This is my Halloween gift to you–a freakish carrot pulled by Mr. Pea when he closed down our community garden plot today. He came home with a couple of dozen carrots–most of them enormous and stout, which makes me wonder–but this one is hte winner as our oddest veg of the year.
Pardon my silence this week–I’ve had a terrible setback with the vertigo, prompting panicky doctor’s visits and general mayhem. I’ll post more soon–making some country bread right now, plus a book review.
We went to Maine for a few days. I meant to take beach photos, but never actually brought the camera to the ocean. Then I went to stay with dad a few days–mom is away. Now I’m home. Check out the harvest Mr. Pea picked yesterday, after the garden went untended for several days:
Today I took what is really the first substantial harvest out of our garden. I’d been avoiding it a bit–there was rain to contend with, other things to do, and the dead tomatoes had really taken the wind out of my sails. But today I went back and was richly rewarded, although I am starting to think that instead of growing veggies cheaply, I’m working on growing the most expensive veg out there. The tomato loss is mostly responsible for that, but today we also lost our winter squash (not much to look at there anyway) to vine borers. I tore one plant out and saw the worm–came home and confirmed it. I’ll go back for the other later, before it, god forbid, spreads to my zucchini.
Anyway, today there’s the usual mountain of lettuce–I’ve been bringing enough home for us and the upstairs neighbors, as there’s no way we’ll get through it all before it eventually bolts. Two rows of lettuce go a long way. I was going to pick chard, but have no use for it today or tomorrow and Friday we’re out of town for a wedding. So I’ll wait. There’s a head of broccoli, which is pretty exciting. I think I’ll hold onto it for a stir-fry tomorrow. There’s a teeny tiny carrot. This thrilled me to no end. I’ve never grown carrots or seen them grown. This one was a stray that had seeded itself by the herbs, and I pulled it. It’s not big, but it’s orange and carroty and that makes me happy.
There’s also a nice pile of basil which I just turned into pesto and popped into the ice cube tray and into the freezer. There are also three! onions. Threeeeee! The whole field-now at I think 45-isn’t ready, but a couple had begun to tip and were clobbering other plants, so I pulled them. I’ll slice one to have on a pizza with that other veggie you see, the purple pepper. It hasn’t grown any lately, so I pulled it before it rotted. There are two others–the green-turning-yellow ones–that are nearly yellow, so another week and they should be ready. Hopefully. I also salvaged a few cherry tomatoes to see if they’ll shelf-ripen without blighting. We did get one sungold cherry that way. Yay. The $18 cherry tomato 
How does your garden grow?
Remember those beautiful, robust tomato plants I showed you a week ago, full of joy and excitement? Well, they are a thing of the past, ravaged by what you see here: late blight (not my photo–I didn’t have my camera). I’d noticed this devastation spreading in the community garden and a woman who I call Debbie Downer, who likes to visit my plot and tell me things won’t grow, had told Mr. Pea and I about while we weeded a couple of weeks ago. And today our poor plants had begun to croak. I had a feeling it was coming–late blight (the same disease that caused the Irish potato famine, isn’t that charming?) starts with brown spots on the stems, and I had spotted those a week or so ago. Today those spots were splitting and cracking, the leaves were blackening, what little fruit had grown (they’d just really started to set) were getting blotchy spots, which would ultimately rot the tomato and turn hard. I took what was growing and not blotchy off, pulled off the dead stuff, but I don’t think there’s much of a chance for the plants themselves.
Late blight is evidently not uncommon but typically comes later (thus the name), after harvesting. With all the rain we’ve had, and our unseasonably cool weather, it came faster. There have also been accusations levelled at big box stores such as home depot for the blight: evidently some of the plants they sold in the northeast were infected and then as they sat on shelves, the infected spread their spores to other plants, and then these plants were put in gardens, and, well, here we are.
Oh well. As Mr. Pea says, life doesn’t always go as planned, and really, they’re just plants. And as another gardener (who, incidentally, looked like Santa Claus and gave me a present of a zucchini from his garden–coincidence?) noted, at least we don’t depend on these tomatoes for our livlihoods or sustenance. That would be much worse, indeed.
Our garden plot has been growing merrily along, despite the torrential rains we have been getting with frequency lately. New England was fortunate to have lots of sun on the 4th of July, and lots of sun on the 5th of July, and now it’s the 6th and it’s still bright….
This makes my garden very, very happy. Though part of it is still muddy (we’re at the bottom of a small slope and under a tree, so it takes a while to dry out), this has meant that we didn’t get super dry while we were away (some plots look a little baked). And because we grew most of our garden from seed or very small seedlings with no miracle gro or anything like that, our plants for whatever reason coped well with the water–I’ve seen rotted tomatoes; my parents’ garden has rotted squash, stuff that began to grow nice and early but croaked with the over-abundance of moisture. Our squash is just getting to the flower-bud stage, and while we might be the last to get zucchini, we’re not tossing any out now.
Here are some pictures from today’s visit:
Purple pepper. It’s pretty cool. Not organic or heirloom and grown from a transplant, but cool nonetheless.
Swiss chard finally growing larger.
This tomato plant, when we first planted it as a tiny transplant, was immediately chomped–from the top–by some critter. It slowly grew and is now a massive bush, covered in flowers and a few tiny tomatoes. It’s some kind of heirloom cherry variety, but I can’t remember which.
Two brandywine tomatoes, growing much larger.
For those of you counting along, there are:
2 growing brandywine tomatoes
4 growing cherry tomatoes
9 huge tomato plants, including the one that got chomped right after planting
5 or 6 growing peppers
48…onions? green onions? One bolted and had to be harvested today–it didn’t form a bulb and was more like a green onion. Weird.
LOTS of lettuce. Constant salads!
Lots of growing spinach. We put some on pizza this weekend.
Growing chard.
Growing carrots. Does anyone know when I’m supposed to know/how I’m supposed to know
when to harvest them?
Three growing zucchini plants, finally getting some buds. There were supposed to be four,
but chipmunks took the seeds. Twice. Little buggers.
Two growing winter squash.
5 happy hills of growing cucumbers.
Zinnias and snapdragons.
And two broccoli.
Pictures to come–I forgot the camera today! Boy, four days of sun and things are just growing by leaps and bounds.
After several days of rainy weather, not bad, actually.
Flower on Brandywine tomato plant
Baby yellow pepper
Spinach seedlings (I think)
Rogue lettuce, growing among the weeds
I haven’t posted lately, as the end of the semester was a killer and was followed immediately by training for something in the fall and the start of summer school. Also, I was working on this–the garden.
I wouldn’t qualify my thumb as green. Yellow-green, maybe, or simply greenish. But I’m trying. We have a 20×20 foot plot in one of the town’s community gardens. We spent one afternoon a few weeks ago giving it a first rake-through, pulling up huge weeds. Since then, we’ve raked in 200 pounds of compost and begun planting seedlings and seeds themselves. So far, I’ve planted the peppers you see here–6 yellow peppers and one heirloom called “Fat and Sassy,” which I thought was fantastic. I’ve also added:
3 Tuscan plum tomatoes (heirlooms)
3 San Giorgino plum tomatoes (heirloom native to CT)
2 different heirloom cherry tomatoes
1 heirloom Brandywine tomato
4 eggplants
I’ve seeded:
A small row of chard
A small row of spinach (starting to come up, at least I think so!)
A small row of lettuce (it being late spring already, planting too much would be a waste, as it tends to bolt once it gets hot)
2 small rows of carrots
49 onions (I dug each one a hole, so I counted)
And two zucchini plants. I plan to add cucumbers and winter squash as well as all the herbs and marigolds I started earlier. They’re still not huge, but I’m hoping for the best.
Here are the tomatoes, in cages I scored for free from a coworker:
I’m a little concerned about them. They don’t seem terribly dark green to me right now, but I’m not sure they’re supposed to be that dark. One has some little spots. I think I’m probably an over-concerned tomato momma.
Any one of you have a green thumb? What are you growing right now? Those of you with longer seasons than we have in New England are probably harvesting already. Strawberry season should be here in a couple of weeks–I might take a stab at making jam again. Or I might not…
