Half-Yard

I have beans!

I planted two types of pole beans on the trellis arch this year, both new to me:  yard-long and scarlet runner.  Yard-long for the novelty, and scarlet runner to have some pretty flowers in the veggie garden. 

No photo of the pretty scarlet runner, thanks to an unreadable camera card (grumble).  They are pretty, but they haven't produced beans.  That's ok: it's why I planted two kinds of beans.

Here's the yard-long side of the trellis arch, with beans a-dangling:

And here is the first bean harvest.

 Those are some long beans!  But are they yard-long?

No, but the longest one is just over a half yard.

They were great sauteed with the zucchini and some Greek seasoning.

 Oh, and I picked some more tomatoes, too.

Zuke!

Last year I had zero squash.  The squash vine borers ate up the plant and spread their disease before any fruit had a chance.  The year before I had some, but the plants also succumbed early.  So this year I decided to wait.  Having read that the eggs are laid in the plant stems in mid-June, and that planting after mating time could prevent an infestation, I waited.  It was torture.  Other gardeners already had squash blossoms, and I hadn't even planted mine yet.

I started some seeds indoors in June. Seems odd to be starting seeds indoors, but I figured that way I could have larger plants earlier.  I couldn't start them too early, because squash have wide root systems that don't really like pots, and don't like to be transplanted when they are too big.  Due to heat, other weather, and my busy schedule, I didn't actually get the plants in the ground until late June.  Additional protection against the bugs, sure, but also additional time to wait for squash.

I planted zucchini and patty pan squash.  Three zukes and two patty pans.  Four plants went into the garage garden, and one into the regular veggie bed.  I didn't dig and amend the garage garden before planting, and there was some had dirt in there, limiting my planting opportunities.  And my garlic was late, so I had one less spot to plan then I had planned.  That's why one plant went into the veggie bed.  One of the garage plants didn't survive its harsh conditions. One has survived but not flourished.  But two plants (one of each) have grown quite large.

The patty pan in the back looks like it's starting to wilt, but that might just be lack of water.  This bed isn't irrigated, and hadn't been watered for four days when I took this picture.  The zucchini in front looks fabulous, even though it is competing with my willow stum that still insists on growing.

The plants have been flowering for a while.  Male flowers first, of course.  I saw some little squash buds growing, but the flowers sure took a long time to open.

I was traveling for work over the weekend and into this week.  When I returned home Wednesday, a nice surprise awaited me:  an actual zucchini!  It was really small, but growing.  I didn't check yesterday, so I was surprised today when it was already huge!

I finally have zucchini, and I think I know what I'm going to do with it.

Pleasing Plums

After my plum tree collapsed under its own weight and I pruned it in haste, I wasn’t sure if the rest of the plum crop would last.  But it did just fine, and by mid-June they were ripe. 

 Despite losing about half of them in the pruning, there were enough for the critters (squirrels, crows, etc.) to share with me.  I was snacking on plums every day. 

 

I gave plums to friends and brought some to work.  Still plums on the tree.  The last weekend of June I was heading out of town, so I grabbed a bucket and my stepladder 

and picked the rest off the tree.

A little under a gallon - not a bad haul.  There probably would have been two gallons, but I had to toss all the plums that had been pecked-at, and some that were overripe.

 It took me an hour or two to “process” the plums for freezing.  Wash, slice in half, and remove the pit.  (This is where I learned that like peaches, there are freestone and clingstone plums.  My sugar plums, unfortunately, are the clingy type.)  Put the plums in freezer bags and fill the bags (enough to cover the plums) with white grape juice (apple juice works, too.).  I filled three quart bags.

While I was away, we had a big storm (a derecho), and my house was without power for a while.  The thing that concerned me the most?  That I might lose all those plums in the freezer.  Fortunately the power was restored in a little under two days.  I came home to find that a bag of ice I had in the freezer was still ice-cube-shaped, so things in my newish (and apparently well-insulated) freezer must have stayed pretty cold.  The plums were safe!  

I visited my parents recently and brought along a bag of plums.  One night for dessert I made Zwetschgenkuchen (plum cake)

Yummy.

More Cucumbers

Since July 5, I’ve picked 17 cucumbers (or thereabouts – I may have lost count) from my one volunteer cucumber vine.  Five I’ve given away, and the rest I’ve eaten all by myself.  I adore cucumbers, but this is getting to be a bit much. 

Just some of the haul

Most I’ve just sliced into cuke sticks and eaten plain.  The few times I’ve actually had some tomatoes I’ve made greek salad (cucumbers, tomatoes, feta, and greek dressing).

Look, tomatoes!  From large to small: black from tula, maremmano, black cherry, sungold

Dinner

 Last week I decided I had time to make tzatziki.  I love this sauce, and it’s easy to make, but it does take some time (mostly waiting).  Strain the yogurt for an hour or two.  Peel, seed, and chop the cuke, and squeeze out the juice.  Mince garlic and mint.  Mix together.  Voila! (How do you say ‘there you have it!’ in Greek?)

When I stopped at the store to but the plain yogurt and pita chips, I was inspired to go the whole way and make gyros.  So I bought lamb and beef and flatbread, and came home to google gyro recipes.  I found this one from Alton Brown.  (I used half lamb and half beef instead of all lamb, because all lamb is a bit too much for me.)  I didn’t take a picture of the finished gyros, but here’s a leftover plate I made when I’d run out of pitas.

pita-less gyro

I definitely plan to make this again.

July 2012 - Belated Blooms

I took some Bloom Day photos a day late (I was traveling on the 15th), but neglected to do anything with them.  So here, 10 days late, I'll show you what was blooming way back when.

The reality:  not much.  It's been hot and it's been dry, so there's not a lot to look at outside the veggie garden.  Coneflowers and Rudbeckia, my summer staples, have even been looking sad and wilty.  The annual rudbeckia dried up and called it quits.

The front garden is the star this month, if anything really stars in my seemingly barren yard.  Along the front walk are some zinnia.  I started these from seed and transplanted them in late spring.  I always wish I had more of them.  Perhaps I should try direct-sowing.

In the front bed, the self-seeded four-o'clocks are doing their thing, filling in the otherwise blank spaces.  Catmint is still blooming along also, if sporadically.

I have cannas in that bed also.  I grow them for their tropical foliage.  Mine have never flowered, and I've been okay with that.  So I was surprised to see this plain-leaved one in bloom.

Around back, phlox are brightening up the garage bed

The structure there was supposed to hold cucumbers.  Only one seed sprouted in that new location, and it hasn't done much.  That's okay, I have more cucumbers than I know what to do with, thanks to a volunteer in the main veggie garden.

Strawberries

Over two months ago, I started this post about strawberries.  I blame my lack of blogging over the last two months on this unfinished post.  For some reason, in my mind, I couldn't appropriately blog about much else until I finished this strawberry post.  For example, there's a plum post coming (if only in my head).  But everyone knows one cannot post about plums until one posts about strawberries.  Right?  Well, maybe.  So here goes:

Last year I purchased and planted some everbearing strawberry plants.  I could have gone with a well-favored named variety, but my frugal nature won out.  You see, these plants, named only "everbearing strawberries", were about a dollar cheaper per pot than the named berries.  What's a dollar (or five in my case, as I bought five pots)?  Not much in the grad scheme of the garden, until I noticed the (cheap) pots actually contained two plants per pot.  There went my plan to buy the "good" plants.  These would do, especially since I had no idea whether strawberries would "do" in my yard at all. 

Yes, I did know strawberries run, and that I would have been just fine buying only five of those other plants because they would have muliplied enough to fill the bed by this second year.  But at that particular moment I wanted the instant gratification of berries the same year.

In went the plants, next to the weeping maple and just downhill from the dwarf blueberries.  They made a few berries last year (eaten by squirrels, birds and voles), and put out lots of runners, to try to take over those blueberries.  I got zero berries for myself, but spent lots of effort reigning in the spread of the berries.

On to 2012.  This spring I made sure the plants weren't crowding each other out, then let them do their thing.  They flowered in early spring and made little green fruits: 

And then the berries started to ripen:

I was not about to let all the critters get to my berries before me this year.  Since there were only a few berries ripening at this point, and I didn't yet have a fencing scheme planned, I tried protecting just the few berries I had:

Yes, that's a leg of hosiery wrapped around the berry cluster.  It worked well, allowing the berries to ripen in safety.

Those were some tasty berries!

There were several problems with this method, however.  First, it would be very labor intensive to put every ripening berry into a stocking-guard.  Second, I found that while the berries were in the stocking I couldn't really tell if they were ripe.  So I had to pull them out to take a look, then put them back in.  I was very concerned about bruising the fruit in the process.

So I got out the bird netting and draped it over the berries, securing it to the ground around the edges with a combination of landscape staples and bricks.  My first attempt was a failure, as I found the next set of ripe berries munched away before I got to them.

I found the hole in my barrier and staked it closed.  Success!  Soon I was eating berries for breakfast every day.

(A note about 'everbearing' strawberries:  while they do continue to bear fruit throughout the summer, they still produce a flush of berries in the spring, just as the june-bearing plants do.  Since my netting scheme made weeding nearly impossible, I removed the netting after the major crop was finished. I'll let the critters eat the later fruits.)

Volunteer Cucumber

I've been away for about a week, and I'm really behind on posts (more behind than just that week).  I do intend to catch up sometime.  But something really exciting happened this evening that I have to share:  I found a cucumber!

OK, so one might expect to find a cucumber in a veggie garden.  I have them every year.  Why is this one so special? 

First, it is a volunteer cucumber.  Grew up all by itself.  I had several volunteers this year.  I accidentally weeded one.  I tried to transplant another (it died).  And the third one I just let be, even though is was growing next to the arbor where I'd planned to plant beans this year (crop rotation and all...).  Well, this one plant is trying to take over my whole garden.  I think it tripled in size in the week I was away.  (Sorry, it was too dark when I was out this evening to take a pic.) 

Second, I had no idea it was there.  Last week the vine had a bunch of flowers, and if I squinted just right I could pretend there were baby cucumbers behind some of the flowers.  Tonight I was happy to see actual cucumbers growing; some should be ready in a few days.  Then, as I moved some lower leaves to pull a weed, I saw a perfect, full-grown cuke:

I brought it inside, peeled and sliced it, and ate half of it right away.  It was delicious in that way the first cuke of the season always is.

Plus, it made me feel less guilty for eating all that fried chicken for dinner.