Falling behind

I can't believe it's been almost a month! I've been taking pictures but just not posting them, so here's a chronological catch-up:

September 20

By late September, the Mexican sunflowers had pretty much stopped blooming. Here's the biggest one after I pulled it up - it was pretty huge. We grew it from seed!



The soy beans were pretty much done too. It was neat to have them, but I don't think I'd do it again - they took all summer to grow, and they weren't particularly delicious compared to store-bought. Anyway, legumes are nitrogen-fixing plants because they have root nodules where bacteria that convert nitrogen into a form usable by plants live. When I pulled them up, you could see the nodules, which was kind of cool:




September 24

For reasons I can't recall, I went to the garden in the evening that day, and got these nice shots of eggplant buds and baby cantaloupes.






September 27

After watering, I picked a few zinnias. When I got home I saw that this yellow one looked like it had a tiny flower growing inside it:




October 5

Next to the water hose, we saw this neat weird tiny red thing growing out of the grass and clover. I think you need to click on it to see it well:



It looked just like a ring I bought in Mexico City this summer:



I picked a cantaloupe that was tiny but on a dead vine, so clearly wasn't going to grow any more. When I cut it open it was a perfect little mini-cantaloupe! I feel like you can see its relation to the cucumber here more than you can see it in the fully-grown cantaloupes:



October 10

We had heard about these mushrooms that sometimes appear in the garden that look pretty gross, smell like dead meat, and get swarmed by flies. And yesterday I was lucky enough to see some. I only had my cell phone camera with me so these are kind of impressionistic.




Well, that's kind of a gross visual note to end on, so here's a zinnia.

I should really be working...

...but I still think these eggplants are the cutest things in the universe.



Lori was cooking eggplant the other day and making baba ganoush. I said she should add curry and call it baba ganesh, but she didn't think that was very funny. I did!

The ground cherries look pretty:



I recently tried to figure out how to eat them, and found out that if they're underripe, and/or raw, they're poisonous. Great! Since I have no idea how to tell when they're ripe - and really, since we didn't plant them, I don't even know for sure that they're ground cherries - we've decided to shift them from the vegetable to the ornamental category.

The cherry tomatoes, in contrast, are delicious. And the little plant we have - that we didn't even plant - is covered with them. Here's a picture of just one branch - it's kind of mixed in with the zinnias, but you can still see lots of tomatoes.



Finally, an unexpected flower - the little plant/weed it's on has I think actually been growing since the spring, but this is the first flower:



It appeared out of nowhere, and I don't know anything about it, but it's pretty. Kind of like Sarah Palin! Except the flower isn't a terrifying threat to our liberty and existence.

Monarchy

When we got to the garden on Saturday, Eli was standing at the gate. It was very exciting since we hadn't seen each other in a while. He had been to the beach and Eric told him he had a tan. Eli waved his hand dismissively and said, "No, that's just skin...."

Here's an interesting moth/butterfly on a muskmelon flower:



And Eli near the muskmelon flowers:



These aren't in our plot but look a lot like the Mexican sunflowers. If you click on this almost at the exact center, you can see a monarch butterfly:



But here's the big technological leap for this blog. Make sure your sound is on; the insects are really loud all day now:

Slogging through August

First of all, I've gotten a request for a full view of the garden. The following two photos show the left and right sides.




I don't know how clear that makes things.

In the meantime, things are still growing, somehow. The eggplant has really come into its own since the cucumbers went away. To date, we've only had two eggplants. But in this shot you can see three baby eggplants growing, and at least four flowers! Very exciting.



And a couple of the tomato plants are really putting on a lot of fruit:



Finally, here's what a ground cherry looks like! Months of waiting for this tiny thing. I just realized we only know it's a ground cherry because one random guy in the garden said so. Perhaps I should do a little more internet research before eating one:




Some closing shots of flowers. I love taking home bouquets like this.

The Greater Good

Well, it's pouring rain here in Cape Cod, so I thought I'd wrap up this post I started.

The sad news is that the cucumbers are gone. The plants were getting wiltier and wiltier and kind of sick-looking, and the few remaining cucumbers were all twisted:





Worse, it looked like it was spreading to the adjacent eggplant, and possibly across the path to the cantaloupes. Since those are in the same family, they share a lot of diseases. So the cucumbers had to go. I pulled them all out - I had to! - but I felt really bad.

So I took some pictures of soybeans, Mexican sunflowers, and harvested stuff to remind myself of the utilitarian principles underlying my decision.





Thank you, Mr. Bentham.

Check out my melons!

So I haven't actually been in the garden in almost two weeks, which is crazy, and will be remedied soon. In the meantime, I wanted to write about my muskmelons! Have eaten two and they are delicious. It's crazy to me that when I cut them open, they're just these perfect beautiful cantaloupes (or whatever) - I can't believe they grew from seeds.

But all is not well. Remember the muskmelon from my last post, the one with a deep indentation and an evil bug guarding it?

Well this is what it looked like on the inside:



Eek! Oh well. At least I have one nice pair!

Eudora Welty

I picked the first muskmelon today! We'll see how it tastes. In the meantime, I noticed a weird split in one of the other growing muskmelons. I leaned closer and discovered it was a monster's lair! Eek!



I probably should have flicked it off but I was a bit intimidated. It had more legs than me.

The ground cherry still looks cool and I still don't understand it.



The soybeans are coming in! They're fuzzy.



Lately every time I go to the garden, night or day, I get swarmed by mosquitoes. They eat any part of me that's exposed, including my face, and I come back covered in welts. The only thing that consoles me is the idea that the mosquitoes have a tiny little garden blog of their own, and that it has entries like:

Went out to the garden about an hour before sunset. The human seems to be growing well. She comes with a little hat! Look what we did:



Anyway, here's a recent bounty; not too bad.

I don't need to knit a little hat!

It comes with one!



Also, here's a neat cucumber knot.



In other news, the squirrels (or their accomplices) are stealing tomatoes regularly. I had to take the new baby tomato plant into the bedroom and put it by a sunny window to keep it safe. That tactic has its limits, though. Tips on squirrel repulsion will be welcomed!

Older; wiser?

For my birthday yesterday we spent two hot hours working in the garden. It was longer than expected, so we missed a planned fancy brunch at my favorite brunch place, but I didn't even mind. Amazing!

The other day when I went to the garden shop to buy tomato plants, Tia, who works there, made a pitch for me to buy a "Salsa in a pot." It's one big pot that had a tomato plant, spices, and four kinds of peppers. This one had a huge crack in it, so the plants needed to go to someone who could transplant them into a garden. Tia offered me a big discount, but mostly, she made me feel like if I didn't take the runt of the litter home and love it, no one else would. Which of course made me say yes.

Here are the four pepper plants, one day after transplant:



One's "kung pao" and one's jalapeno; the other two didn't have tags. Maybe they're Guatemalan insanity peppers! They're looking a bit droopy, but it was 100 degrees out today, and everyone was looking a little droopy.

In the meantime, when I came to the garden a few days ago, I caught this squirrel in the act! Eating a stolen tomato right on top of the supply shed. You may need to click on the photo for a clear view.



Turns out 2 of the 3 tomatoes from one of our plants were gone. It makes me feel much better to imagine that all of the thefts are the work of squirrels, as opposed to rats. So I'm glad to have seen this. But I shook my fist at him nonetheless!

One of the ground cherry pods is turning orange. I don't know what this means. I still don't even understand what ground cherries are. But I'm documenting it here, in case in retrospect it turns out to be relevant to the ground cherries' narrative arc:



For closers, a bunch of zinnias, and two pictures of the Mexican sunflowers:

Hatchings

Well, a zinnia's in bloom, and it's not very exciting.


But check out the webbing on the muskmelon: The first photo is from yesterday, and the second from today. It would have been so cool to have a time-elapsed video of this.



In the meantime, lots of fluffy muskmelons appearing (there are three in this photo):



And at long last, an eggplant peeking out. It looks so shy and tiny. I want to knit it a little hat.