We're halfway through the summer, and I haven't mentioned my garden! It probably has something to do with the difficulty of working full time, chasing a baby, trying to keep the house in order, being out of town every other weekend... yeah, the garden hasn't gotten the most attention. It's embarrassing, really.
But! There have been a few successes!
Volunteer garlic popped up everywhere from last year's unharvested bulbs. It was in the way of planting anything else, so I dug it up as green garlic, spent most of a weekend cleaning it, and sold it to
Pizzology and
The Farming Engineers.
Every year, with very little or no effort, we have berries:
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| Mulberries |
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| Strawberries |
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| Black raspberries |
In the actual vegetable garden, I've harvested a bit, too. We have been eating peas since early summer, and will be for a while. For the first time, I planted a few squash plants, and am loving the creamy summer squash. I don't even like onions, but the onions I've harvested so far are the sweetest I've ever tasted. All the normal herbs are out in the garden too- dill, cilantro, basil. Love the basil.
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| Peas |
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| Onions still in the ground |
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| squash, onion, basil, tomato |
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| tomatoes |
And the tomatoes. I have both cherry tomatoes and full-sized tomatoes out in the garden, but only the cherry tomatoes have started to turn red. They didn't get as red as I expected, but I think they were ready to harvest. When I bit into one this week, two sensations hit me. One was, this was the sweetest tomato I've ever tasted- making me really believe tomato is a fruit. There was no hint of acidity or saltiness, just juicy sweetness. The second, less pleasant sensation was the fact I was still chewing- these tomatoes had a very thick, practically un-chewable skin. The insides are delicious, the outsides, less so. A little bit of Googling led me to conclude this was due to the lack of rain and high, high temperatures we've been having. I'll probably still harvest the cherry tomatoes and eat them as-is, though, because peeling so many little fruit would feel kind of silly.
What are you growing right now?
2 comments:
that's really cool to know about the skin on the cherry tomatoes, as ours have the same very thick skin and we had the exact high temp/low rain conditions! your onions look amazing.
Put tomatoes in boiling water for a minute and then plunge them in ice cold water for a few minutes.
The skins should come off easily.
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