Brownersen Garden: Day 65

Hello, everyone!

Here we are, over two months in to the grand gardening adventure of 2012. We are feeling pretty overgrown! We have been enjoying mostly tomatoes and eggplant this week, and today we pulled our first (of many) melons.

Um, yeah... overgrown might be an understatement!

Jenny Lind vines still taking over... Jenny Lind and sweet potato vines have both ventured out of the garden.

See? Out of the garden!

The cauliflower is getting bigger!

Here is a growing melon...

The corn is still looking good, and the ears are definitely growing! The silk on some of the ears is purple, which Derek's co-worker says probably means that the kernels will be purple. I hope it's edible!

Tomato and tomatillo plants are definitely growing wider... I was able to walk between them not long ago!

Beautiful striped tomatoes!

Peppers (you may need to click on it or squint to see them... still not quite sure which variety these are).

Here is our first zucchini and Purple Beauty pepper from earlier this week. We haven't used the zucchini yet, but the pepper was great!

Here is part of today's harvest: 2 zucchinis (which may be short-lived... Derek thinks he sees signs squash borers!), 3 mini eggplants, 2 bell peppers, and our first melon!

This zucchini sure got big quickly!

Almost 12" long (the tip broke off)!

Today's full harvest with the kale we cut (minus the banana... I got that at the store!). Lots of vegetables for dinner this week! :)

Below is what Derek did with our first round of mini eggplants. He also threw some of our green onions in there. It's basically eggplant curry!

Brownersen Garden: Day 58

Most of our plants continue to do quite well, even through the 100-degree temperatures we've been experiencing over the last week. It's looking like quite a jungle, and I can see that natural selection is starting to kick in as plants are starting to compete for scarce resources (primarily space). Our zucchini plant is leaning directly over one of our pepper plants, and although the pepper plant is shorter than most of the others, it does have some peppers on it. We haven't messed with it much yet! Our melon vine is still growing, and every day I find myself pulling it off of other plants, like the eggplant, pepper plants, the kale... it is very competitive!

I've been harvesting kale, eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers this week. The zucchinis have not been growing! I believe I first posted photos of them a couple of weeks ago, and while baby zucchinis continue to pop up, they aren't transitioning into adolescent or adult zucchinis! Derek did some research and figured out that it probably has to do with a lack of pollination as a result of the heat! Apparently, we can hand-pollinate, but we can also just wait it out until the weather cools off. I'm thinking for now, we'll just wait it out... I have seen more bugs around since it's been back in the 80s!

Here are some photos... I decided to stop measuring and taking photos of each plant, and I will probably focus on documenting what we're picking and how it's developing!

These lovely white flowers are on our all-blue potato plant. Once these die, we should (theoretically) have new potatoes, and when the actual vine dies, then we should have larger potatoes.

This photo is my attempt to show how our Jenny Lind melon has taken over. At least 80% of the vines shown in this photo are Jenny Lind!

Can you spot the bell pepper in this photo?

After impatiently waiting and nearly declaring that we would never have homegrown cauliflower, I finally discovered little baby heads of cauliflower! Can you see it?

Here is the corn... it grows each day, and it is taller than I (as you can see)! The silk has come out in the space where the cob will soon be.

More tomatoes... still from the same Glacier plant. They are about 1-2" in diameter.

See the green lanterns in these photos? That is where our tomatillos will soon be... they will fill each lantern-shaped husk!

Here are the eggplants and tomatoes I picked yesterday... any thoughts on how I should use these eggplants?? They are pretty small...

(So you can see how small these eggplants are...)

I also picked some rhubarb, and I made rhubarb crisp! See below...

Since we didn't have any apple, I substituted blueberries. It was fine, although I think the apples are better for cutting the slightly bitter aftertaste. I also had to substitute brown sugar since we ran out of white sugar. I prefer brown anyway!

Finally, I grilled kale. I tossed the leaves in oil (a little goes a long way), and seasoned them with salt, pepper, and this stuff (which we love!).

Put it on the grill and turned it every couple of minutes or so. It got much smaller than this!

Brownersen Garden: Day 51

Well, the harvesting stage of our garden has definitely started! This week saw, unfortunately, the end of our lettuce (I don't think 90+ temps and lettuce really go together), but we are continuing to harvest kale. Also, we picked our first tomato! This week or next, we should also have eggplant, zucchini, and peppers ready to go. Of course, there are lots of flowers all around the garden, and I have started to notice that bees are frequenting the garden more often now. It was slightly awkward navigating the garden this morning while bees buzzed around me, but I assume that they are pollinating which is a good thing (right?!?)!

Also, the projected dates for harvesting that I put in my very first blog entry are apparently wrong for all but the corn. Apparently the number of days to maturity starts from a seed, and of course we had little baby plants. So I'm guessing that I should really move all of those dates up by about 2-3 weeks. This would mean that our cauliflower is behind (there is no sign of little baby cauliflowers!) as well as the eggplant (although we have babies), and that the melons should be ready any day now. And it also means that it's not so strange that our early tomato (60 days to maturity) turned out its first tomatoes this week.

Anywho, pictures!

Here is our first tomato, brought to use by the Glacier tomato plant (it has the shortest number of days to maturity -- 60).

Below is a bumble bee that was hanging out on our eggplant when I got to the garden. It is in the center of the photo but you'd probably have to enlarge it to see!

Here is our corn... it is 48" tall this week, 11" taller than last week. It has now overtaken the tomatillos and tomatoes!

Here is a zucchini flower... we have about half a dozen zucchinis that are between 3" and 4" long. Won't be long now! The plant is about 34" from stem to leaf, 4" longer than last week!

Here are the tomatillos (they are so big and running together that it is very difficult to get a good photo), they are 47" tall, 9.5" taller than last week! No tomatillos yet!

Here is one of our tomatoes... it is 47.5" tall, 9.5" taller than last week. Each tomato plant except this one has little tomatoes on it.

Here is our cauliflower at 19" tall, 2" taller than last week. This one seems to be a bit late, and no cauliflowers in sight!

Here is our sweet pepper. If you click on the photo and look in the middle, you can see that there is a baby pepper there! It is 19" tall and 5" taller than last week.

Here is a hot pepper plant... not sure which one. I'll let the Texan figure that out! Do you see the peppers on it?? It is 19" tall, 2.5" taller than last week.

Here is the kale, which I'm not really measuring anymore as we are harvesting it.

This photo shows our melon vine and all blue potato. It was meant to show how the melon vine is just taking over!! Once again, I did not even attempt to measure it! The blue potato is about 36" long and the sweet potato vine is about 32" long.

Lastly, here is the eggplant. It is 23" tall after being 22" tall last week. Do you see the small eggplants?

Here they are! Aren't they pretty?? (They are not your typical dark purple eggplant!)