Lots and lots of stuff out of the garden today! Many Roma tomatoes, a few Amana Orange tomatoes, a large Marvel Striped tomato… more tomatoes… cucumbers, beets, and carrots (I didn’t take a picture of them).

We ate two of our black eggplants for dinner last night. The one here is a pink bi-colored eggplant. The random yellow/green squash was weighing down the vine, and when I picked the vine up this morning, it just fell right off. So, I guess it’s time to be eaten! It’s not very big and the vine only made one, which is slightly upsetting.

We ripped a big chunk of the beans out of the garden this afternoon, and Chris has been busy planting vegetables for late fall/winter harvesting. Maybe he will write about what he’s been planting soon!

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Two!

Finally, finally, finally! We turned our backs on the garden for a couple of days, and this morning found at least three Small Sugar Pumpkins, finally starting to grow! I think the hot weather and lack of rain really halted the production of female flowers. We got another half-inch of rain this week, so things are looking up.

The nights are getting much cooler – I’m going to start bringing my papayas inside for the evenings very soon. We may also need to think of a system for our potted eggplants to extend their growing season a bit. The first frost is still (hopefully) at least a month away, but given the late appearance of everything this year, I hope we’ll hold onto the sunshine just a bit longer!

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Front Garden Cayenne Peppers

As you can see… we’re going to have some ripe tomatoes very, very soon! There are three fat amana orange tomatoes in the front, and lots of misshapen oxacan pink tomatoes. The romas are starting to ripen, so maybe we’ll be making tomato sauce soon!

The chile peppers are still doing well… the purira peppers are getting fairly large, though they are still yellow. They turn purple, then orange, then red! I think they get spicier the longer they stay on the plant – hopefully in a week or two I will have a rainbow photo to post. The cayenne plants are loaded, though none have turned red yet. Again, a few more weeks to wait.

The pumpkins continue to look very pretty, producing more and more male flowers every day. Unfortunately, there aren’t any fruits on the vines, which is why we planted them. Oh well… at least they add a bit of color to the garden in the back. One yellow crookneck squash finally decided to enter the garden. I still have no idea what that yellow and green squash is… the skin seems like it’s toughening up a bit, so it’s probably a randomly crossed winter squash after all.

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The best way to see progress in your garden: go away for the weekend. Chris is going to be pleased when he comes back on Wednesday night. The tomatoes are still quite slow to ripen, but there are two nice orange ones that I may be able to eat for dinner tonight, and a few clusters of ripe romas. We have five or six baby eggplants, and there seem to be quite a few more on the way.

The biggest question I have now is: What is that squash growing in our zucchini? <– is!

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We’re heading out of town this weekend, so I completely raided the cucumber vines yesterday, picking everything that was big enough to be sliced or turned into a baby dill pickle. We ended up with 4 1/2 quarts of pickles – both sliced and whole. I used a recipe from the Reader’s Digest Back to Basics book, substituting the food co-op’s pickling spice for the spices in the recipe and adding fresh dill.

The problem with pickles is that you have to wait months and months before you can enjoy them! Actually, we have three fairly large containers of sweet refrigerator pickles in the fridge, and those only take a week or so. I’m fairly happy with our cucumbers this year – we’ll see what we have when I get back from the weekend!

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Last night at the food co-op when we went to pick up our food share, we spoke with another home-gardener who said that she also performs surgery on her squash and pumpkins every year to remove the borers. She said that they always turn out just fine – this leaves me a bit more hopeful, and the fact that we still have zucchini and some random summer squash growing eases my mind a bit.

Also, she said that her eggplant were starting to get little fruits… and this morning there is a small black eggplant! The flowers on some of the eggplants are starting to fold up, and within a couple of weeks we should be regularly harvesting eggplants!

Additionally… we mentioned that a lot of our tomatoes have blossom end rot, and the home-gardener said, “that will go away.” She’s gotten four tomatoes out of her garden so far this year – we ate an amana orange tomato and a couple of romas last week, and with the pink ones starting to ripen, I don’t think we’re too far behind at all. We got our first tomatoes this week in our food share from Easy Bean, so it seems like this year they are slow to ripen. If only we could get some rain…

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Out of the garden today:

- Two romas displaying Blossom End Rot
- One carrot (just checking on the size) – looks like they’re about half-grown
- Two onions, just barely larger than the sets we put in
- A handful of pickling cukes

The cucumbers filled a quart jar and a pint jar. There are quite a few large pickling cucumbers that we missed over the past week – I left them on the vine to make pickle chips with later. The difficult thing about only having an 8-foot row of pickling cucumbers is that only three or four of them reach “baby dill” size at a time, and I’m not entirely excited about making one jar of pickles at a time. Maybe production will pick up over the next two or three weeks – there are still a lot of cucumbers on the vine!

Apparently, onions are supposed to be the “test crop” for how good your soil is. Looks like we don’t have very good soil. We’re definitely going to get our soil tested – onions are a staple in our house, and it would sure be nice if we could grow enough of them to store until mid-winter.

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Here’s the yellow squash growing in the zucchini section. It’s quite round for a yellow crookneck squash – I wonder what it will turn out to be!

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Three flowering black eggplants in pots in the back yard.

It was pretty hot (above 90) yesterday, and the temperatures are predicted to rise for the next two days. I’ve been watering both the front and back garden every day for three days now, and Chris and I are just about to go water it again today. Things are really going to take off I think!

We have a yellow summer squash growing in the zucchini plants – the seeds must have been mixed up when they were packaged! The tomatoes are finally just starting to turn red – there is one Amana Orange that’s just about ripe with Blossom End Rot (boo-hiss), but here’s a rather large tomato that looks like it’s going to avoid the rot:

It’s one of the heirlooms – Amana Orange, Oxacan Pink, or Marvel Striped – but we won’t know which one until it ripens! Next year I plan to keep the tomatoes labeled better, and maybe even plant the varieties together so we can judge the plants for seed-saving purposes (what an idea!).

There’s also a large slicing-cucumber, and a few pickling ones. I hope the pickling cukes take off soon, because we haven’t really had enough to make a batch of pickles yet. Sure, I pull two or three every couple of days but it isn’t enough to fill up a pint jar!

The chile peppers are loaded this year – last year we didn’t have much luck with chiles, getting only one or two peppers from each plant. I’ve been using the czechoslovokian black peppers pretty regularly – each plant has at least 15 chiles on it! The cayennes are loaded with long green peppers – I can’t wait for them to ripen! We should be able to dry a bunch of peppers and also make some chile sauce.

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Two days after our squash surgery to remove the vine borers, this little zucchini decided to make an entrance. I’m wondering if the surgery worked, and if the zucchini will make new roots and continue to produce throughout the summer. I’m still not optimistic, but a bit more hopeful!

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