Brownersen Garden: Day 36

I'm a little late with my garden post this week (see the previous post if you're curious what could be keeping me so busy!), but I've got pictures and stuff to share. In general, the plants are still growing like crazy, and they are showing us more and more that we'll have food soon!

Here are a few pictures of the whole garden. 

As a reminder, here it is on Day 2...

...and a mere 8 days ago (Day 28)...

And here we are now!

I've often thought about taking a day to just sit and watch the plants grow. No joke... I'm pretty sure I could right about now!

Here is a tomatillo. I measured it at 28.5" this week, up 5.5" from last week.

Our corn grew another 8" from last week and is now 24"! (This is not universally true... you can see that we have some shorter plants too.)

The Striped German tomato plant is 30" tall this week, which is 5" taller than the week before. Here is our early tomato plant, which I think I posted last week or the week before had already sprouted some tomatoes. We have definitely had issues in the past with tomatoes sitting forever on the vine, not getting ripe, and then eventually rotting. I'm hoping that doesn't happen again this year! If anyone has any suggestions on how to prevent that, I'm all ears!

Random thought: I'm not sure how I feel about this early tomato plant. First of all, it is supposedly determinate, meaning that all of the fruit should ripen at once (around July 11). Well why do we have this batch of early tomatoes then, huh?? Also, it doesn't look like a normal tomato plant which is generally upright and almost tree-like. This one is more like a crazy bush with branches sticking out every which way. Overall, I'm not sure I trust it, but time will tell.

Here is a two-for-one... both the lettuce and the Jenny Lind are shown in the photo below. The Jenny Lind vine has increased from 10" long to 15" long this week.

I'm not measuring our lettuce anymore since we've been harvesting (Derek and I are each eating 1 BIG salad every day from the garden!). It's been really great, and I'm very happy with our lettuce! I learned that you have to be disciplined about cutting leaves away... if you look at the head of lettuce that is furthest to the left, you can see a weird green thing sticking up out of it. I believe that it has basically seeded, and if I cut any off now the leaves would be bitter. I will probably cut it out to a) make room, and b) ensure that the other heads don't get any ideas!

Here are a couple of cauliflower heads... the one I measure each week is now 10.75", .75" taller than last week. However, the others are taller... closer to 16". They are so full and beautiful!

 Here is the kale... the leaves are HUGE! It has stayed 17" tall since last week, but the leaves are definitely broader than before. I harvested some just a couple of days ago and must say that I'm at a loss in terms of how to use it, primarily because we don't have a stove (see below) and I'm not sure whether grilling it is appropriate.

I believe that this is the all-blue potato. The vine is 19" long, which is 1" longer than last week. Additionally, the sweet potatoes are finally taking off! They are vines now too, so I won't compare their length to my previous height estimates. Either way, it's about 13" long! That has probably been the biggest surprise -- I did NOT expect our potatoes to be vines!

A couple of plants that I apparently didn't snap pictures of this week are the hot peppers (up from 9" to 12") and the sweet peppers (up from 7.5" to 10"). Also, the eggplant is 22", 6" taller than last week, and it has these beautiful purple flowers! I might have to just make a special post just of that plant... it's really too bad I missed it! Also, the zucchini leaves were approximately 23" from stem to leaf, 6" taller than last week.