New arrivals

This week's babies:

scarlet runner

We have a Scarlet Runner bean.  Yay!  The wait was not as long as I had thought it would be.

san marzano tomato

It is literally a pain in the neck to search for emerging tomatoes.  However, I doubt if it is much more than a week since fruits began forming on any of our tomato plants.  Every variety planted has some now, which is a wonder since some are supposed to be earlier than others.  Not all individual plants are bearing fruit yet.  The greenhouse San Marzano just grows more luminous green foliage.  It might need a little more stress.

early ear of corn - dazzling in the morning sun

We turned our backs on the garden for two days and returned to find several tufts of silk erupting from the corn stalks.  This is exciting, given my poor track record with corn.  The plants are also the largest I have ever grown, with the tips of the flowers already up to (don't laugh) my shoulder.

strawberry offspring

This was a little more than a week ago.  The strawberries seem to have shut down fruit production in favour of sending out runners, a great confusing tangle of them, in fact.  Where feasible, I cleared away the mulch to help the plant find a place to root.  Still, I pressed 26 of them into small containers with potting mix, and might yet do some more.  Many of these young plants are destined to live in other beds; using pots will cause less root disturbance for them when it's time to move.







On the menu:

We have recently added Maxibel fillet beans and Orca beans to our 50 foot diet.  Last night Barry made a delicious pesto using our basil, garlic, and beets greens (plus imported ingredients).  The beet roots are waiting for a suitable time to be steamed to the succulent tenderness we achieved with the last batch.  The garlic was not a clove but a small spherical bulb that had grown from a bulbil planted last fall.  We will harvest these sparingly until the regular bulbs are ready.

Every day we shell a pile of pea pods.  Can hardly keep up with eating them.  The snow peas aren't doing so well in the heat, but we keep them alive so they can produce again when the days cool down.

Though the strawberries are almost fruitless right now, we have had three from the new yellow alpine strawberry.  It's difficult to tell when they are ripe.  Raspberries have taken over the fruit supply nicely.  One variety is waning, while another plumper variety is coming on stream.

We cooked up a mess of parsnips last weekend.  It's not traditional parsnip harvesting time, but these were getting to be a bit of trouble.  A couple of them appeared to be inhibiting a Tigerella tomato plant.  Others were too big to live in the pathways and some were giving aid and comfort to the enemy - sow thistle.

Recent discovery - radish pods are edible.  We find they are better raw than cooked, better young than old.  This is excellent news, since we have never been able to grow radish roots in the summer.  Now we can relax while they bolt and enjoy the pods instead.

Still eating zucchini.