tomatoes

We got those.
Romas-

And Green Zebra.

Elsewhere, we are suffering a lack of squash and zucchini after a severe vine borer attack. We uprooted all the plants and killed all the larvae we found. Hopefully we got them all, and next year we will grow our squash under row covers until the threat of aerial attack has passed.

Also steadily rolling in: cucumbers and string beans. And oh, there's lots of taters to dig.

more beans, please!

I wanted to mention a new book I picked up recently called Serving Up the Harvest by Andrea Chesman. Andrea has written several books including The Roasted Vegetable and The New Vegetarian Grill, and has contributed to The Classic Zucchini Cookbook-all new favorite cookbooks of mine with many amazing options (the roasted kohlrabi has convinced me to grow this veg in the fall).

Yesterday we tried the roasted green beans recipe which is in Serving Up the Harvest and The Roasted Vegetable. You can search either book for the recipe on Amazon and I highly recommend you do-it's simple (2 lbs of beans, oil, salt, an oven at 450 for 15 mins) and oh so delicious. It takes the grassy edge off the beans and makes them sweet and juicy. Having picked our plants clean to make this, we are now waiting for them to produce more (and contemplating hitting the farmers market in the meantime). The recipe is correct-there are never enough green beans once you've tried this recipe.

In other news, I'm wishing we had a couple of chickens to add to this pastoral scene in the backyard, but I was (rightly) dismayed to discover that Va Beach is the only city out of the seven cities of Hampton Roads to not allow urban chickens. I am of a mind to approach the city council...

today: 27 June

Today we have potatoes. Purple Peruvians.
Steamed and mashed, served with fresh dill, salt and pepper. Yum.
It's hot here, hottest it has been all year, but you won't find me outside in less than jeans, knee high socks and long sleeve shirt to garden anymore. The mosquitoes find me quite delicious, apparently, and somehow manage to bite me even through all this protection.

Yesterday's haul: 2 zukes, lots of chard and green beans. Today's haul looked like this, but 2 cukes and 2 yellow squash included. We are not sick of squash....yet.
Lots of stuff growing and growing and growing. Here the cherokee moon and stars watermelon is climbing high. There's already one melon the size of an orange and several more starting to grow. Think we'll start pinching back the vine to focus on three or four good melons. We will slip these melons inside old nylon stockings and support them on the trellis. This way should keep the birds away. I won't believe it until I see it, for we have several fearless deep crows hanging around the yard. They've already attacked the neighbor's tomatoes...

the squash are in

....seven weeks after planting. It's nice to keep records so I can determine this sort of thing for the future. Now if only we had written down the day we planted the potatoes. I'd like to say it's almost time for them to come out, but all I see when I dig around in the dirt are tiny wee taters that seem smaller than the seed pieces we put in. Any advice?

hidden treasures

The fun part about gardening, especially if you are trying it out for the first time in years and have forgotten all the cool bits, is going out each day to see what nature has created for you.

Our first snap beans! mmm... purple.

To think that Nature has created this bounty as a byproduct of normal plant growth, and my family will harvest and sustain ourselves from it is incredible in its synergy. Particularly when warped ideas about where food really comes from abound in today's removed society.

Our favorite part of the garden has been tooling around first thing in the morning, still in our pj's, cultivating what's here, dreaming about future plans.

Having a snack or two to munch on is helpful, of course. The bean with a bite taken out of it was nommed by the C-bear. If I told you none of the peas we harvested this year ever made it to the table, barely into the house, would you be surprised?

a favorite passage

Removing the weeds
putting fresh soil about the bean stems
and encouraging this weed which I had sown
making the yellow soil express its summer thought
in bean leaves and blossoms
rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass
making the earth say beans
instead of grass-
this was my daily work.
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

fast grow the weeds

First, a question for you uber gardeners out there: I have read that tomatoes actually enjoy being planted in the same place in the garden year after year. Fact? Or Fiction?

I am always surprised at how fast the time rolls by, and with a small child the adventures are ... new! Yet the garden, it never sleeps.

We started out this year with the Square Foot Gardening method. I'm sure you might have heard of it. While the book sells like a Ronco infomercial, the logic behind it seems sound. Yet we have discovered that having plants spread out among six beds and the upkeep of the "squares" just isn't our style.

And that's okay.

We are drowning in a sea of lettuce and spinach, chard and kale. The cabbage worms have struck, the thunderstorms have pelted, and now the sun shines brightly. Even as I become tired of all the greens I am eating the tomatoes and squash eagerly shoot out of the ground, promises of the summer harvest.