time of year I'm not looking to take on additional garden work with tending to seedlings under grow lights, and it's really hard to keep direct-sown baby plants from getting burned out by the heat.  And by August my farm share has ramped up so much that it's like, "Uh, do I really need any kale from the garden, too??"

But the garlic bed is empty now, and the onions will follow soon, so I want to have something going in there, even if it won't be anything I'm desperate to get yield from.  Carrots are hit-or-miss for us; some years we get enormous crops, other years we get complete failure to germinate.  Normally a second planting is required anyway.  Carrots are assholes.  But they're so pretty, and you can never have too many of them (and you can leave them in the ground for, like, ever)!  The baby boc choy was cheap and the description claimed the variety is hardy and quick, and baby boc choy is my favorite thing for fall's stir-fry season, so why not give it a try?  And speaking of fall's stir-fry season, I've never done any kind of second-planting of peas before.  I always thought they were spring-only, so I'm very curious how this snow pea plan is going to work out.  I did some reading yesterday and the interwebs seem to think that if you can get the plant past flowering before first frost, you're golden.  The type I bought is a 60-day variety, and our first frost is generally October 21.  Seems like we have time!

Oh, and in current news, we picked a Lemon Drop cherry tomato and a Principe Borghese yesterday!  Now we've gotten one of each of our cherries!  Things are happening around here!!

Haha I saved out just the roundest of tomatoes for sandwiches and there are still so many left. We used the rest to make a quart of salsa, along with our bell peppers and old mystery insanity peppers from the freezer.

Ahh, that's the thinking of a true gardener!

I wish I had 30 pounds of tomatoes a week.

Or one pound, even.

(my yields are very very small)

I don't get tons of tomatoes either, and I do 8-12 plants every year.  (Of course, I get tired very quickly of picking cherry tomatoes, so I let a lot of them plunk to the ground and rot.  But I still don't get anything like what ganews does!)

I took out the gherkin vines this weekend, speaking of hilariously small yields.  I had three vines, and harvested every day... and still ended up with a grand total of not quite two pounds of cucumbers total.  (They are all about two inches long.)  My sweet gherkin recipe calls for SEVEN POUNDS.  I have no idea how a person ends up with that many.  This was a fun experiment, but I'm not sure I need to plant gherkins ever again.

Oh, and my other garden work this weekend was doing some rigorous weeding; the catnip was literally blocking the entire path into the garden (we let it go because it's been a banner year for pollinators in our yard), and the empty garlic bed had some kind of monster grass filling it in.  I spent 90 minutes on the hottest day of the year weeding and hacking and tidying up.  Now the garden feels so fantastic.  It's like when you rearrange your furniture and suddenly it feels like you have a new house, but inside the garden instead.  

It's the most meta of all garden posts!

Seriously, though, what a gorgeous haul!!

It was a melancholic tour of the garden yesterday, as I'm struggling to adjust to empty beds where the cucumbers used to be, confronting the reality that the onions should come out next, and realizing that we're already entering the long months of nothing else in those beds.  Garden is so fleeting!

Also, the squirrels are going to town on my big tomatoes, so what looked a week ago like a bumper crop of soon-to-ripen, enormous heirlooms is rapidly shrinking.  More and more of the giant green tomatoes are being pulled to the ground and half-eaten.  Little fuckers.  

And the Kieffer pear tree is thoroughly dead.  Now the second baby pear tree to not make it in that spot.  Oh well.  The wee trees are cheap, so I'll just get another one and try again next spring!  Dammit, I will have a pear tree!!

Took out the cucumber vines today, and emptied the bed where the peas had been.  I left some of the cucumber trellis up, though, because the mutant Juliet tomato volunteer from last year has made a comeback, so I wanted it to have some support.  I also tried to transplant some more volunteer tomatoes from the pea bed to grow on the trellis, but I think I did more of a "ripping them out" job than a "digging them up" one.  They seem a bit... peaked.  We'll see if this afternoon's rain helps them.

I also started my fall crops (or rather "fall crops") -- seeded some Red Core Chantenay and Atomic Red carrots, and some Swiss Giant snow peas.  Every year I plant carrots on a sweltering morning and then have them all get washed out by torrential rains that afternoon, and today seems to be no different.  It was all sunshine and buzzing cicadas this morning when I was working, and now it's Biblical flood rain a mere three hours later.  Maybe I should order more carrot seeds while I've got my computer on...

I did eggplants last year. Only two plants (white casper eggplants and the thin purple japanese ones), and I ran out of good ideas fairly quickly.