Cough, cough, sputter, sputter, Excuse me while I dust off the blog here. Suffice to say, I have felt like a bee and beaver combined this summer. Busy, busy, busy. Tutoring always kicks up during the summer as I and students have more available hours and caring for the house, the Tomato and the garden have been keeping me occupied. I have also been crafting a bunch in regards to baby knitting. So, hopefully there will be some finished object posts to come in the near future. I am spending some time today organizing my thoughts for the blog and making a “to post” list of topics that I would like to share or discuss. It’s a lengthy list as I feel like I get a new idea each day that I would like to put out into the blogosphere.
So, for today, let’s play a little catch up on the garden. It has been a good year! We are battling a heat wave in our area, and pictures of how the garden looks this week will be posted later this week. But, I wanted to show folks what we were looking at in early July.
First up is the large plot. We have pumpkins popping up and flowering.
We have watermelon beginning to creep alongside of flowering butternut squash.
Sunflowers are starting to stretch toward the sky.
Green beans and peas are climbing the obelisks. I definitely felt that the beans were the best for this type of trellis and may have to buy another cucumber trellis for the peas since their height would be more appropriate for that. I would love to find organic scarlet runner beans for the second obelisk for next year. It would bring a great punch of color to the garden.
The potatoes continued to flourish and the cucumbers began to climb.
I thought that I was having a bumper crop of onions this year, but it turns out I was growing some lovely green grass in this bed. We do have five onions for sure now, but there has been a lot of weeding in this patch this summer. Definitely a learning curve moment. Below is the beautiful grass. If only it grew this nicely throughout the yard.
The potatoes in the box continued to move onward and upward.
The blackberries were going crazy and I can’t wait to recane some of the creeping canes in order to make more bushes for next year. I will be sure to do a step by step post of that when we get there. But, in the meantime, I have been enjoying fresh berries for breakfast for about three weeks now.
The eggplants, tomatoes and peppers have looked great. Our only casualty has been some San Marzanos to some blossom end rot. It’s my fault for not watering that bed with a watering can right at the soil. But, when I am stealing moments during naps to run outside and water, it was something I was prepared to see and not surprised by this summer.
What has proven to be our best crop so far has been our zucchini. In fact, I think I can dub this the year of the zucchini. We have easily gotten 10 off of the plant and most have been quite large, despite the fact that we bought a baby zucchini plant. I am making my first batch of bread today (a recipe post to follow) and think I have a few more batches to come.
Finally, the asparagus and the figs keep on trucking.
The most exciting garden development of the summer has been our huge “spring” cleanup. We had hedges trimmed, the area under the hedges cleaned out, trees ripped up and cut down, forsythia trimmed back (but not removed as that is where Peter Rabbit and friends have their living space) and lots and lots of weeding. We are very grateful to the guys that came and did it for us. It was well worth it. We now have some space to think about larger flower and herb gardens, adding a peach tree next year, and designing a play area for Tomato. Here are the before pictures….
And here are the after….
Ahhhhh…potential!! So what is happening in your gardens?
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