Results tagged “garden” from Just Another Stupid Blog

On Sunday, I started pulling up all the old tomato plants and collecting the undamaged fruit. We pretty much abandoned the garden in August but the tomatoes just kept on doing their own thing. Particularly the Gold Currant cherry tomatoes which showed an amazing resilience to the heat and drought. The red cherry tomatoes made their comeback after it cooled off so that’s where most of the green ones came from.

We are thinking about pickling the green ones. Maybe some of the others too?

Here is what the Trumbetta squash is supposed to look like. This one grew on the ground so that is why it is round. We chopped it up and sautéed it with onions and a little bit of garlic, salt, and pepper. All of the seeds are in the bottom so the whole long neck is just flesh. Very tasty!

Also, here is this week’s harvest. A few weeks ago, we applied some Garret Juice plus garlic and orange oil - this seems to have reduced our squash bug problem at least a little bit.

This monster pokeweed grows wild between the shed and alley way. There seems to be disagreement over whether it is edible or poisonous but we haven’t tried it ourselves.

Some silly person, er, I mean appreciated and enthusiastic garden helper, planted chard all over our garden path. The path was full of them (and other stuff) so you couldn’t get through to the stuff in the middle. It was seriously reducing the accessibility of our fresh, ripe tomatoes and nobody gets between me and my tomatoes!

So, anyone want some free chard? Didn’t a certain 12-year old say all he wants for his birthday this week is some “green”s?

There is nothing quite like eating tomatoes in the garden, straight from the vine. I think I’d be happy to have a garden of nothing but tomatoes (and maybe some sugar snap peas). If you have to bring it inside, it is too much trouble.

The Thai Basil has been looking particularly nice lately although we haven’t tried actually eating any yet.

The most productive plants in our garden so far have been the green beans and the dill so it was pretty clear that Dilly Beans would be in our future. This was our first time doing any kind of canning or pickling but I think it turned out ok.

We had a hard time getting the water back up to the boil after putting in the jars so we are a little worried that the beans will be over-cooked. Most of the beans were tough and over-ripe, though, so maybe it will balance out. Now we just have to wait!

I got kinda tired of taking the same photo every week and the garden isn’t growing quite as dramatically now. So, instead I will do photos of featured plants or what is being harvested. Here is a final slideshow of the spring garden growing over the last 10 weeks.

Complete Garden Tour

The garden kinda went nuts while we were gone. I can’t believe how much it grew in just over a week! I think our friends took better care of it than we do.

In our absence, there was an attempted coup by the Rogue Pumpkins. This photo was taken after we reduced their ranks a bit - notice the fresh green carnage on the compost pile.

Thanks to the folks caring for the garden while we are away for sending in this photo.

I found a small volunteer tomato growing under one of the squash plants. It will be interesting to see what it produces.

Finally planted the last tomatoes this week but accidentally killed two of them. That still leaves us with 5 total tomato plants so I think we’ll have plenty. Also added onions and marigolds plus a thick layer of leaves for mulch.

Not much has changed. Had planned to plant the tomato babies but the frost warning for tonight worried me.

In preparation of building a vegetable garden in the Spring, we had started collecting kitchen scraps for composting but didn’t have a good place to put them. A couple of weeks ago, we built this out of some old chain-link fence left behind by the previous owners.

Now I feel like I have to save every little thing that might possibly be compostable. Did you know you can compost your dryer lint? When I eat a banana on the way to work, I feel bad for throwing away the peel. I guess I could walk around with a banana peel in my pocket all day but I’m not quite that crazy, yet.

I also recently heard that they are starting a community garden close to our house, which is cool, but I think our efforts will be tied up in our own garden this year.