Friday, August 13, 2010

The Garden Today

I'm pretty happy with how our garden is going.  Though I'm learning a lot through the process, we are still getting plenty of produce.  Next year will be even better!


Our sole zucchini plant gave us 4 zucchinis.  The rest rotted on the vine with what I think is blossom end rot caused by lack of pollination.  I started hand-pollinating the flowers each morning.  I don't know if it was my pollination efforts or luck, but the finally started growing.  I sauteed the first one with butter.  The second one was grated up for zucchini bread.  I made a couple of loaves (my recipe makes two loaves) with it and have 4 1/2 loaves worth of grated zucchini in my freezer.  (It was a big zucchini)  There are two zucchini left on the plant; the one in the picture is the larger of the two and should give me 6-8 loaves of zucchini bread. Yea!

Our carrots are doing well.  We've eaten roughly half of them and have one more square left.  I have several potato plans that I'm letting go until they die off, then we'll harvest them.  The square on the bottom right is already reseeded with carrots which are already an inch tall.

Here's Josh with some carrots I roasted for dinner last week.


Our persimmon tomato plant is HUGE!  We finally have tomatoes growing on it.  I'm looking forward to harvesting these huge, yellow tomatoes and tasting them.  I've never had persimmons before.

The stupice tomatoes are going well, too.  I haven't had these either.  I have my eye on the two darker red ones for a salad soon.


Our sun gold cherry tomatoes are ripening already.  We've all tasted one each so far.  These three are also destined for a salad soon as they are ripe now.


Don't let the lack of red fool you; there are plenty of ripe strawberries in there.  The plants are just so full that you can't see them.  We have these three squares plus three more, though it isn't anywhere near enough.  We eat them one by one as they become ripe.  Something is attacking them, though, because they are small and funny shaped.



I have probably ten little plants that look like this coming up.  Most of them are cauliflower; some of them are broccoli.  They look identical at this stage and I have no idea which are which.  Ooops!  I need to work on labeling those squares.  I hope they grow well.


We still have plenty of lettuce even though we've been eating salads nearly every day.  There are three varieties here: romaine, butter crunch (my favorite), and red leaf.  You can also see onions on both sides of them, though they aren't growing well.  The bulbs are an inch across at best.



I accidentally bought bush beans instead of the pole beans I wanted.  Nevertheless, they are growing well.  We've already had two dinner's worth of green beans and have another meal's worth ready out there now.  I definitely got more than I expected from 20 or so plants.


My cucumber plant that survived the early season lack of sunshine is recovering great.  It's growing like a weed.  I never knew cucumbers were prickly, on prickly vines before.

It's been fun growing this stuff this year.  I can definitely say that I'm happy with the square foot gardening method.  The kids running out there almost daily to check progress, and our spur of the moment bee/pollinating lesson were great bonuses as well.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

I had the same issue with my strawberries (I am here in fircrest, not far from you). Everyone commented how huge my plants were, they were huge and healthy but the strawberries were tiny and mis-shapen. It finally occured to me that the plants were putting all their growing effort into the leaves. I trimmed my plants WAY back (I almost thought I went too far). Not only did the greens grow back within a week or so, I now have big plump berries! I am by no means an expert but I thought this might help.