July 2015 Update – Summer Garden

Much has happened in the garden since our last post a month ago. Pea, lettuce, and cabbage season ended and tomato season began. Cucumber and haricots verts season kept going… Raspberries ended but blackberries and blueberries began. Summer squash season ended very early this year (a month earlier than usual) as the plants succumbed to squash vine borers. We didn’t get *any* zucchini (not atypical for us) and we didn’t even get enough yellow and patty pan squash to get tired of them this year! The last lettuce harvest was just huge.

Huge Pile of Lettuce

Even More Lettuces

Cabbage / Cucumbers / test Carrot

Sugar Snap Peas & test Carrot

On the other hand, tomato season started early this year, probably because of the heat wave we experienced for almost two weeks in mid-June, and we got the first red tomatoes at least a week earlier than usual this year. We’ve been enjoying homegrown tomatoes almost daily. She has been picking them a day or two earlier than full ripeness because of (irrational) fear that some critter will beat us to them.

Typical July Daily Harvest

All of the garlic and onions have been cured and trimmed and we will finish up preserving them this weekend (we chop and freeze the onions and mince and freeze most of the garlic in order to ensure it lasts in storage).

Trimmed Garlic & Onions

Candy Onions

We dug the last two types of potatoes this weekend (Kennebecs and Red LaSodas) and they have joined the previously-dug Yukon Golds in the basement on a piece of burlap to cure and store.

Potatoes on Burlap in Basement

The haricots verts (French green beans) flourished in the past month and we canned 41 pints of green beans! They’re likely to have a second blooming but the first blooming is always the most productive (and highest quality).

Canned Haricot Vert

Bucket of Haricot Vert

We pulled up two of the three areas of carrots this weekend as well. We have plenty of carrots and will be sharing them with friends and canning them for later use.

Washed Carrots

Bucket of Carrots

The first butter beans are about ready to be picked and the field peas have started putting out pods as well. Melons and winter squash are growing, but it’s always hit-and-miss for us on whether we’ll get actual melons or squash. The fig trees have also put out figs, although it’ll still be at least a couple of weeks before they ripen. We were concerned about the fig trees because we had a very cold winter, but they pulled through. We have noticed that a few limbs died though and need to be cut. We also have four apples on our trees! Hopefully we’ll get to them before the deer do this year.

Finally, believe it or not, it’s already time to start some of the Fall crops in the basement. On Saturday, we started broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage. They’ll get planted out in mid- to late-August, depending on the weather. In a couple of weeks, we’ll start the Fall greens inside as well.

Happy gardening until next time!

Summer Squash

Garden Abundance!

May and early June proved to be abundant times in the garden. Since we switched to hybrid instead of heirloom broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage last year, we actually are able to pick a decent amount of these plants! Because winter lasted so long this year, we planted only the earliest peas (sugar snap, snow, and shelling) we have and have been delighted to be able to harvest a decent amount of peas. We actually had enough shelling peas to both eat fresh-steamed and to blanch some for freezing. They’re about done though and we pulled up many of the plants earlier today. We also had great success with radishes this year (they’re actually one of our more difficult “crops”, if you can believe that).

Three types of peas

Shelled Peas

Blanched peas drying before freezing for future eatin’

Broccoli & Radishes

Broccoli, Cabbage, and Cauliflower

Cabbages, sugar snap peas, and the last of the broccoli

Cauliflower growing

Cauliflower, red cabbage, and cucumbers

We picked our first cucumbers about two weeks ago and have been picking them regularly since. And we picked the first haricot vert (French style) green beans this weekend! Let the deluge begin…

French green bean (haricot vert) plants

First haricot vert of the year!

Turnips & the first cucumbers

More turnips

Turnip greens

Back in mid-May, we cut the garlic scapes and have used them in cooking the same way we would use garlic. We pulled the garlic bulbs today and they’re currently curing under cover.

Garlic scapes

Newly pulled garlic curing

Last week, we pulled up the yellow granex onions. The tops had all fallen over and browned but the bulbs were pretty small. We don’t think this type does very well in this area since the “Candy” variety is still growing strong.

“Candy” varietal onion patch

Yellow granex onions curing

Earlier today we also cut the last of the mustard and most of the remaining kale.

Last of the mustard greens and some kale

In early May, a luna moth hung out next to the door on our side porch for 3 days. Wikipedia tells us that these moths have a life span of only a week, so we suspect it spent the last three days of its life next to our door. But maybe it was the first three days…

Luna moth

Putting the eggplants under the protective cover until they were larger has paid off. We removed the cover a couple of weeks ago and the plants are now large enough to survive the flea beetle onslaught and the plants look healthy. We spray them regularly with Neem, but it doesn’t seem to help all that much since we see flea beetles every time we go out to the garden.

Healthy eggplants

We’ve been enjoying carefully dug new potatoes a couple of times in the last couple of weeks and earlier today we went ahead and dug the Yukon Gold potatoes since their foliage had died back quite a bit. We’re planning on frying up the little nubbins with dinner tonight while the larger potatoes have been put on burlap in the basement to cure. We still have a couple of other varieties in the garden (Kennebecs and Red LaSodas) but they haven’t died back as much as the Yukons had, so we’ll wait to dig them.

This year’s Yukon Gold harvest

Yukon gold nubbins before frying them up for dinner

We’ve also been getting some raspberries several times a week for the past 2-3 weeks. But she tends to pop these in her mouth as they’re picked, so there are not pictures of piles of raspberries.

Raspberries on the cane

We’ll leave you with some pictures from the garden. Until next time and thanks for reading!

Tomato plants

The promise of future blueberries!

First summer squash will be ready in the next day or two…

Sweet potato vines starting to run

Heap of early June lettuce & arugula

Early June garden view

Celery growing

Lettuce that needs to be picked

Late May lettuce and arugula heap

Spring Update

It’s about time for what has become a quarterly post… We’ve been busy with the regular garden stuff. Seed starting began in the basement in early February, there were light harvests of overwintered plants (many died due to the very cold conditions we experienced this winter in NC), and all of the preparation/planting that comes with spring. We harvested a few overwintered cabbages, including red cabbages, so she made the ever-popular rouladen with “rot kohl” – recipes on front page. For the first time ever, nearly all of our radishes have made actual radishes! We’ve also gotten a respectable amount of asparagus and we pulled the overwintered carrots, although we’ve been using them for juicing rather than for direct eating because their quality suffered from the cold. But, we have no pictures of these things as taking pictures of harvests started to feel too much like a chore.

Recently we pulled up the overwintered beets and mustard along with some early-spring planted kales and made braised greens, which we froze for later.

We’ve gotten almost all of our late-spring/early summer plants in the ground. The only things being hardened off now are some zucchini and charentais melon plants.

We planted our eggplant and pepper plants out a few days ago and put them under cover because nighttime temperatures are still a bit cool for these plants and also because we have flea beetles which can kill young eggplants. We’ll remove the cover from the peppers as soon as night temperatures are higher and from the eggplants once they get more mature (a foot or so tall).

We’ll leave you with a few pictures from the garden:

Volunteer Parsley Plant

Summer Squash

Sugar snap peas behind red cabbage

A productive radish box with other things

Potato patch

Onion patch

Thyme container – we sprouted the seeds in the basement

Mustard & Kale

Lettuce and snow peas

Leeks

Haricot vert box

Garlic

One area of cucumbers – we have two more

Cabbages

Broccoli behind tomatoes – the broccoli will be done once the tomatoes get large enough to need more space

Asparagus box

New Year, Seed Startings et al

We used to do weekly garden updates and it looks like they’ve now turned into quarterly updates… The last update was before our first frost last year, which occurred a couple of weeks later than usual. Here are a few pictures of the last summer harvest right before the frost:

Right before the 1^st frost

Last tomatoes

Celery

Winter squash

Barely mature winter squash

Many of the green tomatoes ripened on the counter and we still had a few tomatoes until shortly after Christmas.

We also had a Thanksgiving Day harvest of three cabbages!

Thanksgiving Day Cabbages!

Other December/early January harvests included broccoli, more cabbage, greens (which we juiced), arugula, lettuce, radishes, and turnips

Broccoli & Cabbage

Greens for Juicing

Turnips & Radishes

End of December Arugula & Lettuces

Turnips & radishes in late December

Broccoli & greens in late December!

Unfortunately, in mid January, it turned really cold for several days and all of our overwintered cauliflower and half of the broccoli died, despite our efforts at using burlap and garden fabric to protect the plants. It was very disappointing as most of the cauliflower had formed heads and a couple of them were at harvestable size.

But here we find ourselves at the beginning of February which means that indoor seed starting needed to get started! Earlier today we started cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, mustard, celery, and leeks in our basement seed starting area with more to come every weekend for the next few weekends.

Yesterday and today brought beautiful weather for this time of year (upper 60s) so she spent part of the day puttering around the yard and removing 4 of the 7 small square boxes in the front yard. The wood had rotted and we no longer need the extra growing space (because of our larger backyard boxes, installed in November 2013). The remaining 3 have stuff overwintered in them so they’ll be removed in the spring.

We’ve been eating from our preserved harvests all winter. Earlier today she made a “chili” with a couple of the smaller sized winter squash that we still have (small being relative since some of the winter squash were huge). The basic recipe is at this link following, but we use beef stew meat instead of brisket: http://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/texas-beef-brisket-chili

Thanks for visiting our blog!

Falling into Autumn

Wow, how time flies! It’s already been 2 months since our last blog post. Double WOW for the tomato year we’ve had this year. Amazingly, many of the tomato plants planted way back in April are still producing, although looking pretty ragged. This will likely be their last week as it’s forecast to frost next weekend (a bit later than average for us). We have so much canned and frozen tomato sauce that we may not need to grow sauce tomatoes next year!

Plenty of Tomatoes

Getting to be the Last of the Tomatoes

It’s been a great season in the garden (except for melons which eluded us this year). We’ve gotten so many winter squash of various sorts this year that we’re probably going to give some away. There are just far too many for us to consume. We decided to try roasting the seeds of the ones we’ve used and loved the result so much that we’ve roasted seeds three times this season. Just separate as much pulp from the seeds as reasonably possible; rinse and pat dry; toss with oil of your choice, salt, and paprika (we love the paprika addition); and roast in a single layer at 300-325 degrees for about 20 minutes (stirring at 10 minutes in). They made a great crunchy snack! We stored them in the ‘fridge.

Roasted Winter Squash Seeds

Winter Squash

Yes More

You didn’t think we were done did you?

It’s been a very productive season in the garden, even though time constraints left us tending to the garden only two or three times a week this year. We got plenty of figs (unexpected because last winter was really harsh and parts of both trees were damaged), carrots, butter beans, field peas, haricots verts and other green beans, beets, cucumbers, sweet and hot peppers, okra, herbs of various sorts, eggplant, shelling beans, and a smattering of raspberries and blackberries (which never make it inside to be photographed as she eats them as she picks them).

Harvest

Harvests like squash

See the squash?

Summer Harvest Day

Carrots

Canned Carrots

Canned Pickled Taqueria Carrots

Field Peas & Butter Beans

Flagrano Shelling Beans drying

Butter Beans – Lots of Shelling Happened!

Blanched Field Peas & a Couple of Radishes

The fall “crops” – cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, Chinese kale, mustard, and lacinato kale – are all doing really well. The broccoli and cauliflower haven’t produced anything yet but the plants are the best looking ones of these types we’ve ever grown. We attribute it partially to our willingness to try hybrids (as opposed to heirlooms) this year. Lately we’ve been harvesting radishes and arugula for salads. We’ve had to purchase lettuce this season because our lettuce crop didn’t do well with the neglect and didn’t make it. C’est la vie…

Parsley container

Kale patch

Cauliflower & Broccoli box

Cabbages & Chinese Kale

It’s the Great Cabbage, Charlie Brown!

Autumn Garden

Another View of the Autumn Garden

Unfortunately, when we went out to the garden this weekend, two of the apple trees we planted last fall were broken about two feet above the ground. It was very disheartening. We suspect deer. We cut the trees at the break and hope they will come back next year. At least 3 feet of growth was lost from each tree.

Broken and Sad Apple Tree

Shattered Dreams Apple Tree

Hopefully it won’t be two more months until our next blog post, but you never know. There’s just so much time in the day and choices about priorities have to be made. Thanks for reading!

Le French Squash Et Al

Introducing Pierre and his sidekicks.

Winter Squash

Three weeks ago we harvested Pierre (a Musquee du Provence winter squash weighing in at 11 pounds) and two heirloom butternut type squashes. Since this harvest, we’ve had problems with partially grown winter squash detaching from the vine and shriveling (8 or so died this way). This has been a problem for us every year. We’ve come to the preliminary conclusion that the reason is too much rain. In June/July, we went 3 weeks without any rain at all and then the rainfall was moderate. It was during this time that the various winter squashes we’ve harvested matured. Since the end of that dry period, we’ve gotten lots of rain every week (normal for North Carolina). We think that the detaching problem is due to the rainfall. If anyone knows if “too much rain” causes this problem in winter squash, please leave a comment and let us know. Thanks!

We pulled up about 40% of the spring-seeded carrots a couple of weeks ago. We’ve got plenty of carrots!

Carrots

This past weekend, we cleared away winter squash vines from some of the “lawn” areas since the vines weren’t producing anymore (we still have a few winter squash out there so there will hopefully be more picking next month) and we were getting tired of having to walk through them. The grass/weeds were quite tall since they hadn’t been mown in a couple of months.   After we were done mowing, we saw that a young-ish box turtle had been resting in the tall grass. We were sick that we thought we had mowed over the turtle and killed it, but, lo-and-behold, the turtle was unscathed and walked away from the blades of death!

Saved from the mower blades

In other picking… We’ve been getting plenty of tomatoes this year (after last year’s awful tomato season) and have canned over 30 pints of tomato sauce. We have so much now that we’re even starting to give tomatoes away to friends and co-workers. It was also a bumper haricot vert year (almost 60 pints canned) with more still coming. We recently picked the first field peas (aka cowpeas, black eyed peas, or southern peas) and the first butter beans (aka lima beans). We also drastically cut the basil this past weekend and made pesto which we froze into portion sizes in muffin tins.

Plenty of Tomatoes

Summer Harvest Day

Basil

Last weekend we planted out the fall crops – cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, kales, and mustard. We also seeded lettuce and cilantro. The fall crops we direct seeded a couple of weeks ago (arugula, beets, radishes, turnips, and carrots) are all germinated and growing up. We’ve had a mild summer (for North Carolina) and until a couple of weeks ago, our spring-planted kales and mustards were still growing! We removed them as they were starting to look ragged and we needed the space for Fall crops.

 

High Summer in NC

Potatoes curing in basement

Potatoes and winter squash! We dug the potatoes this weekend and are quite happy with the amount we got this year. They’re currently curing in the basement. We also cut several butternut squash that were ready. These are “Metro” variety from Johnny’s and they’re supposed to be smaller sized; the catalog description says between 2-1/2 and 3-1/2 pounds each. Ours are much smaller. The largest is a bit over 1-1/4 pounds and the smaller ones aren’t even half a pound each. Oh well, we’re happy to have gotten winter squash this year since it’s an unreliable crop for us. We’re expecting quite a few more other types of winter squash as they are currently maturing on the vine. In past years, we’ve had problems with winter squash partially growing and then shriveling a bit before detaching from the vine. This year, that happened with just one squash.

Winter Squash

Winter squash

Winter squash taking over

We canned 15 pints of haricot verts (French green beans) this week! The plants are now nearing the end of their lives but there are still a few beans sizing up. We also canned another 5 pints of tomato sauce.

Canned haricot vert

Tomato sauce

The first round of cucumbers are still producing but have slowed down considerably. The leaves of the plants have started to show the various diseases cucumbers eventually get so she cut off many leaves this week to hopefully slow the spread of disease.

Cucumbers!

Fall “crops” including broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kales, and mustard were started in the basement on the 14^th and most are up and growing at this point. These seedlings get planted out near the end of August.

Fall seedlings

Cabbages heading up

All but two of the summer squash plants have been removed at this point. Squash vine borers did them in. The two remaining plants are patty pan squashes that also have SVBs but have established root points at many places along their stems so parts of the plants are still doing OK and female flowers have formed. Since we don’t need the space yet, we decided to let them be to see if the squash actually mature.

Okra plant – foreground

The tomato plants are doing really well this year because we haven’t gotten much rainfall (tomatoes don’t like to get their leaves wet)and also because we switched over to growing primarily hybrids that have some disease resistance. We had a few Amish Paste seeds left (an heirloom variety) so we’re growing 3 or 4 Amish Paste plants and it’s telling how much better the hybrids are doing. Not only are the hybrids significantly more productive but the AP plants are the ones that have the inevitable disease problems first. The AP plants aren’t looking so great anymore while the various hybrids are all looking good. Particularly when it comes to tomatoes, we’re going to stick with hybrids in the future!

Haricot Vert box – coming to the end of their season

Baby watermelon

Orange, Blue, Red, Gold, Green, Purple: Colors of the Garden

Plums! The plum tree we planted last Fall made three plums this year. We’re pretty excited about it! And the fig trees, after getting a very late start this year due to the very cold winter (we weren’t even sure they made it through), have started putting out the first figs. We’re sure to be competing with a variety of critters once the figs start to ripen. It doesn’t look like we’re going to have any apples this year but the trees are looking very healthy as she has been very diligent about knocking the Japanese beetles into a small tub of water and disposing of them daily. The beetles are very destructive and we can’t wait for their season to be over in a few more weeks.

Orange tomatoes & blue plums

Summertime harvests are clipping along. The tomato deluge began a couple of weeks ago and the cucumbers have been producing like gangbusters for longer than that. We went three weeks without any rain (yikes!) so we had to water by hand, using our well water after the rain barrels went dry. The lack of rain was a bummer but the garden plants actually appreciate not getting their leaves wet. The tomato and cucumber plants are among the healthiest looking we’ve ever had at this stage of summer and we’re pretty sure it’s because of the dry weather, coupled with a relatively low number of pests this year because of the very cold winter we had.

And the deluge begins

One day of Cucumbers

We got a fair number of blueberries from the one bush that is producing berries. There were enough to make our cheddar blueberry jalapeno muffins (recipe link on homepage). The picture shows about half of the berries we ended up with over the course of a week. We’ve also gotten several small handfuls of raspberries and blackberries but these go from cane to mouth, so no pics.

Blueberries

Blackberries & Raspberries in background

We lost the first two summer squash plants to squash vine borers last Monday and the remaining plants all have them so it won’t be long before summer squash season is over for us. We’re happy with the amount of summer squash we got this year and are almost tired of eating it several times a week in various dishes. Here’s a link to a keeper recipe we tried this year: http://www.mrfood.com/Vegetables/Italian-Stuffed-Zucchini-Boats (we used a garlic scape run through the mini processor instead of the minced garlic the recipe called for and it was delicious).

Typical harvest day

This year’s onions are all cured and trimmed and are waiting to be put through the food processor for chopping and then freezing. We like preserving our onions this way since it results in no loss due to rotting in storage. The frozen onions work great in cooking applications.

Onion harvest, cured and trimmed

Hardneck garlic, cured and trimmed

This past weekend we canned 7 more pints of haricot verts and the first 7 pints of tomato sauce. Total pints of haricot verts canned this year is currently 39!

Yes, we have haricot verts

A few more cucumbers

We’ve raided the potato plants twice in the past couple of weeks in order to have new potatoes for dinner. The plants are mostly died back at this point and so we’ll be digging the potatoes soon. If only there were more than 24 hours in the day…

Potatoes for Dinner – Yukon Golds & Red Pontiacs

But don’t miss a day! Or you get this!

All in all, the garden is doing really well. We planted a bunch of various winter squash this year (since we’ve had such bad luck in past years getting them to actually make a squash) and the vines are taking over the garden. It seems like every time we go out we need to remove another vine from attempting to invade an adjacent box (we do this by putting it down on the ground, not by cutting it!). There are numerous actual squash growing, some of which are almost ready to harvest, and we don’t seem to have the problem of a half-grown squash detaching from the vine this year. Hopefully we’ll be inundated with winter squash come Fall.

Winter Squash Cover De World

And taking over more

Heirloom type butternut

The field peas and butter beans are all growing strongly and should start producing in about a month or so. Then the shelling fun begins…

Bush butterbeans, running

Garden Frog Under Rain Barrel – Peeking

Fairy Tale Eggplants

Red Tomato

 

 

Red Tomatoes ! Also Grilled Squash recipe

In Honor of the First Tomatoes…

First Tomatoes

We’re doing a special post in honor of the first tomatoes of the year! Two Early Girls. Picked a bit early because she started fretting that some critter was going to beat us to the totally ripe tomato. These two will sit on the counter for a couple of days to fully ripen before being enjoyed as tomato sandwiches.

The last of the lettuce for the season was cut on Friday. There was quite a bit still in the garden – we’ll be sharing with friends and have plenty for us too. We keep our washed lettuce rolled in layers between paper towels in the refrigerator and find that it easily keeps for two weeks this way, often even longer.

Mound of Lettuces

We’ve been getting plenty of summer squash and cucumbers. We made three more quarts of refrigerator pickles this week and won’t have to buy cucumbers for our homemade green juices for the foreseeable future. More canning of haricot verts will be happening this weekend. The plants are really productive right now!

More than it looks like – Haricot Verts

The field peas we planted last Sunday had already come up strongly by Thursday. One day there was just dirt and the next day there were 2 inch tall field pea seedlings. It’s amazing how fast field peas grow! Other things planted on Sunday are also coming up (butter beans, flagrano shell beans, more winter squash, and more haricot verts) but they tend to burst forth a bit slower than field peas.

We recently tried a new summer squash recipe and really enjoyed it (enough that we made it again just a few days later). So for those of you looking for new ways to prepare your squash bounty, here’s one you might want to try. We make ours in a grill pan on the stovetop but you can adapt the technique to use an outdoor grill if you wish.

Grilled Zucchini with Olives, Cilantro, and Tomato

4 tablespoons olive oil

2 or 3 teaspoons tamari (to taste)

2 teaspoons ground pepper

1 or 2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar (to taste)

2 or 3 summer squash (yellow or zucchini), cut in half lengthwise

1 tablespoon minced garlic

¾ cup diced tomatoes

¼ cup pimento stuffed green olives, drained and sliced

½ teaspoon salt

½ to ¾ cup vegetable stock

2 tablespoons fresh cilantro, chopped

 

Preparation:

In a small bowl, whisk together 2 tablespoons of olive oil with tamari, 1 teaspoon pepper, and balsamic vinegar.

Heat the grill pan on medium high

Brush squash on all sides with the stuff you just mixed.

Sear the summer squash on both sides and then reduce heat to medium and cover the pan so the squash will cook all the way through with just a little bit of steaming happening.

While the squash is cooking, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a small sauté pan over medium high heat. When the oil is hot, add the garlic and brown slightly. Add tomatoes, olives, salt, and remaining teaspoon of pepper. Cook for 3 or so minutes and then add vegetable stock. Continue to cook until volume reduces by one quarter. Stir in cilantro, pour over grilled squash, and serve.

Summer – June 15, 2014

We’ve been happily harvesting and eating from the garden all month. Pea season is now over – we removed the plants today even though they were still producing a little but the mid- to upper-90s forecast for later in the week will do them in. All in all, we were pleased with pea season this year. It got started a bit late due to winter really hanging on but we had our fill of sugar snap, snow, and shelling (English) peas.

Zucchini

Cucumbers and Squash

First canning of haricot verts

Lettuce season is almost over too. We had so much lettuce that we shared with friends and co-workers a couple of weeks ago. Braising greens (mustard, kales, turnip greens) have also been abundant and we’ve made and frozen plenty of braised greens for eatin’ year-round. Summer crops have come in strong. We’re harvesting shareable quantities of summer squash (three types: yellow crookneck, patty pan, and zucchini) and also plenty of cucumbers. We’ve already made our first batch of refrigerator pickles, which includes our own dill, with more to come this week. We’ve also already both eaten & canned lots of haricot verts (French filet green beans).

Lettuce patch

First tomato turning red

The first tomatoes are starting to turn red! We can’t wait for the tomatoes, they usually happen the first week of July for us.

Beets drying

Beet Tops eaten by deer

Deer ate the tops off of the beets so we went ahead and pulled them up. We were actually surprised at how many usable beets there were. This is probably our best beet harvest ever. We usually have problems getting the beets to size up to a usable size so we were pleased to get so many large enough to use. Admittedly, we’re not winning any awards for largest beet though.

Onions curing

Softneck garlic was pulled up and cured a couple of weeks ago and the hardneck garlic was pulled up today. We also pulled all of the onions today and they are curing. Most of the onions will be diced in the food processor and frozen. This was a technique we tried for the first time last year and we were pleased with the results and were able to use our own onions in our cooking for most of the winter.

Watermelons

Butter Beans

Charentais Melon box

Succession planting has been in full swing. Some butter beans (a.k.a. lima beans) got planted last weekend where the radishes had been growing and a few more haricot vert went in a small front yard box that had held lettuce. More melons (charentais and watermelon) were also planted and are already coming up. Today we seeded field peas, butter beans, cucumbers, French climbing beans, flagrano shelling beans, and more winter squash where the various types of peas had been growing and in various and sundry available spots.

Potato plants starting to die back

The potatoes are almost ready to be dug and last week we stole a few new potatoes from some of the plants for dinner. They were wonderful steamed and topped with a bit of butter and our parsley.

Winter squash running

Cabbage head

Baby Butternut Squash

The weather has not been conducive to the brassicas this year (which are very hit-and-miss for us each year). We may get a couple of small heads of broccoli and cabbage but the cauliflower looks like a no-go this season. We’ve had to remove quite a few brassica plants due to excessive caterpillar damage as well, despite spraying Bt and hand-picking those dang caterpillars. The winter squash plants are sprawling about although we’re concerned that the first squashes likely did not get well-pollinated – they’re looking like they’re on the verge of shriveling (a common problem for us). But at least the haricot vert, the dependable workhorses of the garden year after year, are producing like crazy!

Pear trees we planted last fall

Plums on tree we planted last fall

Mid June Garden View

Another mid June garden view

Hydrangeas given fighting chance by cutting back the azaleas

First eggplant forming

Fig Trees

Dill, with Sage behind

Cucumbers on the Vine

Cucumber Trellising

Celery Patch

Carrot Patch

Blueberries waiting to turn blue

Blackberries forming

Basil Patch