A Garden Update

I’ve mentioned it already but I did get the garlic all pulled up. There’s a lot of garlic!

There are six shelves full – too full. We may bring another rack out of the greenhouse and spread this out a little so it will dry faster.

I have some across the stainless sink unit. If we bring out the other shelf, I can have my sink back. I use that for washing veggies before I bring them inside so all that dirt doesn’t go down into the septic tank.

You may remember last summer when my neighbor was moving and he gave me two big planters he had made. One has potatoes in it. The potatoes in grow bags are about ready to harvest. In fact, I’ve already pulled the potatoes out of two of them because we needed potatoes for dinner a few times.

The other planter has sweet potatoes and I thought maybe if I grew a cucumber in the middle of all those sweet potato vines, the squash bugs wouldn’t notice it and so far, they haven’t and it has about a dozen baby cucumbers on it. Let’s hope those nasty squash bugs and vine borers don’t find it.

Looks like it’s going to be a good year for the elderberries. The birds could still get them all but between what we have growing by the house and some growing just outside the fence, I think there’s enough for the birds and us to share.

The rhubarb patch is doing great! It seems the more I use, the more it grows. I’ve always thought that I should stop harvesting it at the end of June but I’ve read in a Facebook rhubarb group that it’s ok to continue harvesting until just before frost. Any thoughts on that?

These 1500 year old cave beans are going to be ready to start picking probably by the weekend. I planted these and only about half of them appeared to have germinated so I went back and filled in the gaps and I think the first seeds and the second seeds took off and this is a tangled mess of bean runners but . . not much I can do about it now.

The garlic was growing in two of the 4 x 8 beds and one 4 x 4 bed. Once I removed the garlic, I added two wheelbarrow loads of compost into each of the bigger beds and one load into the smaller bed and planted black eyed peas in the two larger beds and Marina di Chioggia Pumpkin. I’m pretty excited to try these. I hope some of them will mature. The packet says they need 95 days to mature. That means they should be ready by September 17. According to the almanac, our first frost will be October 21 so hopefully I can get a few of these very strange looking pumpkins.

But, the stars of the garden (at least til that pumpkin starts producing) are the tomatoes. I think I planted about 70 tomatoes and have lost at least four. One just died. I was pruning suckers and chopped two plants and they didn’t come back (one did so I really chopped three) and one had a branch fall off and break it and it didn’t come back. Of the 66 plants I have left, probably at about 35 – 40 are Salvaterra’s Select.

This is my first time to grow this variety. I planted all paste type tomatoes except maybe four plants – two for cherry tomatoes and two for slicers. My tomato crop is mostly for marinara, ketchup, pizza sauce and BBQ sauce to can for the year.

These tomatoes are growing fast! It seemed to take a while to set fruit but it seems I can tell a difference in their size from day to day. I read that it’s not unusual for this type to produce 20 or more pounds of fruit per plant. That would make me happy . . maybe . . that will be a lot of canning.

Another good thing is that these seem to be good eating tomatoes too. Paste type tomatoes, most often Roma, are usually a smaller tomato so having a good past tomato that has a great flavor and grows to be much bigger than a Roma will be fantastic! But, I’m trying to not get too excited until I see how much they actually produce.

I’m getting more zucchini than we can eat but I’m not complaining. With those squash bugs, that could end any day. I get potatoes as we need them but I’ll probably harvest all the potatoes from the 12 grow bags by early next week. The vines are starting to die. The Lillian’s Caseload peas are about done. They don’t like the heat. Oscar loves these peas. He will sit outside and eat those as long as I hand them to him. He’s almost forgotten his obsession with the asparagus patch but when the peas are gone, I’m betting he goes back to the asparagus. The vines on the sweet potatoes are long enough that I don’t mind harvesting some of the leaves. I plan to cook Sweet Potato Greens in Coconut Cream tomorrow, add chicken and basil, and serve over rice. Sounds yummy, huh?

I’m harvesting a lot of basil. In fact, I stopped freeze drying eggs in order to get a load of basil freeze dried. That’s what’s in the freeze dryer now.