Tomatoes

Now that our tomatoes have grown bigger, I have finally been able to get some decent pictures of them. The above two pictures are of one of the Cherokee Purple plants. So far, I think I've counted around five or six tomatoes on each Cherokee Purple plant, but the two in the pictures above are the largest so far.

Below, you can see two pictures of our Green Zebra tomato plants. Each of the three plants have at least five tomatoes on them, and Jennifer and I are beginning to notice the stripes. There are plenty of blossoms, so we are checking excitedly every day to see if anymore have set.



Our best producers so far have undoubtedly been the Yellow Pear tomato plants. One of the plants is already reaching the top of the cage, and I think between the two plants I must have counted nearly seventy tomatoes, and I'm sure there are many more to come.



Megan

Collecting Radish Seeds

I have been reading about how to save radish seeds, because our first planting of radishes went to seed before they had a chance to develop roots. It seemed easy enough to save the seeds, and the radish pods seemed dried enough, so I decided to give it a try today.


The process is very basic. All I had to do was crack open the pods to get to the little round, brownish, hard seeds. They look identical to the ones we bought, so I hope they germinate as well too.


Jennifer and I still have some seeds leftover that we bought from the Cottage Gardener, so we'll likely plant a combination of those and the ones that I collected today in the Fall.

Megan

Swiss Chard, Herb, and Cherry Tomato Pasta

Of all our heirloom vegetables, I harvested some of the Lucullus Swiss Chard today. It hasn't been growing really fast, or very big, but I decided it would be a good idea to harvest it before it gets browned by the sun. I also harvested some cherry tomatoes, which we did not grow from seed, and some oregano from the herb garden, and some basil and parsley (grown from seed by our mom).


We had just enough vegetables to make a delicious pasta for dinner. Here is a basic recipe for it.

Ingredients
1 box of rigatoni
2 tablespoons of olive oil
6 cloves of garlic, chopped
half a vidalia onion, chopped
a pinch of red pepper flakes
Swiss chard
cherry tomatoes
1 tomato, diced
parsley
oregano
basil
salt and pepper to taste

In a pot of boiling and salted water, cook pasta until tender.

In a frying pan, heat the olive oil. Add the garlic, onion, and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Cook the onion and garlic until tender. Add the cherry tomatoes, diced tomato, and Swiss chard and cook until tender. Throw in your cooked pasta once drained. Season it with salt and pepper, add the oregano, basil, and parsley, and serve. It's particularly good if you add some Parmesan cheese too.

Megan

Another Little Harvest

We came home from a camping trip today to find that a lot had changed in our garden. I harvested three radishes, which included White Icicle, Plum Purple, and China Rose radishes. We also decided to harvest three of our beets. We have heard that they are tastier when harvested early, so we pulled a Chioggia, a Cylindra, and a Bull's Blood beet. We will leave the others to get bigger.


There was a lot of lettuce growing, so we also decided to harvest some of it. Again, we cut a little bit of each variety, including some of our mom's Boston lettuce.


We combined the lettuce, beets, and radishes with a few other ingredients in a salad. Jennifer made some croutons in the oven using some bread cubes, dried thyme, salt and pepper, garlic powder, and olive oil. We also added some tomatoes, onion, and cucumber to the salad.

Megan

Garden Overview

It hasn't been too long since we last gave a garden update, but it's surprising to us to see how much the growth of our garden has progressed. There have been a few changes since we last posted, including the planting of some new plants and seeds, and the fact that a lot of our plants are really taking off. (By the way, please ignore the weeds in all of the pictures. It's difficult to stay on top of weeding the garden the majority of the time.)

As you know, Jennifer and I lost a number of tomato seedlings. As a result, we had a big gap in our garden where nothing was growing. We decided to buy two hot banana pepper plants, and two pots of crookneck squash plants. There were about five crookneck squash plants in total.

Jennifer also planted some butternut squash seeds. We had bought a butternut squash at the grocery store for a pizza recipe and Jennifer came up with the idea of planting the seeds from it. Our patty pan squash never came up, so we planted the seeds in their place. Surprisingly, there are many plants coming up. We have two mounds with plants, which I suspect we will be thinning soon.
Our Musquee de Provence plants are doing fantastic. They are growing quite big and really taking off in this summer heat. It looks like they will be blossoming soon, and with that I hope we will have many pumpkins setting soon. The picture below is just one plant of two.

Our tomato plants are kind of small for their varieties, but very sturdy. I'm shocked at how far they've come. I must confess that I had some doubts about whether we would end up with any surviving tomato plants, even when we first started thinking about growing vegetables from seed back in January. All of the plants have blossoms, and some of the Yellow Pear tomato plants already have tomatoes setting. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get any good-quality pictures to show you, so that will have to wait until another time.

Lastly, we had planted some beets directly into our garden and they are finally beginning to mature. Have a look at what I think might be a Chioggia beet in the picture below.


Megan

Canada Day Harvest

We finally had our first significant harvest today. We managed to harvest enough lettuce to make a salad for dinner, and we still have leftovers. We harvested all varieties of our lettuce, including Green Oak Leaf, Cracoviensis, Red Deer Tongue, Australian Yellow Leaf, and Black-seeded Simpson lettuce. We also cut some of our mom's Boston lettuce plants, which she bought as starter plants at the garden centre. In the picture above you can also see two radishes as well, one of them China Rose, and the other Plum Purple.



The salad we made included our freshly picked radishes, but also some oregano and chives from our herb garden. It also had tomatoes, cucumber, and apricots. It feels good to have a salad that includes lettuce and radishes that we grew straight from seed all by ourselves. We are hopeful that there will be many more salads like this to come.

Megan