Blog - VEGarden

Recent VEGarden Posts

Mid-August

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....

Garden Animals

Since it’s “post pictures of animals in your garden” week, I decided to put up this cute shot of the guinea pig that Chris and the dogs found yesterday. He’s hanging out in the beans, a good hiding place which makes him feel very safe. Many of our tomatoes are starting to ripen! Tomorrow I’ll post a picture of the tomatoes in the front yard – they seem to be ripening faster than the ones in the back. I’ve decided to buy tomato seeds from Amishland Heirloom Seeds next year (well, maybe this fall before they sell out) – I’m especially excited about some of the white varieties they have, as well as a few of the yellow/red striped ones....

Puck Helping Out in the Garden

I admit this is tangenitally related to gardening, but here is puck (I couldn’t get much of a picture). When both Puck and me are outside I’ll leave the fence gate open so he can mosey around if he wants. I feel bad the dogs have to be locked up in our puny yard when they ideally they ought to be able to roam free, free as the wind blows. He loves to sniff everything, but unlike Nigel he hasn’t figured out how to eat stuff off the plants on his own. I forgot to water the peas, socrenezora/black salsify, beets and carrots today. From what I’ve read seedlings should be watered everyday – especially carrots and maybe the salsify...

War and Peas

I am not the photog Jessi is, but here are the fall pea sprouts. I planted them a couple days ago. Some slugs sprouted up too what with the rain, but the peas seem to have managed okay. I hope all the junk like straw doesn’t hurt anything – I didn’t want to spend an hour cleaning the bed up. Today I planted beets and black salsify. For the rest of the week I plan to work on removing the grass from the side of garage facing the house where next year we’ll have corn, squash and peas. Once the grass is up and the soil tilled I’ll plant the fall manure mix I got which will grow the rest...

Rain!

Last night the skies finally opened up and it poured for a good hour. It’s drizzling this morning. Looks like we got just over a half inch; it should continue to rain throughout the day. Maybe this will put a final boost into our garden, and we will finally get some tomatoes before the end of the month. We had planned on canning jars and jars of tomatoes and making a lot of tomato sauce… I don’t know if the plants will have time to produce any more than what’s waiting to ripen now.

Carrots

Royal Chantenay Carrots The carrots in the front yard are looking good – they’re about 3/4” in diameter at the top. We piled some lake muck over them to protect them from the sun. I brought back some lake muck from my parents’ cabin last weekend. If I make it up there again, I’m going to bring back quite a bit more. It’s really rich and I’m sure the garden just loves it. Chris planted peas a couple days ago, for a fall crop. Also, the new windows for my house will be arriving soon, so we can start thinking about using the old ones to build cold frames for winter gardening.

Herbs

Mint We must have gone wrong somewhere with the herbs; either we planted them too late or the soil just wasn’t right. Now, in early August, we finally have basil plants that are about five inches tall… we’ve been getting basil in our food share for more than a month now! The mint is also about 5” tall, but not big enough to use. Cilantro? Most of it didn’t germinate, and what did flowered when it was very small. The flat leaf parsley is finally starting to look good. We’ll see how much growing these herbs can do in the next six weeks! Fortunately, a lot of them are in pots so maybe we can bring them in when it...

Tomatoes

Finally, the tomatoes are starting to ripen! Above: four Oxacan Pink tomatoes, one Amana Orange tomato, one Early Red tomato, and 11 Roma tomatoes.

Early August

Sunflowers 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?

Pickles

Four slicing cucumbers, and a bunch of pickling cukes! 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...

Papaya Trees

Two kinds of papaya trees and a couple of medjool date palms Though the papayas aren’t technically part of our vegetable garden, I spent a lot of time getting them to germinate, live, and grow. Actually, I probably spent more time fussing with the papayas than I spent weeding and mulching the vegetables. The papaya plant, usually referred to as a tree, is actually a large, fast-growing woody herb. The plants usually start flowering when they are five months old, and have ripe fruit when they are 8 months to a year. The lifespan is usually only 3-4 years, but some papaya plants have lived for a decade or more. I guess it just depends on how well it is...

The fruits are on their way…

Oxacan Pink Tomatoes Black Eggplant 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...

Four Season Harvest?

I read Eliot Coleman’s books a few months ago (thanks for the barnes and noble gift card, dad) and we will be experimenting with fall and winter gardening this year. Here are the cold weather seeds coming our way: Parsley, Italian Dark Green Bull’s Blood (beets w/red leaves) Napoli (“candy carrots”) Evergreen Hardy White (scallions) Belstar Super (Scorzonera – its a really long dark brown root in the Asteracea/sunflower family) VIT (corn salad/mache – apparently the cold hardy vegetable) Chioggia Red Preco No. 1 (Radicchio ie those little red lettuce heads) Winterbor (Kale) Super Sugar Snap (fall peas – who knew?) Encore Lettuce Mix Fall Green Manure Mix (for where we don’t plant the rest of this stuff) Can I...

Semi – “Harvest”

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...

Yellow Squash?

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!

Summer Heat

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...

Zucchini

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!

Flowering Black Eggplant

Here’s what an eggplant flower looks like. Our eggplants are loaded with flowers and buds; right now, they look like one of the most promising plants we put in! The potted eggplants grew much more quickly, but the ones in the front yard were quicker to flower – I’ll have to keep track and see which ones produce more. Our summer squash and pumpkins have all been invaded by squash vine borers. I remember seeing the moths earlier this year around the pumpkins, and asking Chris what they were. We should have looked them up rather than assuming that they were some kind of harmless bug. Anyway, it’s pretty serious and every vine is infested. This morning we performed “surgery”...

Disasters

Above: the first ripe roma tomato of the season. Unfortunately, it was afflicted with Blossom End Rot and so it ripened too quickly and wasn’t very good-tasting. This hot weather with no rain is likely what has caused the BER – we need to water more frequently to keep the soil evenly moist. In other bad news, we had to pull up all of the buttercup squash plants today. They had worms boring up the stems from the roots – all of them. Very, very sad and upsetting. I hope the cucumbers don’t get attacked, and I am concerned about the rest of the vine plants. We definitely need to have our soil tested next year – something just isn’t...

Okra

At least we’ll have two okras from our one surviving plant this year. Maybe these would haved worked better in pots, like the eggplant? If we want to save any, we’ll need a lot more plants next year. I planted the Star of David variety – I think maybe I just chose the wrong variety to plant in Minnesota. Tip for next year: Start in mid-April, and keep the soil very, very warm. Don’t transplant the seedlings until they are ready to go outside – wait at least until the first week in June to put them out. Try a variety that grows well in northern areas – Clemson Spineless and Burgundy are supposed to be better for cooler climates.

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