Brrr

I took these December 6, but am only getting around to posting them now, since I'm happily well into my "stay-cation." Here's how the garden looked after we finally took everything down:

Here are all the green tomatoes we had to pick. We were hoping to ripen them.

I read somewhere online that you can ripen tomatoes by putting a ripening banana with them. It didn't work, but it made a nice still-life!

In the meantime, here's what a carrot looks like if you let it grow all summer!

And here's the final crop.

Happy winter!

I love the South!

It's amazing to me how long the growing season is here. These were taken on November 9. A fresh new lima bean vine peeking out from among the older ones:

The carrots are going strong.

There are still tons of tomatoes growing.

And even flowers for new tomatoes!


Finally, the alpine strawberries are blossoming and fruiting yet again. I guess it's not just a catchy name!

No Narrative...

Just a nice lima bean vine:



More vines taking over a sunflower stalk:



And a rare two-eggplant harvest. Fraternal twins!

Sunflower Seeds!

Wow, long gap since the last post. Hello!

You may recall these lovely sunflowers:

When they finally got droopy and started to dry out, we got all French-Revolution on them and cut off some of their heads. Here's me, for scale! Please ignore the apparent breadth of my hips. Camera angle!


Close up, you can see all the seeds kind of packed in together, standing up vertically:

Easier to see from the side:


Then we (I) soaked them in salt water overnight (so the salt could soak into the kernel inside) and roasted them. Delicious! And hundreds and hundreds of them from just a few flowers. Thanks, Oma!

Missing

Sadly, two days after this picture of the only cantaloupe was taken, we came back to the garden to find out the cantaloupe was also taken! There's been a rash of thefts in the garden. Funny, they don't seem to be stealing beets, lima beans, or okra. Something to be said for unpopular vegetables.
Ok, so here's how tall the sunflowers had gotten in another week. Amazing!


We picked the first Big Mama lima beans and have been eating them. Penny for scale!
Then, finally:

Late July update

These photos are from a couple weeks ago, but I didn't get around to posting them until now. Here's Farmer Eric taking a quick break from the blackberry harvest.


This was our second eggplant.

I took this to show how tall the sunflowers have gotten, but just wait till the next post...
For you northerners out there, this is what okra plants look like. And believe it or not, fresh okra actually tastes good!
Here's a weird beetle that was on the pole beans.
And here's a sunflower getting ready to blossom...

Lemon Cuke and Okra

I think the lemon cucumber vines are definitely dying. But it was worth the two we got!




We also ate some okra for the first time yesterday. I'd been under the mistaken impression that you could just let the pods grow really big, but apparently you're actually supposed to get them when they're small. These turned out to be pretty fibrous. What can I say, we're yankees.


Sorry not to be more amusing; I slept in my office last night. Tell your Congressperson to push for this damn health bill so I can get back to being moderately coherent!

Saturday's harvest

Well, here are the lemon cucumbers. The plants seem to be wilting and shriveling and dying, and maybe taking the cantaloupes with them (damn you, sickly cucurbits!) but we got these two lovelies. Eric's out of town so I'll wait for him for the tasting.

Less in need of identification is the first eggplant. Cute, right?

In the interest of full disclosure...

... I feel I should make clear that the purple carrots aren't purple all the way through.

Now that that's out of the way: the garden is suddenly full of babies!
Cantaloupe:

Lima beans (the pod is sort of in the middle of the shot, just north of center):

Eggplant:

A lemon cucumber:

And fairy-tale eggplant:

All so tiny and cute! Plenty of grandchild and great-grandchild surrogates to choose from!

Now _this_ is what I'm talking about!

Do you see those carrots! As gimmicks go, that's a pretty great gimmick.

Big beans

This isn't even one of the Big Mama beans!

by the way

You have to have your volume up and click on the triangle to play.....

Tour

Took the day off...

The strawberries just keep coming. I made strawberry cobbler. The garden-neighbor who gave me the starter plants last year told me that the little "bites" we see in some of them (I throw those away) are from slugs. I guess that's a little gross, but I had thought it was rats, so at least we won't get hantavirus.

The beans are almost all the way up the pole.



I tried to plant the sunflowers, but every time they sprouted, something ate them, since they come up with the tantalizing seed still on top. So I decided to plant them indoors. The package said they germinate in 5-15 days, but after 4 days they looked like this:


At 6 days, I took them out to transplant them, and the tap root (longest, main root) for most of them was about a foot long! That's 2 inches a day!



Today I picked the first radish. I thought it might be a little early but I wanted to try one to find out. Not much to look at, but when you slice it....


The package said "crisp and sweet," so I took a big bite... and it's basically like incredibly strong horseradish. Which will be great with seafood! But not so much on its own.

First bouquet:

blurry but nice