I'm Back!

I can't believe it's been 5 weeks since I last posted something.  July and August have been just crazy for us.  What has been going on since I last wrote?  Let me get you up to date...

The 'Mammoth' sunflower - not quite as tall as I'd hoped, but it still met Kate's requirement of "taller than Daddy".

Volunteer sunflowers that sprouted from the birdseed - I love the branching one.

I have harvested all the white onions.  The green onions are still going strong and the leeks are about ready to be pulled sometime in the next week or two.  

'Pandora' leek

Today I harvested my first eggplant - an Ichiban.  There are 3 more that will be ready in the next week or so.  The Black Beauty in the garden I have been having trouble with the flowers not setting into fruit, but the one at the street has two TINY green eggplants on it now.  I think the one in the garden finally has an eggplant also.  Next year, I think I am going to go back to the Black Magic, as it seemed to do better than the Black Beauties this year.

Ichiban eggplant, just before I picked it

Carrots are still growing along - I'll harvest them once the first frost comes, so they have a ways to go.

Peppers - the jalapenos are producing a bunch, they'll probably kick into "high gear" in the next couple of weeks.  The Lady Bells are much slower - I have one big green fruit on one plant, and lots of flowers on the rest.  Hoping it turns red before the end of the month.  Bell peppers never seem to do real well for me - it's always a race to frost time before they really start ripening and turning red (I do NOT care for green bells peppers, try as I might.  They have to be red, yellow or orange so they get sweet).

Tomatoes - where to start.  I made my first (small) batch of tomato sauce on Thursday.  The Amish Pastes are really starting to produce, as are the San Marzanos.  I've gotten 3-4 Purple Cherokees, and have 2 more that will be ripe in the next few days.  Mr. Stripey I am still waiting on - there are 3-4 green fruits on the plant.  Then there are the unidentified volunteer plants, which turned out to be... 2 Romas, 3 Celebrities (I think?) and 1 yellow pear cherry (I forget what this one was called - I planted it last year).  I really, really love the Amish Pastes.  I have not had any blossom end rot issues with them like I did with the Romas the past two years.  I have some cracking, but since they're pastes and I use them for sauce, it doesn't really bother me.

Amish Pastes

San Marzanos up close

Purple Cherokee up close

Potatoes - all of them have been harvested, and I started a second pot that I plan on pulling in the garage for the first few frosts.  I thought I'd see how a 2nd crop does.  I'm not out anything, because I used potatoes from the first harvest.  As far as the laundry basket experiment - I don't think I'll do it again.  Hilling them in the basket was a royal pain, and they didn't grow through the sides all that much.  Next time I will just stick to large pots.

Fall crops - I just planted the following recently for fall harvest - lettuce (rouge d'hiver, iceberg and little gem romaine) and peas (both shell and snow).  Hopefully the peas germinate better than they did in the spring.  We'll see.  I've not grown fall peas before.

I also have a head of garlic I got at the farmer's market that I am saving because I WILL be planting garlic this fall, I swear.  I have intended to plant garlic the past 2 or 3 falls and it hasn't happened.  This year, it will.

I also got a promise of some "Eight Ball" zucchini seeds for next year from a wonderful vendor at our local farmer's market.  He buys them by the ounce, but since I have such limited space he said he'd be happy to give me enough seeds for 2 or 3 hills.  They're a bush style zucchini, and are really cool because they're round.  I think they'll be very fun to grow next year.

Day lilies and Death Day...

The past week or so sure slipped away from me fast!  I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted.  This is a tough time of year for me in the garden, it's so darn hot and there's not a lot going on at this point.  The peas are all done and pulled, the lettuce is all pulled, I've picked one little tomato (though there are a lot of green ones right now), I've picked and pulled 2 of the 4 cauliflower, and the onions are getting large enough I could probably pull them any time now.

The big highlight of the past week has come not in the vegetables but in the ornamental garden - day lilies are blooming!  The Stella d'Oros have come and gone a while ago, but the rest of them started blooming in the last week.  I have lots of 'My Sweet Rose' blooming, and my favorite day lily of all, 'Golden Illusions'.  It's a beautiful golden yellow color with a large flower with ruffled edges.  Of course it is the slowest at multiplying, but the clump will get big enough to divide eventually - maybe in the next couple of years.  What's your favorite day lily?  Is there a "must-have" I should look at getting down the road?  There is a master gardener in Cincinnati that is know for his day lilies - he has probably pushing 200 varieties in his yard, and he hosts an open house every year.  My mom and I went back when Kate was about 18 months - he had a little play house for kids and a large electric train set.  It's perfect.  I don't forsee my yard becoming a regional draw for day lilies, but I do love them!

My Sweet Rose

Golden Illusions

I also was super excited yesterday (the first day of weather in the low 80s in over a week) to go out to the garden and find a bloom on one of the eggplants!  It's a standard Black Beauty, which I love because they're so reliable and usually are the first to produce.  I also have an Ichiban, which has a bud but no flower yet.  And the random tomato that sprouted out the drain hole of a pot that I put compost in has a tiny tomato on it.  I left the plant go, mostly to see what would happen.  It's growing out of the drainage hole of a cheap 1 gallon pot I got with some perennial I bought long ago.  With nothing but water when I remember, it's produced a tomato.  And people say they can't grow things!

Black Beauty Eggplant

The tiny tomato on the plant growing out of the drainhole...

Finally, there are two things I want to share - first is in honor of "Garden Blogger's Death Day" over at Gardening without Skills - my pathetic blueberry has finally kicked the bucket entirely.  It's all brown and shriveled and very much dead.  I attempted to amend the soil in it's pot to make it more acidic, and I thought I followed the directions on the elemental sulfur VERY closely, but the blueberry definitely did not appreciate it.  I am really sad about it, as I don't want to start over from scratch and wait another 2 years for blueberries!  :(  I don't have a picture and it's already dark out so I'm not sure one I took now would do the dreadful looking thing justice.

Lastly, our crazy neighbors.  When we bought our house 4+ years ago, it was our first house and therefore we didn't think much about neighbors.  Well, we got the crazies.  I take that back - they're very nice for the most part, they just have no business living in a suburban housing development.  The siding blew off a large part of their house in a big windstorm we had in February and they are just now getting it fixed.  And they are using vinyl siding that looks like fake cedar shakes.  But I suppose it is better than the half-missing siding they had before.  And their 4 ft deep temporary-type backyard pool sprung a leak, which drained entirely into our yard, and then the empty pool blew over against our fence in another strong wind we had last week.  Plus in the winter they have 4 golf carts and a 4-wheeler living on their back patio - and no, they don't golf.  We had new friends over one night last month and someone asked if there was a golf course near us.  Mark and I burst out laughing.  Again, they are very nice, but they need to move somewhere with some acreage so that this is not right in the middle of regular suburbia.  Though the neighborhood would have much less to talk about if they left!

Our neighbors backyard - down to 2 golf carts, the 4 wheeler, and the half-missing siding.  Also not the dying/dead spot of grass where the pool was blown over for a week.  Good times. :)

And the heat goes on... plus a recipe

Today is the 2nd day of 90 degree heat - blech.  I am, without a doubt, NOT a heat-loving person.  I went out at 2:00 today to take a couple of photos and fill up the kiddie pool, and the 10 minutes I was outside was enough for me, ideally for the whole week (the lowest temp in the 5 day forecast is 87).  This is when gardening gets tough for me.  I want no part of pulling weeds in the mid-day heat during naptime, and I don't want to get up at 6:30 AM to do it before the girls get up.  Thankfully (or not so thankfully from a humidity standpoint) we've had quite a bit of rain, so things in the garden are withstanding the heat fairly well.

One thing did make my trek out into the heat this afternoon worth it - my first tomato is ripening!  I have 4 "known" varieties of tomatoes in the garden, and about 5-6 "unknown" volunteer plants that germinated from stuff thrown in the compost bin (I obviously don't maintain a hot pile).  The 4 kinds that I know are growing are San Marzano, Amish Paste, Cherokee Purple and Mr. Stripey.  All are heirlooms, so I'm planning to save seed for next year. The San Marzano is going to have the first ripe tomato.  Actually, it's the only one with a tomato at all right now.  Everything else is just blossoms.  I am actually very excited about the San Marzanos.  As a lover of basically all Italian food (I studied for a summer in Italy in college, which got me totally hooked) the San Marzano is the quintessential Italian paste tomato.  I am looking forward to much homemade marinara sauce this summer and fall, between the San Marzanos and the Amish Pastes.  I have not had a lot of luck with regular Romas the past 2 years - they got blossom end rot really bad - much worse than any of the other plants I had, so I decided to see if either of these do better.

I also visited the West Chester Farmers Market this morning.  I bought a small bunch of red onions from the Gravel Knoll Farm booth, but there wasn't a lot of produce at this point that I haven't grown myself, with the exception of beets, which are not my favorite.  I did buy some absolutely delicious lemon curd from the lady that sell homemade frozen scone dough - I have been eating some slowly with just a spoon this afternoon.  I basically love all things lemon.  It tastes a lot like the custard part of a lemon meringue pie.  (Insert a Homer Simpson-esque gutteral Mmmmmm.... here).  I also got some homemade raspberry jam, and an organic, pasture-raised skirt steak for fajitas.   (Another Mmmmm....)  Kate and Claire came with me today, and happily got snow cones - they even had a lemonade flavor which was colorless (a big plus as I knew Claire would end up wearing as much as she ate).  They also have an awesome scavenger hunt program for kids, where there is a "clue" each week that the kids have to search the different tents to find.  When they find the clue, they tell the person working the booth and they get a wooden nickel.  They save up the wooden nickles and at the last 2 markets of the year in October they can spend them on kid stuff.  Kate was so excited to find the clue.

On a final note, in honor of the first tomato, I'll leave you with a simple, tasty, healthy recipe involving fresh tomatoes.  This is a staple recipe from my friends Jill & Brad.

Corn & Black Bean Salsa

2 cans black beans, rinsed & drained

1 can hominy or yellow corn, drained (if using fresh, blanch quickly to soften just a tad)

2 - 3 medium tomatoes diced (you can use diced from a can, rinsed & drained if it's not tomato season yet)

1/2 large red onion, finely diced

1/2 c chopped fresh cilantro (or more to taste)

3 T olive oil

3 T lime juice

1 1/2 tsp cumin

Combine in a medium to large bowl and chill for 2 hours for flavors to meld.  Serve with tortilla chips, or even just with a spoon!  The picture below is minus cilantro, which I hadn't trekked out to pick yet.

Potato Update & More

I got two bird feeders for Mother's Day, and love seeing the birds out often.  Kate absolutely loves it, and is learning bird names quickly.   Her favorites are the goldfinches, like the one I caught this morning on the feeder.  I need to get a telephoto lens for my camera very badly, as I can't zoom in much more than this without things getting blurry.  Though this was taken through my closed kitchen window, so it's not too bad!

The thing my husband dislikes the most about the sunflower feeder.  All the seedlings in the grass underneath.  I think it's funny.
People think you need special skills to be a gardener, and that it is hard to grow things.  This always makes me laugh for the most part.  The seedlings in the grass above are an example of why this makes me laugh.  Here's another one.  This is a potted zebra grass (which died, because I didn't get it planted quick enough after it came) and out of one of the bottom drainage holes of the pot is growing a tomato.  It sprouted from a seed that must have been in my compost bin.  And it has grown this far, out of a drainage hole in a pot, which absolutely no special treatment, as I didn't even know it was there until last night. I don't know what kind of tomato it is, but I'm thinking it may be a lemon drop cherry from last year.  If I can get it out of there, I may try planting it and see what I get.  It will probably be the same as the 5 other volunteer plants I saved from other areas of the garden that sprouted from the compost.

Here's an update and some photos of the potatoes.  They are coming along fine, it appears.  All I can see is the leaves, obviously, but I filled up the baskets with more dirt last night, and probably should have done it at least a week ago.  The leaves are going strong, and one of them even has a flower bud on it.  I figure that's a good sign.  The shoots are starting to grow through the sides of the basket too, which Kate thinks is fun.