Finally.

My tomato garden did not do well this year. Well, let me clarify that. The plants did well. The tomatoes did not. There are lots of fruit, but it’s all green, green green. I blame it on the weather. We had a strangely cool summer, an overabundance of rain in July, and not very much sun the rest of the season, not to mention the late blight that blew through (I did get some blight on a few plants about 2 weeks ago, which was much later than most other people around here).

But my plants held on. I resisted the urge to rip the undiseased ones out, even though there have been unripe, green tomatoes for like weeks now. And today, the wait paid off.

We picked two smallish red tomatoes from the garden earlier this summer, but today, there were big ones, and bunches of them. Okay, there were five. But that’s a huge percent increase.

I picked nearly two pounds of ruby-red tomatoes. And oh, my. My, oh my. They are the tastiest little buggers I’ve had all summer.

So finally, the moment I’ve been waiting for practically since March, when I started these plants inside:

That made the wait worthwhile.

Garden Progress

I have to admit to being sort of uninspired by the garden this year. While last season’s garden saw the pumpkins decimated by squash borers, everything else seemed to do fairly well. But this year, a bigger plot and more variety also meant more failures and frustration. But really, I shouldn’t be so hard on myself (or my garden). It’s doing a lot better than I make it sound.

Yesterday, we picked the first cucumbers of the season. I didn’t even see them hiding under all the foliage until I went behind the plants to pick up a big stick that had fallen inside the fence. And there they were! Two cute, pinchy, crunchy, adorable little green cukes. S5 literally squealed when she saw them (she’s a pickle fan).

And I forgot to mention that, last week, while making a barbecue sauce for pulled pork, I ran out to grab these two hot babies:

They were, indeed, hot stuff. But they were very tasty simmered in barbecue sauce.

I also noticed a bunch of green tomatoes that I am pretty sure appeared overnight. I mean, we look at the garden nearly every day, and never noticed them until yesterday morning. So empirically we can assume they appeared overnight, right? Of course, I forgot to photograph them. Maybe later.

Up on the deck in pots, other things are growing nicely, too. There is parsley:

and Pennyroyal, to keep the skeeters away:

The fuschia has bloomed, and is gorgeous:

We’ve even planted some cat grass for Moxie:

Yes, that’s a dog-shaped pot with cat grass in it.  The irony is not lost on me.

Anyway, I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about gardeny things again. Next week: time to dig potatoes!

CSA Week 11

Here we are with another fabulous box of fresh, local organic produce.

Included are:

• A very large onion (used to make spanish rice tonight)
• two round zucchini squash
• five six (we found one under the van) hot-ish peppers
• two bell peppers
• a bunch of beets
• a pint of blackberries
• nearly two pounds of beans
• a canteloupe melon

CSA Week 10

Here is the CSA box for this week:

As you can see, it includes:

• 4 ears of corn
• 2 small tomatoes
• a large white onion
• a large red onion
• a summer squash
• a head of cabbage
• a bunch of kale
• a green pepper
• two hot peppers

So far, I have used up everything from last week’s box except the celery, which I put in a freezer bag with other veggie bits for stock. Oh, and there is one potato left. But I’m going to cook it up with my own recent harvest, and we’ll have them with dinner tonight.

Good Things Also Come to Those Who Just Can’t Wait

Yesterday, while weeding* the garden, I accidentally pulled up a potato plant. Ooops.  We’re still a little early to be digging up the potatoes.

Then I spied a wee little spud nestled in the dirt, right where the plant had been. Well, who could leave a motherless potato buried in the dirt? Not I. I gently brushed the dirt away and rescued it.

This process uncovered another potato plant, and another potato. Before I knew it, I had pulled up three plants, and a handful of potatoes.

Darn.

*weeding generally implies walking past the garden and noting that, yes, there are weeds. In this case, I was actually pulling some of them out.

All Is Not Lost

I’m rather disappointed in this year’s garden, mostly thanks to the varmints, deer and bunnies who were under the incorrect assumption that all the vegetation growing out back was some sort of free wild animal all-you-can-eat buffet. In fact, I had rather resigned myself to a sparse harvest of a few heads of sad-looking garlic. And, while the garlic harvest is a bit sad-looking (the deer trampled all the foliage before it had finished bulbing), there are still some signs of life out there in the vege patch.

For example, I nearly forgot about the cucumber plants. They’re around the corner of my “L” shaped garden, against the wall, so I don’t often see them unless I go back behind the tomatoes to look. The other day I happened to venture back, and lo if there aren’t some lovely vines growing up the trellis.

Even better, we have some little baby cucumbers beginning to form.

If you look past the weeds (actually grass growing out of the manure mulch), you can see a little hot pepper here:

There are quite a few of those, and several flowers on each of the six plants. I’m surprised, actually, considering how cool it’s been.

There’s also a sturdy looking pumpkin vine:

I check it vigilantly, every day, for squash beetle borers. They decimated my pumpkin plants last year. So far, so good, though I am having no luck getting both a male and female flower to bloom at the same time. So we may just end up with a really big vine and no pumpkins. But I’m hoping.

The one thing I’ve been especially glum about so far this year is the tomatoes. My plants look pretty healthy, but there aren’t too many flowers yet, and no tomatoes. But then I noticed these on a few volunteer plants which I had let go:

If I remember right, these are the yellow cherry tomatoes, which were very tasty (and very pretty!). But I also found these volunteers:

If those are also yellow, then they’re Taxis. If they’re red, I am fairly sure they’re either Stupice or one of the black varieties I grew last year. Time to check my notes.

Not only are the wee little tomatoes exciting, but there’s about to be a bloom on the fuschia plant. This is thrilling, because fuschias are typically grown as annuals in these parts. I cut this one back practically to nothing last fall, overwintered it in a cool, sunny room, and now look:

Aren’t they adorable? Such cute little buds? I ask you. It looks like there are about 3 or 4 pair of buds all ready to bloom any day now.

Speaking of blooming, the acidanthera have just passed their peak. I managed to catch a shot of one of the best bloom days:

I seriously can’t decide if I like acidanthera or nasturtiums better. The nasturtiums probably win, on account of they are (a) edible and (b) much longer-blooming. But damn, those acidanthera are gorgeous!

And here is the garlic harvest, somewhat small but still serviceable, hanging up to cure:

Hey, it might not be pretty, but there are definitely NO vampires coming in my back door anytime soon.

Good Things Come To Those Who Wait*

Right… so, remember that nasturtium plant that was all infested with black aphids? The one I was going to rip out and burn because it was so bad?

This one?

Well, I am proud to report that it is aphid-less.

Not aphid-free, mind you. But definitely aphid-less.

I do believe it has something to do with a very exciting recent discovery, which happened totally by accident while browsing some online garden site for information on marsh mallows. The reason I was looking for information on marsh mallows is because I’ve started some from seed, but what I thought was a marsh mallow seedling has now also mysteriously appeared in two other locations (important to note that I did not plant marsh mallow seeds in those locations), which leads me to question whether the thing I think is a marsh mallow seedling is, indeed, such a thing. I’m beginning to think it is not. But that’s not my important discovery (although it is useful, since I can now give up hope on growing a marsh mallow plant this year and concentrate my efforts on something else).

No, my very exciting discovery was what, exactly (or approximately), ladybug larvae looks like. (Whoa, how’s that for some alliteration?!)

This is important because, as we all know, ladybugs or lady beetles are excellent companions to have in one’s garden. They rank up there with earthworms and mulch and fish emulsion in terms of garden usefulness, really. And having ladybug larvae in my garden means that soon,  I’m going to have ladybugs. And this means we will likely not be totally infested with aphids on our nasturtium plants next year. And I am so excited about this that I have already started looking around for nasturtium seed sources because, next year, I am going to grow so many damn nasturtium plants that people will think I’m nuts.

As proof that my dastardly plan theory is already at work, please note the (very bad) (hey, it was windy today) shot of a ladybug larva hanging out on a nasturtium leaf.

I swear, I heard it belch.

*even if it is out of sheer laziness

Some Things are Worth Waiting For

Some things are definitely worth waiting for. Vacation. Christmas morning. Turkey that’s been roasting in the oven all day long.

And acidanthera blooms.

Devastation

You know things are not going well in NaBloPoMo land when your post titles go from “Faltering” to “Devastation”. But life- and mundane blogs- need a little drama now and then.

I, however, am not particularly fond of drama in my life, unless it’s the kind that comes in a red envelope.

Some drama is good. This red lily that finally bloomed is an example of good drama:

as are the cascading tendrils and cheerful blooms of the volunteer nasturtium plant:

But there is a dark underbelly to the garden’s beautiful facade. All is not as it seems. In fact, the nasturtium plant is actually a crack-house for black aphids.

It was quite disturbing to see just how many of these icky things are all over my once-beautiful plant. I’m about ready to rip it out and burn it.

But that’s not the worst of the drama, friends. It gets uglier. Much, much uglier. As I scanned the back garden, my eyes were met with a horrific sight:

That is supposed to be a hosta. It was a hosta yesterday, before I went to bed. So were these:

And this was a beautiful double impatiens:

Do you see any beautiful red double impatiens blooms in that picture? No, you do not. This is because the deer ate them during their midnight all-you-can-eat buffet in my back yard.

I sulked about the deer all day. They had already whacked my kids’ bean teepee, which still has not recovered, and trampled all the garlic. This was just one more in a long, long list of deer-related transgressions. But the deer were instantly forgotten when I stepped outside later this afternoon and glanced at the basil planter box.

Yep, that would be a Japanese beetle orgy going on in the basil mix.

Fortunately (relatively speaking), beetles tend to feed in big obnoxious gastronomic orgies. So only one plant was victimized here, which is small relief when I’ve already had a whole series of agricultural failures so far this season. I did feel slightly vindicated when DH volunteered to smash them for me.

With pliers.

After that, I had to look for signs of hope in the garden. And lo, there were my acidanthera about to bloom. Bless them.

On top of it all, I saw some flower buds on the overwintered fuschia today.

So maybe all is not lost.

Yet.

Garden Pictorial

Yeah, so while I’m ridiculously late at posting all the garden pictures from this spring, it’s better late than never, right? I mean, at least I thought enough to go out with the camera a few times, and not completely miss out on everything budding and blooming- even if I didn’t blog about it in a timely fashion.

So let me catch you up on things around the homestead. Now that it’s the second week of June, we’ve already had several things bloom and disappear. We’ve seen rhododendrons

and dianthus (which is still sort of blooming, but looking like it needs a haircut)

and trilliums (which were a very exciting find)

and mayapples

and assorted wildflower-things that I once identified but now can’t remember what they are, like these

and these

and these (does anyone know what the heck these are, by the way? It’s vaguely mint-looking but no smell.)

We also had lily-of-the-valley, but I couldn’t find it again after I remembered to bring out the camera (it must have disappeared overnight), and some periwinkle that I did find but never remembered to bring out the camera for.

I also found some things that came back from last year, like this nasturtium volunteer (which should bloom any day now)

this allium

this mutant carrot (which I’m sort of afraid to eat)

and this fuschia, which I tried overwintering from last year.

It’s doing greeny-things, but no flowery-things, so we will see.

We also have clematis blooming now

and lilies that will (hopefully) bloom in a month or so

So, now you are probably wondering (or maybe you are not wondering at all, but simply humoring me, which is also fine because I will take whatever I can get) what sorts of veggies we are growing in the new and expanded garden, right?

Aha! So glad you asked! I will take you on a little virtual tour. Let us start near O3, who is showing off our northeast bed.

Yeah, if anyone wants some garlic, I will be swimming in it come July. The potatoes also look good:

We are growing All Blues again this year, plus Early Ohio and French Fingerlings.

Onwards and southwards… our southeast bed, where the tomatoes grew last year, is twice as big as last year. It now wraps around the house.

It’s so big it has a mountain in it:

That, my friends, is year-old sheep shit. I shit you not. And while you may laugh, it makes my plants happy. So just cut the shit, okay?

Not much has come up yet in this bed, but there are beans planted, along with some peas and onions. There are many, many tomatoes. And there are some parsleys and basils interplanted with the tomatoes, but you can’t see them- mostly because they’re small, but also because I didn’t take a picture of them. But I did photograph the zucchini squash:

and the punkin:

So there.

In the back, the girls have a little garden with a bean teepee and a sunflower patch. O3 is very excited about this and checks the beans every day to see if they’ve sprouted (not yet).

O3 likes the bean teepee. She likes “teepee” so much that she also refers to the peas out front as TeePeas.

We made them this nice little trellis to climb against, and they seem to be very happy about it.

We shall be swimming in peas as well, come July.

So that is most of what we have been doing this year. There are other little things, like pots of herbs

And today we are installing some pepper plants that we found at the market over the weekend, plus adding some more basils (one can never, ever, ever have too many basils). I’m sure there’s more, but the camera’s gone to work with my husband so I can’t really tell you about it even if I did remember.

You may notice that there is No Corn this year. Our plot really doesn’t get enough sun to grow corn properly. We tried last year, and failed, so we have moved on to smaller and better things that can stand a little dappled sunlight.

Like eggplants.