Garden Update 9/3/13

Somehow we find ourselves in September already! It's been interesting having a garden this year because it has made me really be present to the season. Each different vegetable has its growing time and its harvest, and charting the changes week-to-week has made me more aware and appreciative of the natural world.

At the moment, now is the time for lemon cucumbers! There exponentially more every day, and luckily they are one of my favorite vegetables. I made this Thai cucumber salad last week to use some of them up. The 2nd & 3rd photos above are of the mutant lemon cucumber vine. It's like 6 vines stuck together, and at the end is a huge ball of flowers/buds/cucumbers, all growing from the same spot!

The purple beans are pretty much done by now, and the zucchini are slowly winding down as well. The pumpkin is slowly growing, and I keep hoping to see more appearing at the ends of the vines. The beautiful speckly pinto beans are beginning to dry, and the marigolds have finally bloomed after growing 3x taller than I've ever seen marigolds grow!

We borrowed my parents' fruit dehydrator and preserved many of the pears and plums from the property.

Garden Update 8/17/13

Our garden is full of food. The peas are ending, but the purple beans are still going strong. The cucumbers are just beginning to produce, too, and we have spotted tiny gumball-sized pumpkins on the long pumpkin runners. The pinto beans (in the last picture) are beginning to show their speckles! Today we harvested several pounds of purple beans, four lemon cucumbers, three regular cucumbers, a zucchini, and the one and only mystery gourd.

I almost wrote, "It's like having our own farmer's market!" but that is ridiculous. How funny that we compare garden-grown veggies to the ones on the supermarket when it should be the other way around, and how the canvas bag of produce I just harvested reminds me of the farmer's market, not the farm.

This weekend we walked around the property surrounding the house, to explore what is left of the old farm's orchard. It turns out there are pears, several types of apples, and red prunes! There is so much free fruit around here! Maybe even too much... we'll probably be shoveling rotting fallen fruit in a couple of weeks so it doesn't attract bees.

For the past few days, we've been making fruit salads using increasingly more fruit from the property. We trek down to the little pond, which is surrounded by blackberry plants, and pick a couple of handfuls of the delicious little hard-to-store berries, just enough to add to the day's fruit salad. And today we were able to use our own pears too!

This is summer at its best. I love the warm leisurely feel of August, and that we can literally step out our door and pick a gorgeous, perfectly ripe, organic fruit or vegetable any time we want.

Garden Update 8/2/13

Our garden finally has food in it! Today I harvested peas and beans. Pounds of peas and beans. The neighbors watered our garden while we were in San Francisco, and although we had invited them to pick and eat anything ripe, I don't think they took any at all. So there were so many china peas that the plants were pulling over their trellis! Picking peas is so funny, because no matter how many times you double-check the plants for any more ripe ones, you will always find just one more hidden among the vines.

The gourds and pumpkins are doing well too. There are several zucchini nearly ready to pick, though only one of them is touching the ground. They're all somehow suspended above the dirt by their vines; it's very weird. There is one white pumpkin, a couple of mini-cucumbers, and lots of blooms letting us know that there will be more to pick in the next few weeks!

Oh also: the mystery gourd has shown us its identity! It's grown some sort of hybrid white zucchini-gourd. Hooray!

In other news: The neighbors ran over our transplanted rose bush with the lawn mower. It had two rosebuds on it. It's not completely destroyed, but we might have to wait until next year to see its blooms after it grows back. That rose bush has had a tough life! We transplanted it from the gravelly area right next to where the trash & recycling sit near the porch, where it was not able to thrive, and it took the shock badly. It had just regained its strength and grown new leaves before it was chopped down this week. Oh well. Rose bushes need lots of pruning, right? :)

Garden Update 7/23/13

We finally finished the weeding/straw-ing of the garden! And everything is starting to turn into food. We have baby pumpkins, baby zucchini, a baby cucumber, and peas and purple beans ready to eat!

Garden Update 7/17/13

The garden is growing well, especially now that the midsummer heat is constant. We water it every day, and we are starting to see the fruits vegetables of our labor. We ate our first two china peas, and tiny beans are starting to appear on the purple bean plants! The mystery squash is about to bloom, so maybe we'll find out soon what it is.

The only row not thriving is the asparagus ("yard-long") beans. They're not dying, but they are so far behind in growth compared with the others. Not sure why, but we're not going to give up on them! :)

We are (I mean, Erik is) almost done with chopping out the weeds in the mounds section that grew up before we could put newspaper and straw down. It's a little-by-little project because it's backbreaking work to chop them out inch by inch with a hoe, but hopefully we'll finish it this coming weekend. Lesson learned for next year!

Garden Update 7/7/13

The garden is really taking off now. The peas are nearly a foot high, so we built their trellises this weekend. The beans are just beginning to flower, and the zucchini, pumpkins, and cucumbers are doubling in size every few days it seems!

As you can see, we're still finishing the weeding/straw paths at the end with the mounds. As long as the mounds themselves are weeded, the plants can flourish; however, the straw keeps in the water so well during these hot days that the work is worth it.

Garden Update 6/27/13

 

The garden is now growing well! After we planted most of the first round of seeds too deep, I re-planted them, and now they are thriving. The peas are nearly ready for their trellises, the beans are about 5 inches tall and showing their pointy leaves, and the squash and cucumbers are in various stages of happy sprouting. 

It's an explosion of green growing things– including weeds! You can see in the photo above, in the back near the mounds, just how overgrown it got while we have been so busy. 

Many thanks to my parents who dropped by last weekend to help us get a start on laying down newspaper and straw in the walkways, and clearing out the weeds from among the rows.

As you can see, it's not quite finished, but between Erik's 55-hour work weeks and sprained wrist, and me being sick for the last five days, that can wait a little longer.

In other news, my gigantic order of 2600 acorns is on track to be finished within the next couple of days! I will post pictures of them when I have all the colors finished.