Summery peppers

The 5-color peppers are living up to their name in August. Nice and summery!

Pesto change-o

We tried making almond pesto last week. Different flavor from pine nuts, pretty tasty.

We hardly had any cheese and it still came out great. I freeze the pesto in ice cube trays then put the blocks into containers in the fridge. Makes it easy to take out a little at a time; add some to tomato soup to give it zing.

Feeling inadequate?

These Yamoto cucumbers won't help:


Don't know if I will grow them again. Grow very fast, get out of control, aren't too crispy. Will intimidate your friends and neighbors.

Corn??

Could I possibly get a few popcorn cobs this summer? Talk about a haphazard attempt (planted seeds between tomatoes and beans right before I left for a month)

Lots o tomatoes

I've been slowly working on processing tomatoes. I made some tomato soup, almost by accident. Been drying cherry tomatoes and made a batch of salsa to store in the freezer. The tomato plants are starting to look scraggly, but this has been a really great tomato year so I'm pretty happy.

Can't even tell ya how many buckets of tomatoes I've hauled in this summer.

Roasting tomatoes for soup:


Dried tomatoes and soup in freezer:

Even more (with a few pickling cukes):

Update on peppers and eggplants

These were also taken before we left for the trip, in the third week of July:
The Jalapenos are going crazy:


And... hoooray! I actually got an eggplant:


The heirloom Peter Peppers are finally starting to make peppers:

They will turn red and look like little weiners, hence their name.

Harvest pictures

These were taken in the 2nd and 3rd weeks of July. I started getting ripe tomatoes almost a month earlier than last year.
First batch of big ripe tomatoes:


Some tomatoes, asparagus beans, and the first Yamoto cucumber - these guys are almost 2 feet long but only an inch across:

Pizza!

Some homemade pizza using pesto and tomatoes from the garden:

It's hot

It's so hard to be a cat:


Some days it's so hot the cats can't even bother to go outside even if the door's open.

Sushi and Katsu kissing, right before they decided to have a 2-day fight:

Sushi is probably just checking out the competition. What good cats :)

More progress

For the first time ever, my eggplant plants have made it far enough to produce beautiful, uneaten flowers:

It would be great to actually get an eggplant this year.

The peppers are going strong. I have lots of the super-hot 5-color peppers. The Jalapenos just started producing:

I'd like to try smoking some to make chipotles.

First Tomato!

While I was gone last week, the first ripe tomato arrived:

It's one of the sweet 100s cherry tomatoes. A few of the large heirloom tomatoes are looking slightly less green also. Can't wait!

Comparison of tomato plants 2008-2010

This was the status of my tomato plants in late June in 2008:


And late June 2009:


And late June 2010:


The ring stakes are all the same in the three pictures. Late spring/early summer was relatively cool and wet for both 2008 and 2009. This spring and early summer were really hot, and in my particular area, also quite rainy. What a difference heat makes!

July Update

Everything I've posted since I got back was from mid-late June. Here's a more recent update:
The cucumbers are getting ready to produce. I have a Japanese slicing cucumber variety this year. Those plants have been climbing the mesh fence trellis really well:


A random insect hangs out on a cucumber blossom on an Arkansas picking cucumber plant:

These plants have physically smaller leaves and flowers, don't grow super fast, but seem pretty tough for cucumbers. I transplanted some in the middle of boiling hot weather, and every single plant survived, even though some leaves died.

Boy, the tomatoes are going nuts. Most of them are already above their cages. Compare this picture even to that from late June:


And some of the heirloom tomatoes are getting downright chunky. Here are some of the Black Sea Man tomatoes:


Beans are also climbing now. The front row are heirloom lima beans, back row are Chinese long beans (asparagus beans). They have been slower to vine out and climb.

Wild Raspberries!

The wild raspberry bushes found everywhere along roadsides, on hillslopes, and in my case along the driveway, are going nuts with berries. 20 minutes of effort produced more than 2 cups of berries:


And I made some sort of cupcake-like dessert (supposed to be heart-shaped) from the raspberries and local blueberries:

Tasted pretty good.

For some reason I have the Prince song "Raspberry Beret" stuck in my head every time I eat some.

Amazing! Actual eggplant plants

Unlike every other year I've tried to grow eggplants in Virginia, this time I succeeded in beating the flea beetles (at least so far):

This was taken right when I got back. The plants on the deck are about to flower now.
I also have several plants in the garden. I did a little experiment in pest control. A few plants were left completely uncovered in the garden while I was gone. I kept a few others in the garden completely covered in row cover material (in the center of a row) until I got back in late June, then took off the row cover. The ones on the deck were never covered.

Results: The ones on the deck, 10+ feet off of the ground, did great without being covered at all. The ones in the garden under the row cover, then exposed, are doing OK. They have some flea beetle damage, but I don't think it's terminal. The ones that had no protection look stunted and punctured with thousands of holes in the leaves.

So there ya go- the easiest thing to do is to get the eggplants way up off the ground in pots.

Peas

Oh yeah, and some of the pea plants on the porch reached 8 feet tall before drying up:


I had pulled all the other pea plants out when I took this picture. Saved some of the dried peas to try to plant in the fall.

Back from Ireland!

Here's what the garden looked like when I got back:



Not too bad really. The size of the tomato plants was shocking. And seeds I had planted at the last second before leaving seemed to do very well. Seems like almost all of the bean seeds came up:



Most cucumbers sprouted:


Even the random pumpkins made it:


There was a LOT of rain, even though it was VERY warm while I was gone. I had the automatic drip irrigation system set up to run half an hour a day, but that was very extraneous in late May and most of June.
It's interesting because even the town of Harrisonburg, only 7 miles away, had very little rain. I was just on the edge of the thunderstorms that were hitting the western mountains.

Planting tomatoes

Pretty sure our frost days are over for the spring. I planted 20 tomatoes this afternoon, along with some little basils and marigolds :)

Have sweet 100s, romas, Cherokee, Brandywine, and the colorful Black Sea Man.

First lettuce

Cosmo lettuce and my favorite, drunken woman lettuce (with red spots).

Peas Pleeze!

Here's what the pea plants looked like at the end of April:

Now they're more than twice as high. I have the usual sugar snap and snow peas. I'm also trying shelling peas this year.
Had the first pea blossoms bloom on the snow peas on May 5:

Building a new garden

I moved to a new house last summer! So I've almost finished building a terraced garden.
It's next to the shed. I figure the closer to the house, the better. The deer are a little less hesitant to come near the buildings.

Using regular landscaping logs and rebar rods.

The soil is a hard clay with, um, a LOT of rocks. Spent a large amount of time hacking rocks with a pickaxe. Added about 2 inches of compost across the garden. I wasn't sure the water pressure from the one spigot on the house would be high enough to push water up the hill, but is seems to be working fine:

The highest terrace is still not finished, but I started putting some plants in the lower levels anyway.

I'm trying Michihili cabbage this year (in the picture above). It's growing really well in pots on the porch and in the garden.