Monday, July 19, 2010

Garden scenes

I'm not sure how it's happened, really, that summer's half over and I haven't posted any garden pics since (goodness!) April. But it's been there, and I've been there, these past three months. Getting bigger, greener, wilder-- and always giving. This week, I'm bracing myself for the beginning of the flood: cucumbers and green beans. My 4 x 4' cucumber patch has probably a hundred flowers. By the end of this week, I will have seven or eight nice, straight, shiny cukes. My cucurbit allegiance has been sworn, enthusiastically, to Marketmore 76, and with you-all as my witness, I will never grow another variety.

This year, I'm trying Hercules carrots. I have never had great luck with carrots. Even when the crowns look like this, often the roots turn out to be puny, and so I'm delaying my carrot harvest, prolonging my hope that this year, maybe, I'll pull long, fat ones out of the ground.

This week, my anaheim peppers have a standing date with a recipe called "Picnic Caviar" that calls for canned green chiles. Scoff. These beauties will do the trick.

I had to post one tragically beautiful shot of my tomatoes, before the blight consumes them all. I've noticed it beginning to creep down the row, one plant at a time. Breaks my heart all over again, just like it did last year. Next year, maybe I'll devote the space to something else. Let the treacherous mystery of the blight extinguish itself before trying tomatoes again.

Every day at the garden, I think of the captured woodchuck, and offer my gratitude that my plants are safe from his appetite. Last year, I didn't get even a single cucumber.

3 comments:

Becky said...

Your garden is lovely. Sorry about the tomatoes. Did you plant those in the same spot as last year? I think one is supposed to "rotate the crops" - especially tomato plants.

Stinking deer have circumvented my every blockage and chopped all my plants. Hubby doesn't want fences but as I point out he ain't getting any fresh veggies without 'em.

Kristina Strain said...

Argh, deer. Fortunately, we city dwellers don't have to fight the deer. When we move to the country, however, it'll be a different story.

I did rotate my tomatoes-- however my garden space is so small that I can't move them too far away from where they were last year. This is one problem that will be solved, not worsened, when we move. :)

Nicole said...

If you need to, you can pick your tomatoes while they're still green and let them ripen on a sunny windowsill. It's not quite the same, but better than no tomatoes at all. (in case you didn't know :) )

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