Wordless Wednesday: I'm in Love with Zinnias

Ready or Not, Here We Go!

My first bean harvest was ready the other day, and I let mine get very dry on the vine, since I save them for soup...my two bush varieties were already done, though the two pole bean varieties are still flowering and just starting to make pods.  The two beans I picked were Tiger's Eye and  October beans I think.  I say I think, because I just realized I bought 4 beans with almost the exact same pattern and color, but they have slightly different degrees of shading.  This makes it extremely difficult to tell which beans are which when they aren't completely mature.  And now, after shelling some beans this evening, that explains why I kept finding a few beans that didn't neatly fit into either of the two groups I thought I'd picked.  I also planted Christmas Lima and Speckled Cranberry Beans.  Note to self:  Next year, plant beans that look COMPLETELY different or plant them in opposite ends of the garden. Unfortunately, most of the Christmas Limas got taken out due to a bacterial blight they got earlier in the summer... Thankfully, it didn't spread to the rest of the beans, but almost all the limas had to be ripped out.

It is now the time of year that I can't go out to the garden without coming back with at least 2 baskets of tomatoes plus other things.  The problem is that now that I've moved, I have a much cooler house, and an awesome yard of my own, but a MUCH SMALLER kitchen.  This presents a problem when you are trying to stack piles of tomatoes all over the place until you can do something with them. This is where I have decided to stack them for now, but my island will only hold so many.  These are the leftover tomatoes after I made tomato relish and pico de gallo today.

I also dug up the first row of carrots I planted this year.  Most of them are purple dragon carrots.  My carrots usually do really well, but this year, I had trouble with germination, and then they got crowded out by the potatoes and chard. 

I did, however, manage to get a few beautiful specimens.  I also got one rather large hybrid carrot that was part of a group of orange/yellow/white carrots.

My potato foliage is also looking pretty bad, so I took that as an indication that I should start digging some of them up.  You can see my potatoes are doing very well.  I borrowed my son's wagon to bring them back up to the house.  I planted 2 1/2 pounds of each:  La Ratte, All Blue, and Yukon Gold.  I am going to have a LOT of potatoes I think.  This was only 2-4 feet of each row.  I am pretty sure I will meet my goal of having enough potatoes to last through the winter.  I am going to go buy a laundry basket to put each variety into for storage.

Thursday was my first real tomato harvest.  This was Sunday, only 3 days later. You can see Brandywines, rainbow, romas, purple cherokee, white beauty, and some other kind that I am not sure of.  I thought I had two white beauty plants...but one was obviously mislabeled.  The tomatoes got huge like White Beauty does, but on one plant they turned a deep cherry red.  Hmmmm...oh well.  I will not look a big tomato in the mouth, so to speak.

For size comparison, you can see next to my hand, these are huge tomatoes.

Canning season, here we come.  Are your tomatoes coming in now?

Nastiness in August

All my nasturtiums are having a little trouble with the heat.  The trouble being that I am too busy to water every day, so sometimes they get a little DRY.  These are my master gardener sale nasties, they are growing big and huge, but they got really shaggy and yucky looking on the bottom, so I gave it a massive haircut.

Spitfire and another nasty cousin are hanging out in the side of this barrel planter.  Hopefully the cannas will bloom soon, they will look fabulous with the red spitfires and the yellow nasties.

They are just starting to peek out over the edge of the barrel here.  I love the foliage colors in this container.  All the greens have some cool blue mixed in with them. 

My tippy pot planter is not doing so well.  The top pots get so dry, I have given up on getting the top two to grow anything.  The nasties in the bottom are doing pretty good, and spitfire is starting to catch up in the middle.  I did give it some fertilizer last week finally.  Next year I am going to mix in some of those water holding crystals into the dirt in this thing.

Here are some more spitfires back here.  They are not doing much.  The extreme shade caused by the fast growing kale and cucumber trellis have blocked the nasties from a lot of the sun.  They are green, but not getting very big. 

Can you tell I like blue and purple foliage? 

More cool tones in the front...this spitfire cousin is starting to take off, making its characteristic 'hump'. 

I think these are my best spitfire flowers, this one is still kind of leggy, but it got fertilizer too, so maybe it will do a little better from now on. 

This is what else I was doing today before I took my blog post pictures. Pulling bean pods off the vines.  Very relaxing, yes?

I am making butter in the next few days, so check back for my post on nasturtium butter, it sounds so pretty!

I'm growing Nasturtium "Spitfire" for the GROW project, thanks to ReneesGarden.com for the seeds.

What a Haul!

I harvested my first watermelon yesterday...unfortunately, it was not ripe when I cut into it.  How do I know when they are done?  It was close, it was turning red on the inside, but a lot was still white.  I guess I am going to have to let the vine dry up more before I pick them.

I also did my first tomato harvest.  We were gone near Chicago for 4 days, and I had no red tomatoes, with the exception of a few cherry tomatoes before we left.  When I came home, I found several large red tomatoes.  You can see some of them are quite big.  I think these are brandywine and cherokee purple.  I pick mine if they are more than halfway ripe, and let them finish inside, because if I leave them on the vine, it never fails, some bug eats them, or I get busy and then they rot. 

These are the la roma II hybrids that I got from my friend Erin.  I didn't know they were going to be so stripey and attractive.  They are extremely meaty. 

I love this view down into the basket.  It is so beautiful seeing all the shapes and colors of tomatoes.  Dh laughs at me for thinking produce is so lovely. 

More tomatoes, onions, a couple peppers and more monster zucchini.  I have a whole day of zucchini shredding ahead of me I think. 

While I was gone, my cucumber vines got so heavy that they pulled down the entire trellis.  I had to stand it back up and hammer these black stakes into the ground to hold it up.  I hope all these vines make lots of cucumbers! 




Is your garden producing like you hoped this summer?

Wordless Wednesday - Our Day at the Zoo

A note- Some of these pictures were taken by my son...some contain my son...see if you can tell which ones my son took. Also, there is a warning about one of the shots...we didn't realize certain parts of animal anatomy would be so 'obvious' when we brought the pictures up on the computer. Enjoy.