Friday, June 5, 2009

Not Quite What I Was Planning

First, some pictures:
The sunberries, which have take off! They have outgrown their allotted space...and then some.

One of the rows of green beans, with a little fennel at the very end.

A row of hot and sweet peppers I planted, including, red marconi, better belle, tequila sunrise, jalapeno, chocolate beauty and pasilla bajio. We obviously have been using a lot of shredded junk mail and newspaper to mulch and keep the weeds down. My sister and her boyfriend Ben came for a visit on memorial day and Ben, looking into the backyard said to me: Uh, someone dumped a bunch of trash in your yard.

Here's what the trifle tomatoes look like these days.

A handful of sunberries, taken several days ago.

The title of this post is stolen from the six word memoirs book. But it seems very appropriate, as, the garden this year has turned out to be something entirely different from what I planned. Isn't that always how it goes?

The Edamame still hasn't come up, and I've given up on it. Maybe I'll try again next year, or possibly even later in the season, if the mood strikes me.
I have fallen in love with the volunteer plants. Particularly the zucchini, MY it is a large plant!

The self waterers, which had my heart at the beginning, have become quite the disappointment. Many of the tomatoes in self waterers have seemingly incurable blossom end rot, and the plants just can't handle heat well at all. On the other hand, I think all of the slaving I have done over the ground soil is finally paying off. There's one tomato plant inparticular -a red pear- that has out grown the self waterers. It's SO vibrant, and hardly ever needs watering. While I still hold a place in my heart for the self waterers, I think I'm going to use them for smaller things like green beans, and basil next year. Here's a picture of some tomatoes on the wonderful red pear!

June is here already, and we are beginning to enjoy the fruits of our labor here at our house. pear and jellybean tomatoes are ripening here and there. I seem to forget, every year, just how much better a homegrown tomato is compared to store bought. The brambles are ripening also, at the rate of a berry a day. Jonas, upon eating his first raspberry promptly picked and ate all of the remaining (and unripe!) berries on the plant. And here I thought I'd be fighting off the birds, apparently the problem comes in a form closer to home.
The sunberries are coming on strong as the weather heats up. We're picking a good size handful every day. Jonas eats them faster than I can pick them most days. Today while picking sunberries A RAT ran out from the bushes. I was thoroughly disgusted and quit the berry picking for the day. I guess this means the rats from last year have returned. Isn't that just wonderful. Now we're just waiting for the japanese beetles to arrive and then the vexations will be complete...hopefully.

Oh! And I also harvested the garlic today! I kept thinking it was too early, that I had to wait until june...then it dawned on me, um, it's june! So I pulled it up and learned a valuable lesson, the the size of the stalk does not in any way correlate to how big the garlic head will be. Some of the wispiest stalks produced the biggest heads. Go figure.

Though the garden hasn't sprung up exactly as I mapped it out it is still a thing of beauty to me. It fills me with glee to think that by this time next month I'll be up to my neck in tomatoes. Canning season is just around the corner. It'll be keeping me extra busy this year as I have been put in charge of the parent's apricot harvest. Greg's mom will be in Europe for a month, and therefore unable to jam. And despite Jonas picking the green apricots off of the tree, the harvest will still be sizeable.

3 comments:

Kristina P. said...

I love fresh fruit and veggies. Looks great!

Matron said...

What a wonderful selection of veggies. You grow some unusual varieties. Never heard of sunberries, we don't get them here in London. Are they like blueberries?

Clong said...

Matron, welcome to the blog! I'm so excited you're here and bragged to my husband last night that a real, live person from london reads my blog!

Regarding sunberries. When I bought the seeds from seedsavers.org they were touted as being "better than blueberries." Which is somewhat untrue. They resemble blueberries in appearance only and the similarity ends there. They are quite sweet with a tomato-ish after taste. They are distantly related to the tomato. If you can grow tomatoes in your area then you can definitely grow sunberries. I reccomend them. My son eats them about as fast as I pick them.