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Tomatoes

We’ve got tomatoes!  Looks to be a good harvest this year.  Glad to see all of the tomato plants (but one) in full bloom.  Week by week more tomatoes will ripen for beautiful pictures and delicious eats.

Beans

The beans are SO close to looking something like a bean.  There will be TONS of beans when they start to mature.

Peppers

They have been slow growing all season.  The peppers down the street growing outside of a dry cleaners are bigger than these.  Nonetheless, they are starting to fruit and I should have some good peppers in about 3 weeks.

Garlic

I harvested another batch of garlic this week including one elephant garlic.  It is huge and looks like it will be great baked and spread cover toast.  I can continue to harvest the garlic until the bulbs start to reproduce again.  It’s probably the only thing I can think of that starts regrowing this quickly.  I guess it shows just how easy garlic is to grow.

This was a late post and I’m off to work in the garden so I’ll have more pictures shortly.  Enjoy.

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Live from the Farm: Elephant Garlic

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Garlic

This is the beginning of garlic season.  I planted the garlic back in October of last year to grow over the winter and into the spring.  Around July, some of the bulbs are ready to be pulled.  Unlike most of the things I grow, garlic will store for a long time.  I pull about 5 to 10 garlic bulbs a week, they cure in a cool, dry spot and then go into the kitchen.  All of this garlic should last until next year when the cycle repeats.  The only really trick is to be careful pulling the garlic out of the ground.  I try to break up the dirt around the garlic and then pull the bulb out of the ground.  You don’t want to get too close to the garlic because if you break the outer covering, the garlic won’t store very long.

Garlic can stay in the ground until early September.  It probably won’t grow too much bigger but it will allow me to keep it just a little longer through the winter.  If you wait too long, the bulbs will start to send up shoots and regrow.  This past winter I accidentially lost some garlic cloves (likely fell off the bulb?) and this spring there were garlic plants popping up in places I didn’t plant them.  I guess that shows you just how easy it is to grow garlic.

Greasy Grits Beans

I’ve been worried about my beans — well, the plants haven’t been growing beans yet.  Today that changed.  In the third picture above is a close up of a bean just beginning to grow.  There are many, many beans growing right now.  Many.  I’m quickly going to have to figure out the proper way to dry and store beans.  I’m guessing they’ll all mature at about the same time.  Other than setup the trellis, the beans have maintained themselves so far.  I planted the plants 3 inches apart, so as they’ve grown, they’ve crowded out any weeds.  In the next 10 to 14 days, I should have a bean or two to try.  These are Greasy Grits Beans… so picture a standard green bean that is a puple brown red color with a shiny cover (hence greasy).

Green Peppers

The peppers have struggled all season long as they thrive in 90 degree weather and we just haven’t had enough of it (off the top of my head, I can only think of two 90+ degree days).  Just like the beans, the peppers also have started to grow.  The peppers will take a bit of time to fully grow into a green pepper and the 70 degree days this week aren’t going to help them.  I’ve specifically laid some extra fertilizer down in the hopes that I can help these guys grow.

Ground Cherries

I’m going to write an entire post on the ground cherries, so look for that soon.

Tomatoes

They are looking great!  The sunburst (little cherry-type orange tomatoes), roma (long skinny), green zebra (green striped), and others all look great.  There seems to be a little compression between the maturity dates this year.  They are suppose to be spread out among 5 weeks to pace out the number of tomatoes I’ll harvest.  It looks like the early varieties are running a little late and the mid-summer and late varieties are running a little early.  Just means that I’ll have many more to eat.  I’ve tried to take some real close up pictures of the tomatoes to give a good idea what they all look like and where they are in their maturity.

Cucumbers, Pumpkins, and Watermelons

Based on the pictures, you can clearly tell that all three plants are related.  The pumpkin plant is starting to go crazy.  This is very typical.  A pumpkin patch is a really easy thing to grow.  Lay down some seeds and a patch will be created.  I’m trying to grow the pumpkin up a trellis.  It’s a novel idea, but when a 10 pound pumpkin starts to grow, it’s going to pull the trellis down.  I just don’t have the room right now for a full pumpkin patch.  I hope it will grow up for a little bit which will give me time to harvest the other plants in that plot.  Otherwise, they are all growing strong.  I’m thinking cucumbers will be ready around August 1.

Lettuces

I planted a nice selection of lettuces — mizuna, rocky top, and arugula.  I had to pick a shadier part of the garden to plant it in as lettuces do not like the super hot heat of July and August.  Of course, we really don’t have that kind of heat right now.  With each of these lettuces, I cut a little bit each week so I end up with baby lettuce, “sandwich” lettuce (the size leaf perfect for putting between two pieces of bread), and eventually full salad lettuce.  The lettuces took forever to start to sprout but once they did, they were off.

Sunflowers

I planted an unused section of the garden next to the compost bin with sunflowers.  It’s a little late to be starting sunflowers (they’ll probably reach full height just before the first frost) but they’ll add some color to the garden and encourage more bees to hang around.

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Ground cherries are in the tomatillo family — you can see from the picture above the husk covering the actually berry — and they are extremely easy to grow. I bought a plant last year and had an outstanding batch of ground cherries. They are more like a blueberry than a cherry or tomato. They have no pit, they are yellowish orange, and very soft and sweet. They have a vanilla cherry flavor.

Ground cherries are a bush plant growing pretty close to the ground. The cherries drop to the ground when they are ready to eat. Here in lies the problem. When they drop to the ground, someone (a rabbit?) steals them before I can get to them. Last year I came up with the plan to shake the bush a little bit to get the ripe cherries to fall and then pick them up. That way I wasn’t pulling fruit that wasn’t ready to eat and I got to them before the rabbits did.

They keep on producing all summer long until the first frost. Keep picking them and they’ll keep growing.

I let the plant die in it’s spot last fall and to my amazement, a few ground cherry plants regrew this summer. One plant grew about 25 feet away from the original plant — I’m not sure if it was wind blowing the cherry or I dropped a berry that far away.

In any case, I’m looking forward to a robust ground cherry harvest. I should save them all up and make a ground cherry jam, but I have more fun eating them right out in the garden.

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