Garden Update, August 2006
It's been a couple of months since I posted, and I haven't ignored the garden since June, I just haven't had time to write about it.
Yesterday was our first day back from a weekend trip backpacking. It seems that as soon as I step off the property the squash grow like gangbusters and I come home to some giant seedy bombs. And the plants give so much energy producing these bombs that it takes them a few weeks to recover and start producing more fruit again. We ate squash last night and it was delicious.
We ate a few tomatoes too. The Green Grape has been producing decently (by my standards) and some of the fruit are ripening. They are SO good! I picked a few Early Girl fruits, a Rosie Romanian and tossed a Russian torpedo with blossom end-rot. The Rosie Romanian tasted very sweet, almost no difference from the Early Girl.
This is the place to grow cucumbers. They have been growing all over the place and produce many many fruits. Thankfully these are the burpless kind and I can eat them without having tummy troubles later in the night. They are wonderful!
My box of salad greens has grown 3 feet high with overgrown flowering arugula. I need to pull it out and try planting some more, but I can't safely do it during the day because the bees love it so much. I tasted the mache and didn't really care for it. It tastes too much like grass. Spinach was a disaster again. I thought I would put it in a shadier spot so it would not bolt so quickly. Wrong! Spinach does well when it gets a lot of sun early on. I got a bad show of seedlings, and then the seedlings that did come up, bolted almost immediately. Sigh.
The beets and carrots have been good and sweet. I tend not to eat as many of these as I should because they keep longer in the ground than some of the other perishable vegetables.
When we came back from our July camping trip we were overwhelmed with green beans. I picked as many as I could and we were a little tired of eating them and actually threw a spoiled bag away. (Shame on me.) My grandfather used to blanche them and keep them in the freezer. I'll have to do that next year. At any rate, the pole beans haven't started losing many of their leaves yet and it looks like they may be forming a decent bumper crop. I'm looking forward to that.
The kids box has some weird kind of weed growing in it that looks like orange hair. It has been twining around everything and choking out some of the plants. I yanked a bunch of it out because it just didn't look like a good thing and thankfully what I pulled died with some of the plants I removed too. After looking at it more carefully I think it's some sort of parasite (is that the right word?) that twines around the plants and probably gets it nourishment from them through the stems. It's still growing in the garden box but not as wildly. I think I've seen it on the roadside before. Weird and scary.
That's all for now. I will post pictures when I get a chance. I took some last month when the garden was at it's peak. August and September are the harvest months, but the garden always starts looking shabby too.
Yesterday was our first day back from a weekend trip backpacking. It seems that as soon as I step off the property the squash grow like gangbusters and I come home to some giant seedy bombs. And the plants give so much energy producing these bombs that it takes them a few weeks to recover and start producing more fruit again. We ate squash last night and it was delicious.
We ate a few tomatoes too. The Green Grape has been producing decently (by my standards) and some of the fruit are ripening. They are SO good! I picked a few Early Girl fruits, a Rosie Romanian and tossed a Russian torpedo with blossom end-rot. The Rosie Romanian tasted very sweet, almost no difference from the Early Girl.
This is the place to grow cucumbers. They have been growing all over the place and produce many many fruits. Thankfully these are the burpless kind and I can eat them without having tummy troubles later in the night. They are wonderful!
My box of salad greens has grown 3 feet high with overgrown flowering arugula. I need to pull it out and try planting some more, but I can't safely do it during the day because the bees love it so much. I tasted the mache and didn't really care for it. It tastes too much like grass. Spinach was a disaster again. I thought I would put it in a shadier spot so it would not bolt so quickly. Wrong! Spinach does well when it gets a lot of sun early on. I got a bad show of seedlings, and then the seedlings that did come up, bolted almost immediately. Sigh.
The beets and carrots have been good and sweet. I tend not to eat as many of these as I should because they keep longer in the ground than some of the other perishable vegetables.
When we came back from our July camping trip we were overwhelmed with green beans. I picked as many as I could and we were a little tired of eating them and actually threw a spoiled bag away. (Shame on me.) My grandfather used to blanche them and keep them in the freezer. I'll have to do that next year. At any rate, the pole beans haven't started losing many of their leaves yet and it looks like they may be forming a decent bumper crop. I'm looking forward to that.
The kids box has some weird kind of weed growing in it that looks like orange hair. It has been twining around everything and choking out some of the plants. I yanked a bunch of it out because it just didn't look like a good thing and thankfully what I pulled died with some of the plants I removed too. After looking at it more carefully I think it's some sort of parasite (is that the right word?) that twines around the plants and probably gets it nourishment from them through the stems. It's still growing in the garden box but not as wildly. I think I've seen it on the roadside before. Weird and scary.
That's all for now. I will post pictures when I get a chance. I took some last month when the garden was at it's peak. August and September are the harvest months, but the garden always starts looking shabby too.
posted by sandy at
9:04 AM
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