Garden in Early July

Early July is green beans time! One day I picked about two pounds of green beens. I've been sharing them with my neighbors. I've also picked some cucumbers and pulled small beets.

 Front yard flowers

 Lords and Ladies in sideyard

 Backyard veggie/flower garden

 Cucumbers

 Parsley gone to seed

 Garlic is ready to be dug up amongst eggplant

 A little bit of everything

 PIcked my first tomato today, July 9

 ...and it was added to salad.

Small September Harvests

Even this "bad" year, I've been able to pick this and that from the garden...

Summer...

Such long time between the posts! The summer has been very hot and my garden is not doing as well as I wish it would. I missed the peak of green bean harvest because I was on a trip for two weeks. Squirrels are picking my tomatoes. Beets did not grow much. Seedlings from the tomatoes that I started from seed grew very lush, but did not bear a single fruit. Even hot peppers are not producing as much as last year. I've done a lot of weeding, though. And a few other things have been doing well. Like my parsley... it's abundant.

There have been small harvests...

 and some native flowers are doing great even in this heat...

 as well as this surprise appearance... not sure what this flower is and when had I purchased it.

 I get a few cucumbers every week...

and three beans from a single pod that survived rabbit plague last year (and that were seeded in a special pot and kept in front of the house) produced 85 beans that I will plant next spring.

Strawberries

This is this year's largest strawberry harvest. They are cute and picked right from the bed, still a bit warm from the sun.

I have about a dozen strawberry plants and they produce several handfuls of berries over a course of few weeks. It's more than other years when deer and rabbits ate strawberry leaves and fruit. This spring I put a small chicken wire fence around them and it has helped.

Still, I think this is the last spring for strawberries in my garden. As much as I like the idea of growing my own berries, none of the plants I have bear fruit that is sweet and they all are small. Perhaps I should investigate other retailers and try a new variety. But with the room for my garden being so limited, this might be one plant that I will give up in the future.

Harvest October 2

Small pumpkins (now placed near the entrance to the house), hot and sweet peppers (I made more pickled peppers), mint (now drying out for tea) and zinnias (later placed in a decent vase).

Harvest circa September 20

Pickings from the garden one day last week: hot peppers, parsley, dill, bell pepper and a few tomatoes.

Harvest September 12

My garden looks tired and I feel tired when it comes to gardening, too, these days. The rush of energy, almost an instinct, a calling to plant, seed, dig, weed, transplant and so on from last spring has diminished to very minimum. A rabbit has eaten my fall crop of lettuce? -- oh, well, not a big deal. In springtime, observing the same event would increase my heart rate and get me passionately angry. Flower beds are out of shape with overgrown plants? -- Let it be, I'll pull those out after the frosts start. And so on...

It is still a good feeling to pick up a few things from the vegetable patch, though. Here's today's offering.

When one thing leads to another

One recent evening over beers and casual conversation I mentioned that we have lots of hot peppers and someone suggested to pickle them. I embraced the idea and decided to try out pickling this weekend. I did not have any canning jars, so I went to a local hardware store to buy some. There I noticed they had broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower seedlings for sale, so I bought them.
To make some room for my new plants, I pulled out a wilting zucchini, a few cucumber plants past their prime and corn that no longer produce. I dug up potatoes I planted in spring, then picked more hot peppers and sweet banana peppers, one green bell pepper that I accidentally pushed over and a small ear of corn. There is also that yellow thing... I'm not sure what it is... might be something between a squash and a decorative pumpkin. One thing is for sure - I did not seed anything that looked alike the outcome.
While weeding in the garden, I noticed a few other things. Near parsley plants I found this black swallowtail butterfly caterpillar. Welcome, friend! (Sorry for the fuzzy picture, I could not get my camera to focus.)
My first yellow bell pepper is ripening.
Winter squash has produced a single fruit. I hope there will be more.
In the afternoon I was catching shots of a golden finch on my sunflowers.
And right then a hummingbird flew right next to me to check out crown-of-thorns on the deck where I was standing.

Good day. I still need to pickle those peppers, though.

Green Composition

Last night a deer had jumped over the netting fence around my vegetable patch and eaten two ripe tomatoes. It knocked down the green ones. When I went to pick those up, I also pulled a small decorative pumpkin, four sweet banana peppers and two ugly cucumbers.Why this deer comes to my garden? There are plenty of neighbors who live closer to the woods and have their tomatoes in open spaces in their front yards. They have their red tomatoes. Why such injustice?

Red Onions and Shallots

The ground was too wet yesterday to dig up onions and shallots. And I have been taught in Latvia not to dig up onions in wet weather, but on a sunny day and then let them dry outside in the sun. Today was a perfect day for onion harvest--not a cloud in the sky and low humidity.

To the left are red onions. My father-in-law bought seed onions in March at some farm. To the right are random shallots. I got a few three years ago at our grocery store and they have done well. I will keep about a third from each to plant early next spring. I store them in brown paper bag in a cabinet under a stovetop. I've been told that onions and the likes should be kept in fairly warm and definitely dry place; if storage is too cold, an onion will put all it's energy into creating a big bloom, but will not create a new bulb.
There are a few beets also... a bit on a small size. I wrap beets in foil and roast them in oven for about 45 minutes, but these small ones do not take that long.

I also cut couple of dill seed heads. I'll sow part of these seeds later this summer for fresh dill in fall and the rest will have to wait until next spring.

In another corner, zinnias are blooming. I have only two colors this year--orange and purple. The orange ones are my favorite.

Spearmint is blooming, too. Small insects are buzzing around.
A small butterfly on blazing star.
And one of my hen-and-chicks also is blooming.
This one's the first for my garden.

Harvest July 4

Yesterday I picked some vegetables from my veggie patch: broccoli florets (some still are coming up after I've let the plant start flowering), two jalapeno peppers (saved for now in fridge for later use), four sweet banana peppers and small bunch of Italian parsley for macaroni salad I made yesterday (did not use ham or peas that was called for in the recipe, still turned out great), and the first zucchini that we'll grill tonight.

3.5 Hours

What a difference uninterrupted morning in the garden makes. I got a rare chance to work in my garden as long as I wanted... until I got too tired and hot. But after that I felt so good.

Yesterday morning I started with digging up my garlic harvest: elephant garlic (upper left corner; started as three cloves last fall), garlic 'Music' (medium size; planted 24 cloves, now I got 20 garlic heads) and unidentified small garlics. The latter grew from typical grocery garlic. There are always some cloves that are too small to clean and prep. Typically I throw those away, but since back then it was time to plant garlic, I pushed them in ground. They are still too small for kitchen use, but I'll save them to plant in some corner this fall again.
I also pulled a few beets (to be roasted and used in salad) and one red onion, just to see how big it has gotten. Onions will probably come out next. Too bad beans become rabbit food, otherwise I'd plant them in the free space--it's still not too late to plant beans.

Besides harvesting, I pulled some weeds from veggie patch and two flower beds, I also edged one of the beds. I watered some plants. I tried to make my own leaf mulch with lawnmower (not successful). I wanted to keep going and setting order in other parts, but I got too tired. After all, at least the backyard got good care and everything else can be done in smaller time chunks.