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!