Lush

Shit has gone wild.  Wild!

The onions are huge lining both sides, the sunflowers in the back are doing well, the wildflowers in the front are starting to bloom, and the damn lettuce up the middle is feeding all my friends and coworkers.  Some marigolds are hiding in there and little nasturtiums.  I think the flowers are blocked from sun.

Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage and peas in the back.  Next year, more peas!!

Extra broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage.  And weeds.  Screw them.  I'm tired.

The tomatoes are up to my shoulders!  I can't even imagine them getting bigger but I'm sure they will.  Do you trim back tomatoes?  These are supposed to be determinate varieties.  How do I keep them under control??  I can't find the peppers anymore and I'm not too concerned.  Whatever.  The basil was good in a caprese salad the other day, and it'll rock in some spaghetti sauce.

These are my insane zucchinis and pumpkins.  The zucchinis aren't doing well because the fruit sits on the wet ground (I can't remember a single day in the last 2 months when it didn't rain) and rot, so that's not cool.  Hopefully adding some more mulch today will help.

Cantaloupes and cukes.  I still have to trellis up my cukes, but they're growing happily across the bed regardless.

It's a lush garden and I'm quite proud of how successful it's turning out.  Really exciting!

Confession

I went in the garden, picked a pea pod off the vine, ate it right there.  It was sooooooo good and sweet.

That is all.

Pea Pods Paradise

They've gotten tall and they bloomed flowers, but I hadn't realized they also grew pea pods!  So exciting to find them!

There is one onion about to bloom a flower, too.  I can't remember if I'm supposed to leave the flower on or take it off so the plant can concentrate on growing the onion instead of the bloom.  I'll have to look that up.  For now, it's kind of like something from War of the Worlds. 

Harvest of Gold

A sink full of lettuce to bring to my boss today.  He was very excited about the idea of salads and BLTs and it ignited a taste for a BLT for me as well.  This zucchini, the first one harvested, has already been shredded and is ready for to be put into zucchini bread.  So excited!

Broccoli flowers.  So pretty.

Almost invisible is the yellow spider living in the broccoli flowers.  With his legs curled up, he looks just like a little bud.  The flowers were clean when I brought them in, but a couple hours later this spider got busy and had started a web already.  Pretty cool. 

The fun just doesn't stop.

In Bloom

Well, I've been eating broccoli and lettuce for a while now, and I read somewhere that if you let a head or two go to flower, it will help produce more heads of broccoli, so I did it and look what pretty flowers broccoli make!  So pretty and delicate.  And these flowers are residing in the little dots that make up broccoli!  It's ridiculously amazing.

So weird, it reminds me of something I heard on NPR recently about the caterpillar's transition into a butterfly.  An entomologist explained that when the caterpillar is in the chrysalis, it turns into this liquid goo and from that goo a butterfly will emerge, which is shocking because you might assume the caterpillar just grows big wings and the body shrinks, but it actually liquefies most of its body.  And the weirdest part is if you slit a caterpillar open, inside are the wings!!  OMG, the butterfly is inside the caterpillar all along!  And so are the broccoli flowers, scrunched up inside the teeny green buds that are our favorite parts to eat.  Enjoy those broccoli flower buds, folks.

I think two of my Brussels sprouts aren't a sprout at all.  It looks a lot like a cabbage to me.  I guess that's okay since I'm still eating the Brussels sprouts from last year, and growing thrice as many this year seemed a little foolhardy.  Cabbage is a welcome surprise! 

My buttercrunch lettuce is huge and I've been bringing bags of it to work for my coworkers.  I'm getting tired of salad.  Particularly when my tomatoes haven't popped out yet.  Oh, and look at those awesome onions poking their oniony tentacles up all around!  

I don't know what is going on with my zucchini.  Some of the fruit rotted before it grew more than a couple inches, and there are all these broken leaf stalks.  Does it do this to provide more sun to the fruit?  Did I screw something up?  DID THE DOGS TRAMPLE IT??

Still, there will be zucchinis to be eaten, thankfully.  More please!

These are my pumpkins growing in the semi-shade of the zucchini, doing very well, I think.  Goooooo, little pumpkins! 

Cucumber flowers mean that cucumbers are not far behind.  I don't care about cucumbers except for the delicious cucumber salad recipe I got from a coworker (which is heavy on the vinegar and takes my breath away) and I'm looking forward to trying that with my homegrown cukes.  Bring it on, baby! 

How these long things are supposed to turn into round, rotund, Rubanesque cantaloupe, I'm not sure, but at this point, whatever grows is going to be eaten and enjoyed, regardless.

And just because life is so awesome to see sprouting up, here's the pic I took at a forest preserve of a snapping turtle laying eggs right on the side of the road.  She's a brave one.  I don't know how smart this is, but there they are.

Maybe soon there will be baby snapper hatchlings scurrying into the water here.  I'm going to keep watching for them. 

And in front of my house, the columns on the front porch have always had sparrows but this is the first time I've seen babies.  There are three up there, on top of the column, but only one likes to hang its head out and see me.

It's probably wondering where the worms are.

It's a sad frown baby birds wear, but I think they perk up once they can fly.  Have a good life, little birdie!

Mmmm, Broccoli!

Hey man, I got the brocc.

It was good, too!  I had it steamed over a yellow potato and some cheddar.  Perfection!

So, this is the spread.  Things are growing, and it's not just weeds. 

The lettuce bed has the most stuff, mostly because the 50 onions really puts it over the edge in productivity.  6 marigolds are doing well but still small, the back is lined with sunflower seedlings that are coming up like gangbusters now that the weeds are pulled, and the foreground is wildflower seedlings starting to come up.  And, obviously, there are 2 big heads of lettuce and 4 each of red and green leaf lettuce heads behind them that are still growing.  It's tasty.

Brassicas.  Broccoli in the background, cauliflower in the center, Brussels sprouts in the foreground.  There are some miscellaneous marigolds around the edges but nothing else came up, not even the onions.  Peas and green beans are behind them, barely pictured.

Peas.  They are getting so big!  And there are some newborns down around the ground there.

This is the pepper and tomato bed.  There are 2 tomatoes doing well in cages, a couple peppers about a foot tall, a few tomatoes about 8 inches tall, a few marigolds, and 4 basil plants.  They're just not growing very fast. 

This is the brassica #2 bed, with broccoli in the background, then cauliflower, then Brussels sprouts.  Again, no onions came up.

Cantaloupe are the big ones and 8 cucumbers are hiding behind them.  A few onions came up here and there in this bed but mostly it's just weeds.  Reminds me, I gotta get more mulch.

ZUCCHINIS!  And pumpkins.  And a couple marigolds.  BUT ZUCCHINIS!

Look at those flowers!  They're going to yield me some awesome zucchinis!

They're in there!  Look at them!  Just waiting for me to eat them!

Marigolds.  Yay for deterring pests.

These are the baby cantaloupes coming in.  They look kind of long and cylindrical for melons, but I'm not picky.

These are the lupine.  Yes, they're lupine.

And another shot of the peas on the other side.  So eager!

The tomatoes have flowered so I know there are tomatoes coming.  Someday.  Until then I have to eat lots of lettuce.

First Yield

Having a mini-farm and still having to buy produce at the farmers market is irritating, but it's too hard to bring myself to eat food that isn't fresh this time of year.  My local farmers market surprised me on Friday with the most fragrant strawberries -- I could smell them wafting from 20 feet away.  So I bought them.  As well as meat and tomatoes and some fine looking zucchinis.  At home I made this low-carb feast that had me full to the tip top and singing the praises of the zucchinis.

That's a salad from my lettuce!  My lettuce!  THIS lettuce!

And a grass-fed burger with egg and cheese on top.  But the highlight of the meal was the zucchini.  I sliced them into medallions, put them on a baking sheet, added a can of organic diced tomatoes with juice, and grated fontinella cheese and a light sprinkling of feta on top, baked at 375º for about 45 minutes, and the result was quite possibly one of the best things I've ever put in my mouth.  I cannot wait for more zucchinis!  I'm going to make this every week until I run myself out of zucchinis!

Bring it, baby!  Bring me some zucchinis!

The broccoli, too, is almost ready to be harvested.  YAY!

There are a couple pumpkins coming up from the seeds I shoved in the dirt in desperation.  I'm not too hopeful.  No watermelons showed up.  A few peas have popped out of the dirt from seed, and I think two green beans.  No nasturtiums.  Not the heaps of results I hoped for, but I'm pushing it for time at this point.  My sunflowers are starting to peek up, as are the wildflowers.  The onions that came up are doing awesomely, but not even half came up.

Transplant-wise, the few things that made it from the house to the soil are doing okay.  Marigolds are starting to bloom, which I was hoping for because everyone is complaining about rabbits eating their veggies right now and I (knock on wood) have not experienced any critters yet.  A couple of the tomatoes and peppers are doing okay, but they're so far behind I don't know if they'll yield anything.  This makes me angry, but I'm breathing deep and encouraging them to c'mon up, enjoy what life they will have.  The lupine made it.  That's rather amazing to me, particularly given what I've learned about their extremely deep root system and now I'll have three squares of lupine in my garden forever.  Pretty cool.

Last week we had a couple days of rain, kept me out of the garden, but when it stopped my garden was full of weeds.

I'd been waiting for the seedlings to come up before I mulched, but with this many weeds I had no choice but to pluck and protect.  It took a couple days and I'm still working with certain sections, but I got it mostly mulched and it's doing better.  My back is the color of walnut from being out in the sun bent over so much.  I think this must be how my ancestors looked and it makes me happy.

Tonight may be the night I go home and have broccoli and a salad from the yard, and some chicken from the store.  One day we'll be able to have chickens too, and I'll be one happy girl when that happens.