15 July Weekly Update

Harvests:

Cucumbers, tomatoes, 3 types of green beans, cayenne and cherry bomb peppers, red pontiac and kennebec potatoes, all the rest of the carrots, a couple of squash, and the first eggplant of the season.

A round through the garden

Another round

Next day

Just a few tomatoes, this time

Carrots

Carrots

Yet another harvest

We dug enough potatoes to make a batch of potato salad (southern, cold, traditional) and mashed potatoes for a lamb shepherd’s pie (yummy dinner!)

Taters, precious

The oldest haricot vert plants have set their second flush of flowers and the newer box is starting to set its first flush. Additionally, the butter beans are starting to set pods, as well as the Monkey Tail field peas which were planted before the Running Conch field peas (all of which are pushing the boundaries of their boxes).

The tomatillos we’ve harvested thus far yielded a pint and a half of salsa verde. We also used our own jalapeno, cayenne, and cherry bomb peppers; onions; and garlic to make it. We chose to refrigerate this instead of can it, so we can use it soon. We also processed a counter top full of tomatoes into sauce as the tomatoes are producing nicely rightly now. This also got refrigerated, and we ate some this past week and will eat more this week.

We did a bitterness taste test on the cucumbers and drew the following conclusions (albeit using a small sample size): a mishapen cuc is more likely to be bitter, especially if it is a lot smaller at one end; the blossom end is more likely to be bitter. In fact, several of the cucumbers we tried were fine at the vine end but turned bitter half way down. These observations lead us to think this is a watering / weather issue.

On Monday night we finally got the rain we’ve been hoping for, a whole 1.5 inches. By Thursday am we’d had 3.5 inches.  Drought. Insects. Flood. Too Hot. Drought.  Too Cold. Flood. Farmers always have something to complain about, that’s for sure. And one of those things is:

MELONS RAIDED!

We came home Tuesday to find the remains of a melon on the front walk, mostly just a few seeds left. Every other melon in the front was GONE! Except for this half-chewed remnant in one of the boxes. We have declared “death to the raiders!”, if we can only figure out who/what did it. I’m betting on the squirrels actually, but it is very possible that a possum or raccoon did it as well.

Seeds on a walk

Maimed and ravaged melon

A grieving and bereft melon plant

The yellow squash plants are on the verge of being removed; we got more fruits this week that didn’t make it than did.

We planted seedlings last week on Saturday, as we reported, and promptly forgot about them. By the time we looked at them Thursday morning, they had all germinated (very very quickly) and had started growing up in the dark and are now spindly. We immediately set up the light system so hopefully they’ll make it in the long run. Also, most of the blue lake bush beans we seeded on Saturday were up by Thursday as well. As were two of the three dutch crookneck squash seeds. And by Friday afternoon the 3rd one had come up.

This is a tomato box in July, unpruned.

Tomato Box

This is what the adjacent box looks like after spending over an hour pruning it, removing dead and dying foliage.

Pruned Tomato Box

On the vine

Peppers

More peppers

Lemongrass (not a pepper!)

Peppers like edible ornaments

Tags: Peppers, potato, raised boxes, root crops, Seedlings, Summer, Tomato, Victory Garden