June 29, 2010 Summer Vegetable Harvest Begins

Much of the summer crop is starting to ripen!  I've been looking forward to some fresh tomatoes for some time now.  Especially since I was forced to buy some really bland ones a month or two ago in the grocery store.  I'm also trying out the video capabilities with the new iPhone 4 to start uploading the occasional video update.  Early tests (of a really cool clearwing hummingbird moth) were not very HD but they were uploaded straight from the phone, so we'll see what this looks like after processing.

Tomatoes

Yellow Pears.  They are sweet!  Only a few are ripe right now, but there are a ton on the vine

Pink Brandywine.   I wasn't sure if this was fully ripe, but when I looked at the picture it also has a bit of green on the top.  I think I'll have his one with what ever dinner is tonight!

Wild Cherry.  I've been popping these for a few days now every time I walk by and see a bright red one.  Very small fruit even for a cherry tomato, but man are they good! And like the yellow Pear plant, there will be plenty more.

Giant Belgium Pink

Peppers

The other bell peppers are looking pretty decent.   A few medium size peppers per plant.  But below are the highlights for the peppers thus far.

Purple Beauty Peppers.   I have three on the vine that have turned a deep shade of purple.  I still want to give them a few more days to make sure they get as big as possible

 Sweet Italian.    There are two very nice size peppers with several more forming.  I'm looking forward to these the most!

 

Cherry Bomb. There are about two dozen peppers on this one plant.  It's a good think I only planted one hot pepper plant this year!  It always seems like they are way more bountiful than bells or other mild peppers.

The purple bean flowers alone are worth it. 

 

Purple Beans.  I was walking out in the garden not two days ago and there were no beans worth picking.  today however I harvested two large handfuls!  Some of them are almost too big to eat!

Both the Yellow Squash and the Zucchinis are producing fruit now.  We've already had to dust off the Zucchini bread recipe and had a little of both types of squash in the roasted vegetables last night with dinner.  Three of the zucchinis that i picked late last week were WAY to big to eat.  They grow so fast it's hard to keep up with them!

Cucumbers.  The Cucumbers have bounced back after the deer attack.  I pulled my first full size cucumber yesterday and like everything else there are a plenty more on the way.  I have not seen any fruit on the Crystal Apple cucumbers yet.  They have grown quite large and have many flowers ( I think there are a little ones coming soon).

June 13, 2010 After the Honeymoon

The wedding was a whirlwind of good food, good friends, and good beer in two beautiful locations followed by a relaxing few days at the beach. We couldn't have had a better time! Everything was perfect!  Now that were trying to get back to real life (and a full work week starting tomorrow) I spent some time in the garden and now getting a chance to update the blog.

One of our wedding presents was a drip irrigation system from my friend Tom.  He had it all set up, all I had to do was to unfurl the sub-main and add attach the drip line. So the Sunday after the wedding I weeded (it was much needed) and installed the irrigation system.  You can see the system in a couple of the pictures. It couldn't of come at a better time as a few days before the hose was ran over by the tractor making it a huge pain in the ass to water the garden.

Cucumber damage...

Purple and green beans damage...

While we were away the electric fence was left off. I had initially turned on Friday (6/4/10) to make sure none of the nephews zapped themselves. And then with wedding on Saturday and getting ready for the honeymoon at the beach I completly forgot about plugging it back in. Sometime in the last week a deer must have tested the fence, found it off, and then munched on every exposed leaf  hanging on the trellis.  Nothing else was touched, but all the beans and much of the cucumbers on the south side of the trellis were devastated.  I'm guessing that he only came through once because some of the plants have already started sprouting new leaves.  Needless to say, I'm going to be more vigilant about plugging in the fence for the rest of the season.

 

Peppers are looking great!  Although the peppers on the left are much smaller then the plants on the right.  The closest tomato plant near the shortest pepper is the Matt's Wild Cherry plant which has grown well outside the cage.  I'm pretty sure that it is shading out the closest pepper plants despite my best efforts to increase spacing.

Even the smaller pepper plants are already larger than the best plants from last year.  No peppers yet but all the plants have begun to flower.  Each plant has between two and three times as many flowers as last year.  It's a good sign!

 

After not being in the garden for a week I think the greatest difference that I immediately noticed were the tomatoes.  All of the plants have grown significantly and have flowers and green tomatoes. 

 

The first red tomato is on the Matt's Wild Cherry.  Even for cherry tomatoes the fruits on this plant are small, roughly the size of a nickle. I'll give this red one another day or two before I'm going to test it out.

This the big fruit on the Green Zebra plant.  You can already see the stripes forming.

I decided to pull the peas and lettuce today. The lettuce had bolted and tasted pretty bitter. We got quite a bit off of the pea plants and cooked them up for a delicious meal, but the plants have begun to yellow and remaining unpicked pods are better for seeds than for eating at this point.  The timing of the weather this year really messed up my spinach, peas, and lettuce.  That's how it goes I guess!

And finally a couple of cool pics from the garden...

Some bug posing inside a cracked scallion

One of the scallion flowers