weekend harvest - seeds

We don't have too many pictures of veggies to show off this week.  We had a couple groups of friends who came to visit the garden last week.  We had fun walking around the garden.  Everyone tried their hands in harvesting veggies and took home the harvests.  And, of course I forgot to take pictures of those harvests.

 I did take pictures of the harvest for Saturday night dinner.  The cucumbers are slowing down.  The tomatoes are ripping faster than we are picking.  On Saturday and Sunday, we picked tomatoes both in the mornings and the afternoons.

This big fat carrot was one of the only two seeds that came up from my failed seed sowing in March.  The other one I picked too early so there wasn't much of a carrot.  Then I kept forgetting to pick this one.  I chopped this one up and cooked it in soup.  It was nice and sweet.  This variety is Oxheart.  They grow very short and fat, so they are good for heavy clay soils.  We don't have heavy clay soils.  I just like to grow different varieties for fun.

Although we don't have too many edibles to show off this week, we do have some non-edible harvest to share.

Here are some stargazer lilies we harvested for cut flowers.

I let some chive flowers go to seed so I can plant more next year, although I think there will be some volunteers next year.  There were a lot seeds dropped to the ground.  The seeds were kind of a pain to collect.  It was hard to separate the dried up mini flowers from the seeds.

I have a monster celery plant going to seed.  It's been there since last year.  I harvested some of the seeds last Sunday.  I can't wait for the rest of the seeds to dry up, so I can dig up the plant and grow something else there.

I had a much easier time collecting these seeds.  I just used a fine sift to separate the debris from the seeds.  I heard celery seeds can be used as seasoning for cooking.  I'm going to give it a try.  I guess you could count these as part of the edible harvest.

catching up

We have been absent from the the blog for a couple of weeks, but things don't stop in the garden.  Here are some pictures from past two weeks...

baby lima bean

yarrow

building the shed

softneck garlics

first tomato! (unfortunately overripe when we found it)

how's it growin'? (mid-june 2011 part 1)

I have been bad this season.  Last spring/summer season I took pictures of the plants every week as a journal to note their progresses.  This season I haven't been doing so.  I also haven't done any "garden update" posts.  I was going to do one about a month ago when my dad asked me how the garden was doing.  I took some pictures, but never sat down to write a post.  Oh well, better late than never.

So, here are some of the plants (pictures were taken last week)...

First up are the cukes.  These are hybrid Japanese cucumbers (tasty queen 10).  They are supposedly extra early and high yielding.  I don't know about extra early, but it does look like they will produce well.  I picked my first cucumber on Saturday, then four more on Monday.

They are not great climbers though.  As you can see, we are trying to train them up the trellis/arbor.  The idea is for them to climb up using the (neon pink!) strings.  On the top, there are criss-crossed bamboo sticks and wooden bars so they can climb and grow across the beds.  The arbor they create will provide shades for the veggies growing under it on those hot summer days.  The arbor will cover 2 beds.  The edible luffa gourds and bitter melons in the next two beds will climb up the same arbor.

Here's a picture of that first cucumber.  It was harvested after this picture was taken.

These are the greens growing in the same bed with the cucumbers.  There are spinach, red and green salad bowl lettuces, tung ho (edible chrysanthemum), a-choy lettuces, and New Zealand spinach (you can't see them as they are still small).  I sowed these greens and the brassicas in the next bed really late (a little more than a month ago).  I'm sure glad I did.  The weather's been cool and they are loving it.

The edible luffa gourds are growing slowly.  It enjoys hot weather, so it's one of the veggies that's not happy about the cooler temperature.

These are some of the brassicas growing in the same bed with the luffa gourds (mizuna, southern giant curled India mustard, summerfest komatsuna).

Here are our pole beans (Kentucky Wonder, frosty lima, yard long).  Kentucky Wonder is the healthiest of the bunch at the moment.  Frosty lima is still recovering from the slug attack earlier.  Yard long seems to be the choice for the aphids.  The yard long beans on the north side (righthand side of the picture) of the bed are infested with aphids.  Last week I wiped aphids off the stems and cut off some heavily infested leaves and tips.  We'll see if they recover and produce beans.  I did see some ladybugs having feasts.  I hope they'll bring over some family and friends.

I prefer our "V" shaped trellis over the "A" shaped trellis.  It makes harvesting much easier.  We built an "A" shaped trellis two years ago.  I had a really hard time picking beans.

This is one of our nightshade beds (we have 6).  The five plants you see in this picture were purchased.  We did start some peppers and eggplants from seeds, but they were growing wayyyyyyy too slowly, so we had to buy most of our eggplants and pepper plants.  The sun gold cherry tomato in the front was the only purchased tomato plant this year.  All of our other tomato plants were started from seeds.  This one is a bit behind the other tomatoes.

There are a few flowers on the eggplants.  I hope I'll see some baby eggplants soon!

harvest - 'tis the season of summer fruits

saturn peaches, blackberries, ume plums, garlic chives

The peaches started ripping last week.  This signals the start of summer even though the weather doesn't feel like it at all.  The temperature has been a lot cooler than usual and gardening-perfect.  We are trying to enjoy the weather before those 90-some or 100-some degree hot summer days come.

Back to my basket of goodies.  These tree-ripened peaches are mouth-wateringly delicious.  They have a light sweet scent and the skin peels right off.  They are very juicy and not overly sweet.  Just the right sweetness.  Just peachy.

We also harvested a couple of our first blackberries.  We should be getting loads of them in a few weeks.  The two apricot-looking things are ume plums.  They are used to make Japanese pickled plums (umeboshi) when the fruits are still green and sour.  The ripe fruits are rather tasteless.  The tree only bore about 5 fruits this year.  Maybe we'll try making some umeboshi if there's ever a good amount of harvest.

The cooler-than-usual temperature also means happy greens.  In this box there are - tung ho (edible/garland chrysanthemum), curled Indian mustard, a-choy lettuce, spinach, mizuna, summerfest komatsuna... oh ya, and our first cucumber!

Our garlics are pathetic this year.  We didn't notice that our irrigation system wasn't working right for a little while. Their growth is stunted and the leaves are burnt.  For now, they are hanging on.  Earlier during the week, I harvested our garlic scapes.  I was excited to see the garlics producing scapes since I had never grown hardnecks before.  The scapes are a little tougher than I would like (probably because of the lack of water) but still good.

baby preying mantis

When I was working in the garden, this little guy came along and wanted to play.  I asked it to pose for a few pictures, then it left to get some aphids for dinner.

I saw this caterpillar on my pumpkin plant.  Good bug or bad bug?