Garden

The Garden

as of October 09

The Garden got started late (in May) due to my health not being so great. I was on synthetic T4 ONLY and a tooth was giving me trouble. Finally got on natural thyroid in April, then had the tooth pulled & got a bone graft in June (ouch), and am now feeling a LOT better! The garden is in my back yard - made the yard bigger by almost 1000 sq ft last year & this is what I'm doing with it.

Chose mostly heirloom varieties - Cherokee, Sioux, Mortgage Lifter and Yellow Pear tomatoes; spineless okra, cantaloupes, anaheim chiles, green bell peppers, red bell peppers, cilantro, basil, Connecticut Field pumpkins (a Native American Heirloom that predates 1700), Moon & Stars Watermelons, and Tendersweet Orange watermelons. The only hybrids - black beauty zucchini and yellow summer squash. The black beauty can get up to 6 lbs and still not be seedy.

Powdery mildew and aphids pretty much wiped out the pumpkin plant - it gave us six gorgeous pumpkins. With one we made yummy pumpkin seeds and pumpkin sweet rolls. It was way too hot for thewatermelons - they tried a few times but failed. The canteloupes were/are delicious most of the time. The cantaloupe plant has been hit with powdery mildew and aphids, too, but it doesn't seem to ever give up. We don't get 5 or 6 cantaloupes at a time, we're down to one, but it never just quits and dies.

The cucumbers were taken out by cucumber beetles. Didn't see them! After the beetles emerged, I spent many, many mornings catching them in the garden and squashing them. Had BOTH striped and spotted. Little bastards. My favorite breakfast for weeks was a sliced cucumber out of the garden with Murray River Pink on it. YUM. Have planted 3 more cucumber plants, two of them are the Lemon Cucumber - instead of the cylindrical shape most cucumbers take, this one is round and yellow.

July brought the planting of the Yellow Corn, White Shoepeg corn, blue Hopi corn and winter squashes - Acorn, Butternut and Banana. We've already eaten acorn and butternut squash and as of this writing, the 9 and 10 foot tall cornstalks are still producing delicious tri-colored cobs. Thinking about planting red, white and blue next year to get patriotic cobs by the 4th of July.

During August, we planted more tomatoes - Cherokee Chocolate, red pear tomatoes, rutgers and a yellow globe tomato - as well as peppers - colored bell peppers, jalapeno, anaheim and habanero peppers.

The green bell peppers and green chiles are YUM and I don't think I will ever be content with a store-bought tomato again. You really haven't tasted a tomato til you've had one right off the plant.

Have discovered that the bees LOVE the basil plants in bloom, so there is now Basil all over the yard. It draws the bees in and it smells like heaven. Some say it repels bad bugs, but I don't know. I DO know that the big preying mantis mama likes it in the big basil plant which is 4 feet tall and now sprawls out about 6 feet wide.

Last month and this, the carrots and onions were planted. The orange carrot everyone is used to as well as purple dragons - purple on the outside and orangey-yellow inside. Both bunching onions and big globe onions, leaf lettuces and spinach.

The blackeye peas, Christmas lima beans and Kate's peas are coming along very nicely. Really can't wait to have homemade blackeye pea and corn salsa with my homegrown blackeyes, corn, tomatoes, onions and chiles.

Everything except the strawberries has been planted as seed directly into the soil - have had phenomenal seed performance.

Basil with flowers

Cantaloupes - this is a baby

Cherokee tomatoes - this big tomato is now two-hands-full big!

cucumber

garden

yellow pear tomatoes

zucchini

The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! This is a variety that predates 1700 and it grows about 3 feet at night. The crazy thing wants to take over the yard, but I'm not letting it - It is AMAZING how big it's gotten so quickly.

Day's harvest for 7/14/09

The Murderer of the Pollinator Bees - Robber Fly! They are very quick.

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