County fair time again. These little piggies were taken off early this week to strut their stuff. One of them has already won champion market hog and another's FFA handler won champion fitting and showing. All are at the fair market auction as I type and will be gracing some lucky bidders dinner plate very soon. Bacon, Hammy and Barbecue would be their names if I had my way. I love fair, a spell seems cast so that strangers all nod and say hello, lost items are found and returned and worries are checked at the gate. Of course the cowboys are always nice... 8-)
Visions of apple pie dance in my head. Last year every apple, those still on branches and every one on the ground, disappeared. The neighbor says he saw several deer munching on them. Impressive considering the 6ft chainlink fence. These are pretty tart and on the small side.
These two (four?) yellow straight neck squash grew on one plant from some of the first blossoms of the season. They were in fact four separate squashes and joined rather quickly. At first they were all about the same size but as time went by you can see that each pair had it's dominate member. I had intended to let these go to see how they would progress but the smaller of each set began to go soft.
We cooked these on the grill using a woklike pan with holes made just for grilling odd shapes. Green zucchini and yellow straightneck squash from the garden were sliced very thick so they had time to get good carmel color without getting mushy. Adding a sweet onion, also a large chop, along with salt, pepper and a drizzle of olive oil then into the pan over medium high flame got the job done. A dressing to pour over after cooking sounded good so I held out a chunk of onion to dice finely, snipped some thyme and basil from the herb pot and gave that a fine chop, added a quarter cup of pear vinaigrette, a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, a few tablespoons of olive oil, a finely chopped garlic clove, salt and pepper into a bowl and whisked lightly. I let that sit while cooking the veg and dumping it into a bowl, then I just poured the mixture over the still hot veggies and tossed. Skewered
shrimp and grilled top sirloin rounded up the meal, if you don't count the red velvet cake...
The first real summer squash harvest is in! The mildew was kiboshed on this side of the garden with no real damage. Turns out spraying the leaves with water early in the day is enough to keep the nasties away as unlike most mildew this one spreads in dry conditions. We ended up cutting out the most damaged leaves on the winter squash side and that left one pumpkin plant a bit bare, I hope it makes it.
About a week after laying down straw the winter squash and volunteer crooked necks developed this hideous case of powdery mildew. It has spread across the entire 15x8ft patch. The soaker hose runs under the plants and straw. I suspect this, combined with the sheer mass of leaves from the volunteers that blocks the light, has created the perfect moist condition for the nasty mildew. We of course went straight to the garden store to pick up an organic solution. However it turns out even organic products have precautionary labels. In this case, don't let it drain into stormwater runoff, don't inhale, wear long sleeves, 72 hours before harvest... So, we'll be searching the books for a more user friendly solution. If you have any wisdom on the subject feel free to let me know.
This little bee and it's friends arrived on the patio several weeks ago and began going into and out of the tiny holes on the underside of each metal crossbeam that makes up the patio cabana. They were few and small and didn't buzz around our heads so we left them to it. A week or so later we noticed they were carrying in bits of green leaves. They looked like about 3/4 of an inch of thick bladed grass. I took a closer look and saw a smallish, silver and gray striped fuzzy bee with no real stinger that I could find (not that I was super close). Now we saw that nearly every crossbar had it's own 'busy bee'. They were bringing leaf after leaf. A quick lookup finds we have native leafcutter bees. They say the cuttings are roundish but these really look leaf bladish. The one shown above looks a little waspish unlike the others and is yellow and black but still fuzzy with small or no stinger. We're glad they're here to help pollinate.
Left to grow a bit longer, the romaine tightened up a bit. Still not as tender as I'd like, not sure what to do about that. If you have any ideas let me know.
These are the earlygirls. All of the varieties have fruits now.
I'm most excited about the heirlooms, their flavor is outstanding.
Just a few weeks now to a garden fresh spinach, basil and tomato salad.
Just entering the warmest part of the season now so we picked up a bale of straw to spread under the plants and over the soaker hose. You can see the bush beans finally decided to grow, we'll see if they produce. Next pic will be all dressed up.
As noted in an earlier post we decided to leave the volunteer broccoli that popped up en mass amongst the seedlings to act as a living mulch. This beatiful graygreen and purple tapestry is the result. And it was effective! Not only are the weeds practically nonexistant, the soil beneath is cool and moist. As a bonus the younger smaller leaves of the volunteers distracted the munchers from the seedlings.
We spied this little guy yesterday. We've had limited luck with them in the past but love fresh pumpkin so much we're giving it another try. Last time there were only a few fruits and they were very small. They did manage to come up from leftover seed the next year but with no fruit. We chose a smaller variety this year.
This picture was taken 7 days after the first squash blossom was spotted. It is about 3 inches long, at about 6 it will meet thyme, onion and some sliced linguica in a saute pan.
Italian basil, Greek oregeno and common thyme planted in gallon pots recycled from the garden store. These are my favorite herbs so we planted 3 just like this. We will see if they do well together. I suspect the basil will want more water than the other two. There is a rosemary planted in another pot, another staple for me. I added sandy soil from the garden with organic potting soil to boost the drainage in hopes of finding a happy medium for all three.
The salad green patch is filling in nicely with red and green romain, spinach and just out of frame is the volunteer butterleaf. The red romaine is also from last years seed that was missed in the fall cleanup. I think the romaine leaves tends to spread if given room and they don't seem as tender so I'm going to try the next planting closer together to see if that makes for a positive result.
I spotted this little guy on the 4th. The squashes took a little while to get going in our cool spring but we are in a bit of a sun belt here so finally they're growing into a little jungle. These are straight green and yellow squash and are on a 5 inch high flat top hill about 4x5 in the center of a larger patch about 10x10. On the other side of the path are the volunteer crooked necks from last year along with pumpkin from seed and a butternut squash I picked up for $.89 from the garden store's sale table. They are not on mounds and are not as vigorous as the summer cousins. This week we are expecting our first stretch of 80 degree weather so that may change soon.
The tomatoes LOVE the plastic covered cages! After the last two seasons, which we call tomatogeddon, we are thrilled with the progress. We started from seed a bit late so they are still small for the date but there are already flowers so I am sure we will get fruit none the less. Sweety, gold pear, Siletz and an heirloom rainbow blend along with one earlygirl all made the cut to the garden.
We didn't clean up or prune these raspberry canes at all but they're covered with ripe and ripening berries. Did you ever notice the berries grow in bunches of 4-5 and one is almost always very ripe, one just a little less ripe and so on so that you harvest one berry from each bunch every few days? We pick just the darkest ruby red berries for the absolute best flavor.
Our third big bowl of the season!
The patch is only about 6x8 and there are still tons ripening.
One small piece of summer squash can contain 50-100 seeds. We apparently missed some during fall cleanup as this volunteer squash patch proves. So far we have volunteer broccoli, squash and 2 varieties of lettuce from last year. Fortunately we are going for a 'live green' mulch this year to keep weeds down so a little more chaos won't hurt anything.
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