hello again

There has been precious little time for gardening, let alone blogging about gardening. As you can imagine, what was the best garden I had ever grown, turned into the biggest weedy mess you've ever seen around this time.

Tomatoes are coming in nicely. One batch of garden tomato sauce is frozen, a couple batches of diced tomatoes, one batch of crock pot marinara (8 cups of that).

 

Ground hogs have been an ongoing problem attacking carrots, beans, parsnips and wow - how they love collards and Brussels.

The onion crop came in, as did the garlic. Fantastic yield with the garlic though I harvested late and the leaves had started to separate from the bulbs. I let a couple go to flower and it didn't make a huge difference in head size.

 

 

I'm still harvesting beets, and about to plant more.

Same with carrots. Here's what I got after not thinning and not weeding (much). I'm not sure about "atomic red", but "purple haze" sure met expectations!

 

Despite slugs, pole beans made it up the poles, but I can't reach the beans to harvest them.

I harvested the potatoes. Beautiful colors, but small yield. No surprise considering I did the opposite of tending them.

I really can't wait for the sweet potato harvest, the vines are everywhere, but it hasn't been hot so I really don't know what we will find under ground. 

Tomatoes!

Lets hear it for the variety "Fourth of July" which didn't quite make its deadline but nonetheless beat out the beefsteak that was planted a month earlier.

 

Freezing Tomatoes

This week we got some surplus tomatoes, 1/2 bushel, for $7. Half of them went into spaghetti sauce and half just became diced tomatoes. So for $7 we got approximately 5 jars of spaghetti sauce and 10 16 oz. cans of diced tomatoes. Totally worth it.

Vegetable bouillon

So, supposedly if you dry soup vegetables and then powder them in a blender you can add them to soups, scrambled eggs, etc. Here, tomatoes, leeks, and kale. I'll let you know how it goes.

First tomatoes

First ripe tomatoes came in a week ago. They are trickling in slowly as slugs and rodents get the lower first tomatoes. But there are plenty on the bushes and we will have a pretty good harvest despite the blight on the lower leaves.