green beauty

 Found another relative short, but fat zucchini under the broad leaves. Cooked it as a side dish last night. My youngest groaned: "Mo-om, I thought you said we with done with all the zucchini!" She thinks I serve this way too often, even though it's less than once a week. "I did! but the garden gave me another one! So we're eating it." Ha.

I really like the dark green and speckled skins of the variety this year.

a few garden things

My lovely scented geranium looks recovered now, and is even blooming.

Kale was cut back down to the ground (because I ate it) and new leaves look better, just a few bug holes (I caught the caterpillars)

Zucchini is a grand thicket, but some of the fruits are rotting again before I can pick them. Turn yellow and shrivel, don't grow out nice. My sister says they do this if fail to get pollinated.

I am still not fond of marigolds, but I do appreciate their job- the scent seems to keep away the deer and rabbits (who have eaten all my hostas again). I wonder if I could plant a low wall of marigolds around the hotas. But there's not enough sun. Or at least in a spot that would deter the deer from entering the yard? Hm.

Made a new recipe (from a borrowed library book): lemon bars with thyme in the crust.

I thought it was delicious! 

garden to food

Picked the first few cowpeas. Young pods. They grow out very fast, long and straight, sticking up at an angle from the stems, so easier to see on the plants. I don't have many yet.

The vines are also getting a lot longer, I'm thinking to try and train lines up to the deck for them to climb, as none of my poles are tall enough. 

Getting more short fat zucchinis. I really think the speckled skins are pretty.

Cooked a shrimp stir-fry with homemade sauce. Included from the garden cowpea pods, sliced zucchini, green onions, ginger mint. The cowpeas were too few and smothered in sauce to get a taste- but added a nice crispness as I hadn't simmered them long enough to be soft.

from garden to table

No cowpeas yet, but I'm still impressed at how healthy these plants look. Barely touched by the insects, while I'm picking leaf hoppers, stinkbugs and cucumber beetles off the green beans right next to them. Still no sign of little beans yet, but they've begun to send out thick runners. I put up a few poles but will need more- and taller!

One huge cucumber, and a short but very fat zucchini. 

Baked it with tomatoes from the garden! 

 Also made this lentil dish, finally cracking open one of my cookbooks. (The cucumber slices were added as an afterthought, not part of the recipe). Lentils cooked with (among many other things) peppers, bay leaf and ginger mint from the garden. Fresh basil garnish. So the meal had seven things I grew.

My kids were not too keen on the zucchini boats, but they liked the lentils! It was work to prepare but definitely worth repeating.

garden food

Cucumbers and tomatoes. The cukes are good again this year- nice and fresh, no bitterness at all.

Getting a nice amount of cherry tomatoes! and darker cherokee purples.

My basils are all thriving on the deck

Fresh caprese one of my favorite summer snacks

First decent picking of green beans

The cowpeas- on the right here- grow taller, stand upright without support (so far) and don't seem as bothered by the bugs. But they haven't flowered yet, much less grown any beans. If they do so later in the season, might be worth growing both every year after all (I was leaning towards just cowpeas in the future) to have continual crop.

I have a few new zucchini forming, Hope these don't turn to yellow mush like the last one did, before I can pick 'em.

july flowers

Some just beginning, others are near their end. My purple clematis bloomed a third round- though the flowers are very few. I had to prop up this last one for a picture, as the rain beat it down last night.

A yellow counterpart- at least, its shape seems similar to me: zucchini flower. If my zucchinis continue to rot (cucumbers right next to them are prefectly fine!) maybe I'll start eating the flowers instead.

Rue, yellow floating above the blue, also a bit crinkled from the rain.

Small yellow on the ground: cucumber flower.

Even smaller: tiny white flowers on my winter savory.

Also quite small- tiny purple trumpet-shaped flowers on the dark glossy plant I bought on a whim. Never found the tag again and I can't remember its name!

Up on the deck, a volunteer nicotiana. It grew out of the drain hole in a pot, that had trellis for my sweet peas. So I left the pot there, because it was so amusing (and pretty).

Pink trio of geraniums are flowering again, though they keep loosing leaves. Turn yellow, then brown, then drop. Am I watering too much? or not enough- are they drying out between rain spells.

Cardinal climber has crawled all over the planter boxes on that end of the deck railing. Swarming my parsley!

Most of the flowers are up top, here. I've trimmed some of the trailing vine ends- they are still looking for height- hoping the plant will branch more further down and fill in the trellis. I love how it's grown all through the balusters:

Tithonias are all flowering on the second sunny slope. Doing much better in this new spot!

Beautiful from the sideyard: gladiolas. The one salmon pink spray is from the new group.

Arranged in the house.

july garden

I have peppers! These serranos are perfect for flavoring beans or lentils

and the 'yolo wonder' look great, too. My husband ate one fresh- said it was rather spicy, so we're letting them ripen more to be sweet.

They're all still in pots on the deck. Get a lot of sun here, and far from most of the bug war in the garden.

That's what it feels like, down there. We ate all the young chinese cabbage last night, from that scattering I did by accident. Full of bug holes, but tasty nonetheless.

The bed they came out of still has plenty of amaranth greens, though it seems the insects are eating most of it. I sprayed last week an insecticidal soap. It seems to have knocked out most of the whitefly, aphids and cabbage worms (though not the egg-laying white butterflies of course). However I'm daily pinching off these striped beetles I never named but recognize well now, and there's cucumber beetles too.

There's one in there, the flowering kind of amaranth- looks just like the celosia I grow elsewhere. The bugs aren't eating this one.

In that same bed I have two benne (for sesame seed). Looking rather shabby. 

But they're flowering! Trumpet shaped with a lip, quite pretty.

Starting to pick some green beans.

Other side of the garden, zucchini are failing. They don't stay green but turn yellow and rot.

My big tomatoes are still on the vines, and some of the plants are regrowing green leaves. Lots of cherry tomatoes, but many are splitting. 

However this charmed me yesterday, as I was sitting near the garden on my bench with a book. A robin poked through the garden, and then a female blackbird- quite close to me. Then a catbird came, perched on a tomato vine, and jabbed its beak into the split cherry tomato! I don't know if it was getting moisture, eating the seeds or insects from inside?

garden

First the good. I harvested sweet pea seeds to save

and tatsoi (so many!)

Lavender is done flowering, so I cut it back. Chopped up all the trimmed stems, leaves and flowers, scattered on the beds of amaranth calaloo and leaf beet chard / cowpeas. I think some bugs don't like the scent! A few striped beetles immediately took flight away from the bed onto collards. I tracked with my eyes and smacked 'em.

The cowpea, bush green bean and leaf beet chard bed:

with collard greens behind:

I trimmed out over half the leaves of the sorrel- because they looked sickly- leaving more room for the sage and lemon balm now. Tarragon has grown nice! I used some in a soup but a bit too much, my kid complained the flavor was strong

Then moved on to a dismal chore: cleaning up all the wilted foliage. Carrots- all looking dead and brown-

but the smallest inner leaves are fine. And I pulled one- the root is fine. No rot. So I don't think it was the downpour.

What's left of my tomatoes, after I cut off all the brown and yellow and wilted leaves. Dreadfully familiar, this. At least now you can see how many tomatoes I have! But I don't know if they'll be okay.

I didn't find any pests on the tomato or carrot plants, but startled a few stinkbugs in the zucchini and cucumbers. After clearing out half the zucchini leaves that were rotting or blanched of color, this is what's left. It looks so leggy and open now.

But maybe enough still healthy to recover. Here's one zucchini growing!

On the opposite end of that bed, what's left of the lovage (that towered over my head just a few days ago)

I haven't been out here enough the past two weeks, to keep ahead of the bugs. There's whitefly and cabbage loopers on the collard greens. Leaf hoppers in the chard and green beans. Some kind of beetle in the amaranth, and slugs in several places. I have biodegradable, organic insecticidal soap, but can't use it in hot sunny weather or it will cause leaf burn. We have several more days of sun before it rains again. I'm considering coming out to spray the plants very early in the morning, before it's hot- and then hose them down after . . .