The Wild August Garden

We're a couple weeks into August now, and the garden is definitely getting more and more wild. In past years, I've been concerned that we didn't use our garden space well enough, but this year we've packed the garden with so many plants that everything is starting to take over one another.

 

I thought we had a nice pathway in between the sunflowers and pole beans, but everything's grown up so much that we can't walk through anymore. In fact, the pole beans are starting to climb up the sunflowers too. 

Similarly, the pumpkin plants have gone a little bit crazy, growing underneath the beans and sunflowers. 

 

I'm a little bit concerned about our peppers, as our pumpkin vines are getting dangerously close to them.

Pumpkins and Peppers

I'm happy to say that our Cherokee Trail of Tears beans have been producing blossoms for a couple of weeks now, and today we were able to pick a nice handful of beans.

 

The Small Sugar pumpkins keep getting larger too.

 

We have at least 15 pumpkins growing between 10 plants so far, and some babies that we're not too sure about yet. 

 

And, our Ronde de Nice zucchinis continue to produce abundantly. I picked five on a single day! I estimate that we've picked around 20 zucchinis so far. I made about seven loaves of zucchini bread, and we cooked some to eat. I also blanched and froze some, and there's still three zucchinis sitting in the fridge.

We even gave three zucchinis to our dad and oma.They were surprised to see round zucchinis!

 

 We don't have any of our tomatoes coming from the garden, but I'll take the opportunity to show off some cherry tomatoes that our step dad has grown in the garden this year.

Megan

 

The July/August Garden

Late July and early August is a particularly exciting time for us, as it's the time that the garden really starts producing and really starts to get out of hand in a good way. It's a wondrous experience seeing the pole beans climbing high and threatening to start climbing our sunflowers, which we have planted in a short row just behind the beans. The pumpkin plants seem to never stop growing, and now we are seeing the first pumpkins expanding quickly on the vines. The Ronde de Nice plants have become extremely bushy and leafy, and are loaded with the little round zucchinis. And, the pole beans, tomatoes plants and pepper plants are beginning to set their first fruit/vegetables. Here are some pictures of our garden from late July to the beginning of August!

 

As it turns out, the zucchini and pumpkin plants don't need any help from me in the pollination department. Each morning I look at the garden and see many bees buzzing around the blossoms. Sometimes there's as many as three in a blossom at a time. 

 

Because of our many pollinators, we've been able to pick about six Ronde de Nice zucchinis so far, and I counted about fifteen growing on the plants the other day. 

 

Check out these beautiful zucchinis and our very first cucumber of the season. 

 

I just love seeing the plants loaded with so many zucchinis. 

 

Here's a picture of our largest Sugar Pumpkin so far. It looks bigger in the picture than it really is, I think, but it's still quite big and growing fast! 

 

This is another beautiful Sugar Pumpkin. I've counted about 21 growing, but I'm still not sure that they're all going to grow into full-sized pumpkins or whether they will abort. I'm pretty sure of about 10 of them though, as they keep growing bigger. 

 Our first Bulgarian Carrot pepper has set on one of the plants. There are lots of blossoms on the others. 

Purple Calabash

We are also seeing our first tomatoes setting, including our Purple Calabash tomatoes. They look so pretty at this stage. 

Red Zapotec

These are some of our first Red Zapotec tomatoes of the year. 

Federle

The Federle tomatoes are the most advanced. 

Purple Cherokee

 

Mystery Tomato

 

 

The above picture is of what we're calling our mystery tomato plant. We have two in the garden like this. Early in the season we noticed a number of little tomato plants popping up in the garden that we didn't plant ourselves. We are guessing that these are Sungold tomatoes, as our mom planted a few last year that produced prolifically and we're certain that many of them rotted in the garden, leaving their seeds behind. 

 

Our Cherokee Trail of Tears beans have finally started blossoming. I even noticed a couple tiny beans today. 

And last but not least, here's a couple pictures of our cinnamon basil and cilantro. I can see now that it's definitely worth growing your own herbs from seed. You get so much more that way. 

Megan

A Ronde de Nice Recipe: Zucchini, Tomato and Pepper Stir-Fry

We harvested our very first Ronde de Nice zucchini on Friday, July 19th. In fact, it's the very first zucchini we've grown completely by ourselves, from seed to vegetable.

It's such a pretty little zucchini. It's shaped almost like a little pumpkin, with dark green stripes and veins of green against a whitish-green background.

Having only one zucchini at this stage, and four people in the family to feed, I wasn't exactly sure what to do with it. My sister, however, is going to culinary school at George Brown College and often gets to bring home leftover ingredients. She happened to make ratatouille at school the other day, a dish consisting of zucchini, tomatoes, and eggplant, and brought home a large amount of Roma tomatoes.

Inspired by the ratatouille dish she made, I decided to make a zucchini, Roma tomato and pepper dish as our side vegetable for Friday night.

Here's the simple recipe.

Ingredients

• Olive oil 
• 1 red onion
• 6 cloves of garlic
• 1 red pepper
• 1 green pepper 
• 1 Ronde de Nice zucchini (You can, of course, use whatever kind of zucchini you have on hand) 
• 6 Roma tomatoes
• Fresh basil (I used our own cinnamon basil)
• Fresh oregano 
• Salt
• Pepper
• Paprika

Instructions 

Begin by preparing the vegetables. Peel and dice the red onion. Peel and give the garlic a fine chop. Chop the red and green peppers in to large chunks. Cut the zucchini in to round slices, and then quarter the slices until they are about the same size as the peppers. Slice each Roma tomato in half, scoop the seeds out with a spoon, and then roughly chop the Roma tomato halves. Julienne the basil and chop the fresh oregano.

Now start to cook the vegetables. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Once heated, add the onion and garlic to the pan and cook a couple of minutes until translucent. Adjust the heat if necessary to avoid burning the garlic and onion.

Add the red and green peppers to the pan. Cook them until they are still crisp but beginning to get tender.

Add the zucchini to the pan. At this point, I would add your salt and pepper to taste, and a few generous pinches of paprika.

Once the zucchini is nearly cooked through add the Roma tomatoes to the pan. I did this because I didn't want the tomatoes becoming mush. Also, at the very last minute you can add the fresh basil and oregano. Add more salt and pepper at this stage if you think it's necessary.

Megan

Ronde de Nice Zucchini

Since my hand pollination efforts at the beginning of the week, it appears that we definitely have one Ronde de Nice zucchini that's been successfully pollinated, and two others have begun to grow, so I think they've been successfully pollinated as well.

There's so many  good resources on hand pollination. This is one resource that I referred to to learn how to pollinate our plants: http://subsistencepatternfoodgarden.blogspot.ca/2009/07/hand-pollination-of-zucchini.html.

The zucchini in the picture above bloomed on July 13th, and by yesterday, July 17th, it looked like this. The blossom is pretty much finished now and the zucchini continues to grow. We'll be picking this one any day now.

This one still has an orange blossom on it. I believe I hand pollinated it on Monday morning, July 15th, and by yesterday it clearly had started to grow.

This zucchini is the same. I hand pollinated it on Monday and it's clearly started to grow. In a couple days, we should know for sure whether it will grow into a zucchini that we can harvest and eat.

Over the last two days, there have been only male blossoms coming out on the plants, but I think in a day or two we'll see more females blooming that we can hand pollinate.










Megan

Garden Progress (July 9th, 2013)

On July 9th, 2013 I took a few pictures of the garden to document some of our progress. Now these seem terribly out of date, as the garden has changed so much since then, but here they are any way.

The above picture includes our Blue Lake pole beans, which are climbing fast now, and our small sugar pumpkins. It seems like in just a couple days the pumpkin plants have grown a lot more than what is shown in this picture. I noticed the other day that there are a few female blossoms forming on the plants, although none are actually blossoming yet. I shifted around some of the vines so that they won't grow on the grass. I don't want them getting cut with the lawn mower.

 

This is another view of the pumpkin plants. 

 

The Ronde de Nice zucchini are growing very well, as the above picture shows. I just love their leaves; they are truly really pretty plants.

 

Since last week, the blossoms that formed on the plants have started blooming, and they started with the female flowers. I was a bit confused by this, as the zucchini plants I've seen before start with the male blossoms normally. From what I've read, however, heirloom zucchini are a bit different from other zucchini because the female blossoms usually bloom first, and the males second.

Luckily, we have about ten or eleven plants, so there's already been plenty of each kind of blossom, but I haven't seen a lot of bees around. I Googled how to pollinate the flowers myself, and quickly learned that you can take the male flower and brush the pollen from it inside the female flower. I tried it with a few of the female flowers, and two of the little zucchini at the end of the flowers seem to be starting to grow, but we won't know for sure whether they were effectively pollinated until the flowers fall off.

 

We have a red currant bush with tons of currants ripening on it as well. I picked these last week, but we still have a lot on the plants. I made two batches of red currant scones with them.

Megan

The Garden: The Beginning and Now

It's easy to forget in July where the garden really began. At the same time, when faced with an empty garden in the early spring, it's hard to imagine that it will look anything like what it is now. It's interesting to look at pictures of the garden at different points in the season.

The picture above is the garden in early June. At this point, the lettuce, radishes, arugula, peas, Ronde de Nice and beans were planted, with seedlings just beginning to come up. Most other things weren't planted yet though.

This picture was taken on June 30th, 2013. The garden already looked quite a bit different, with the plants getting bigger, the beans starting to climb, sunflowers, Ronde de Nice and pumpkins up, and tomatoes and peppers planted.

The above picture was taken on July 9th, 2013. At this point the beans were visibly climbing, some of them close to the top of their poles. Everything changes so fast!

Megan

Garden Update (July 10th, 2013)

Jennifer and I haven’t written in a long time, but here’s a quick update of our garden progress for this year. There’s definitely a lot happening so far!

Radishes have been great. We’ve had a lot of success with the German Giant and French Breakfast radishes. Unfortunately the Easter Egg and Sparkler White Tip radishes seem to bolt quickly. I decided against planting the Cherry Belle variety, as we had so many other varieties to plant. I don’t think we’re going to get too many radishes any more for the summer, but we’re hoping to plant some seeds in the fall. We’ve heard this is a good time to grow them as the weather will be cooling down. 

The Ronde de Nice and small sugar pumpkins are looking very healthy. We planted six mounds of each variety. Only three mounds of the Ronde de Nice germinated at first, so we replanted seeds in the other mounds and those have quickly caught up to the earlier plants. There are about 10 plants in total of the ronde de nice. I counted at least fourteen blossom buds on just one plant, and some of them look like female blossoms, so that’s a good sign. We also have about 10 small sugar pumpkin plants. We're looking forward to making pumpkin pie in the fall, assuming we get pumpkins this year. 

Ronde de Nice

Early in the season I planted arugula in some containers. It did very well, and Jennifer and I managed to pick enough to add to a salad. The arugula that we planted in the garden has unfortunately all bolted, but seeing as we don’t have any seeds left, we plan on taking the opportunity to collect seeds from the arugula plants when they’re ready. 

We had one harvest of tatsoi  before it bolted. We don’t get to plant this stuff early enough, as the garden doesn’t get rototilled early enough, so we don’t get the full benefit of growing it. I don’t anticipate we’ll be planting this again, unless we can figure out a spot for early planting. 

The Royal Red, Merveille des Quatre Saisons and  'Early Green Moss, Curled' Endive (Chicoree Frisee) are doing fine and we managed to get enough for a salad this week, so I’m happy about that. There’s been a baby rabbit hanging around the garden, and we suspect it’s been nibbling the lettuce down, which is okay with us, as it's nice to see the rabbit. 

When we planted our tomato and pepper seeds indoors back in March, we also planted some cilantro and cinnamon basil seeds. They grew fine, but they grew tall and lanky. I decided to plant them between our tomato plants in the garden, not really sure how they would do. Luckily they’ve strengthened up very well and are growing. I also planted more cilantro seeds between the tomato plants, and they are coming up and look very healthy. 

The British Wonder Peas were doing well in the cooler weather, but again, I don’t think we planted them early enough; they’re not doing well in the heat. I wonder if there might be a chance they’ll take off in the fall?

Last year we collected Cherokee Trail of Tears and Blue Lake pole bean seeds for the first time, and happily there are a lot of plants up from that very same seed. The bean plants are climbing the poles quickly now and should hopefully blossom within a few weeks. I’m quite proud of the fact that we've had some success with seeds that we collected on our own.

pole beans

We didn’t have very many red beet seeds left, and not many germinated, but we do have some up so I hope to get some beets this season.

The tomatoes are growing quite well, although I think they might be a bit behind what they were last year. I’m beginning to wonder whether it will be similar to our first year growing tomatoes from seeds; that year we weren’t picking our first tomatoes until September! It might be just as well, though, seeing as we’ll be away from home the last two weeks of August. We ended up with 13 tomato plants in the garden this year. We planted two Federle, four Red Zapotec, three Purple Cherokee, two Green Zebra, one Yellow Pear and one Purple Calabash.

Back in May we mentioned that we’d be growing  Bulgarian Carrot, Jimmy Nardello, Orange Thai and Quadrato D'Asti Rosso peppers. Unfortunatley, the Quadrato D’Asti Rosso peppers (the one I was most excited about) didn’t germinate that well and we didn’t end up with any to put in the garden. However, we have quite a few Orange Thai and Bulgarian Carrot plants. We only have about three Jimmy Nardello plants this year. In total I think we have about 20 pepper plants this year.

We added a few more things to our growing list since last time. We needed to fill up some space in the garden, so we bought eight cabbage plants and four cucumber plants. We also decided to plant some sunflowers. Lastly, we couldn’t help but notice some mystery tomato plants growing in our garden. They must have re-seeded from last year. My guess is that they are Sungolds from plants that our mom planted last year, but we’re not sure. I am really curious to see what kind they are, and there are blossoms on the plants already, so I kept two in the garden. I had no idea that these heirloom tomatoes would re-seed like crazy.    

Megan