Katherine and I after a we cleaned up from a muddy session in the garden. At this point we are pretty much ignoring most of the weeds, because there is no way to keep up with them.Weeds apparently don't mind too much rain and not enough sun. They are thriving. Earlier in the summer I was going out and spending a couple of hours every weekend trying to keep the garden mostly weed free, but I've decided I'd rather spend the summer with my family than with the weeds.
So, Katherine and I go out and pull a few weeds and gather in the week's harvest. I am still hilling potatoes, and hoping the few beetles I've found and picked off are not ruining the potato crop. It will be interesting to find out what's under the hills in the fall. Could be a big crop of Yukon Gold potatoes, or could be a mess. We'll have to wait and see.
Turns out that once the garden is established, you can go every few days to pick and that's enough. If I had nothing else to do, I would probably enjoy going more often, but it's not hurting anything to just go once or twice a week. Maybe in a few weeks when the tomatoes start really coming in we'll need to go more often. Katherine isn't a big fan of weeding such a large patch, but she loves harvesting.
And why wouldn't she -- it's a treasure hunt, pulling back cucumber vines, reaching into tomato cages, peeking under huge squash leaves, poking beneath feathery carrot tops, looking down into enormous cauliflower plants to find the hidden goodies within. When it poured on us in the garden yesterday, Katherine washed off her muddy hands in a cauliflower "sink" -- the leaves are big and cupped, and catch the rain.
Since she has been helping since the layout and planting in early May, she knows how incredible it is to see a tiny plant develop into something so big it reminds you of a sink, and how miraculous it is to eat heartily from a plant that you started from a little brown seed so tiny you could barely pick one up. One eggplant was bitten back to the stem twice by unknown insect assailants, then dwarfed by a nearby cucumber, and survived both the attacks and being moved to a more hospitable spot -- where it is now surrounded by encroaching pumpkin vines.
Undaunted, it is resurrected, leafing out, and I hope, will produce some eggplant by my birthday in September. What an amazing thing to watch this kind of resilience in something so fragile as a little plant that was small enough to be in a yogurt cup when we transplanted it, with thin little stem and leaves, standing firm and flourishing, come what may.
We are still getting lettuce in early August, as well as carrots and kohlrabi, plus warmer season things like tomatoes, beans, and cucumbers. The zucchini plants seem to be unhappy with the very wet weather; one has died altogether and some of the others don't look good anymore. We only had one arm-sized zucchini a week or so ago, which we sliced and grilled, and several smaller ones, and I don't have to go around town with excess zucchini stashed in my purse to foist on people I meet.
I did share one of the smaller zucchini, some cukes, lettuce, and beans with my next door neighbor, who was delighted to have fresh produce delivered to her door. Another big zucchini went into squash spice cake, one of the kids' favorite summer treats, from a recipe I adapted from a Victory Garden cookbook and make with grated squash, applesauce, lots of spices, and a mix of whole grain and white flour, flaxseed meal, wheat germ, and other goodies. In short, they see cake, I see a snack packed with nutrition that uses up excess squash.
I spotted one baby pumpkin yesterday on an enormous pumpkin vine, and so far haven't seen any cantaloupes or butternut squash developing, even though those vines are also large and there are lots of flowers. Next year I'll order short season cantaloupe seeds. We planted both orange and white pumpkins in hopes of a good crop for both eating and decorating. Maybe there are more under the enormous leaves that I didn't see yet.
A couple of our cherry tomato plants are so heavy with fruit that they pulled over their cage, and I knocked off some tomatoes as I wrestled it back upright. The green ones will ripen in a bowl on the counter. We have both golden and red cherry tomatoes as well as some larger fruited varieties which are loaded with tomatoes that haven't ripened in the last couple of weeks, probably because there hasn't been enough sun.The beans are a burgundy variety I learned about in Washington. They are a short season bush variety, and do well in New England summers as well as in the Northwest. They taste great right off the bush, and are just as good cooked. One cool thing that the kids got a big kick out of when they were younger is that they turn from this nice deep purple to the usual green when you cook them. They're crisp tender when they turn, so it's kind of like growing beans with a built in timer.
This was a harvest supper we had a couple of weeks ago. We made macaroni and cheese and popovers, and served them with mixed lettuce, radishes, sugar snap peas, a couple kinds of tomatoes (those are Brandywine, cut up in the blue bowl), and kohlrabi as well as cooked broccoli and cauliflower.I've blanched and frozen a couple of pounds of cauliflower and broccoli. I'll put some beans in the freezer, too. I'm not a huge frozen vegetable fan, but it will be a treat next winter to cook with some of summer's bounty, especially as we pore over seed catalogs and plan next year's plot.
I missed getting a photo of the veggie tray we fixed for Gregory's "fake" birthday (we celebrated almost two weeks early at home, and will celebrate again on the actual day in Maine). It was very pretty, and the veggies were great with Katherine's "from scratch" ranch dressing for dipping. Gregory's birthday meal included chicken satay and a veggie stir fry, and other than garlic and ginger, the stir fry was all home grown as well. Pretty rewarding to see a table full of birthday revelers well fed by the work of our hands.
