A Walk Around the Garden
August 5th, 2008Despite the sometimes scorching heat and suffocating humidity, this is one of the best times of the year as a gardener. All of the hard work and anticipation that we’ve put into a small plot of land out back, is finally starting to be rewarded. The backyard is green and overgrown, and in-between much of that growth are fresh vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Let me walk you through our garden…
Around our raised brick pond, we have a small bed containing peppers (frying and jalapeno), and one monstrous eggplant. I have one cucumber vine that finally just started to take off after a battle with slugs.
The eggplant is finally ready for harvest, with so many more on the way that I’ll probably be sick of it after 2 months. This particular fruit is destined for Baigan Bhartha, a wonderful Indian dish.
Our peppers are doing quite well! The Cubanelle peppers are looking great and the Jalapenos are absolutely exploding! We will definitely not have to worry about the salmonella outbreak on peppers, as we have plenty ourselves!
We planted lemongrass this year for the first time, mainly to create a nice backdrop for the pond, but I’m looking forward to using it in some Asian recipes.
Our tomatoes are currently the biggest disappointment this year. They’re growing, but they seem to be about a month behind schedule for some reason. We support our tomatoes with clothesline, supported by multiple 6-foot poles. We manually feed the vines through the string. By fall, we’ll have a thick 6-7 foot wall of them.
While behind schedule, we still have a number of tomatoes forming, so hopefully they’ll come around eventually; horn worms not withstanding.
Next to and in front of the tomatoes, we planted three varieties of squash: Amish squash, yellow neck, and black beauty. Somehow, we missed the fact that the Amish variety is a winter squash, that can produce fruits up to 60-80 pounds.
We’ve got a couple of these giants starting. I’m unsure whether they’ll ever actually ripen, however, as unfortunately, bacterial wilt seems to have afflicted much of the vine.
The vines, by the way, stretch about 15 feet long, with side shoots spanning the full 4 feet of the bed, and up the fence in some places. I’m not terribly upset that it’s dying back a little bit because it was strangling the rest of the plants in that bed. If anyone has any suggestions on how to prevent/combat bacterial wilt, I would be interested to learn, however.
Coming into the hot weather, our Okra has started to take off. It’s beginning to shoot toward the sky, with our first pod shown below. While I never had Okra growing up, I really love the stuff now, even though it’s admittedly an acquired taste.
In our back raised bed, we have a number of thing going on. The grape and bean vines are clinging to the fence and tripods I’ve setup. We have our evergrowing sage bush in the front left, with some greens in the front right. Carrots, beets, and turnips are behind those things
Our first group of beets are starting to pop out of the ground. I’m going to let them get a little bit bigger before picking, but I do want to get a second crop in the ground soon for late harvest.
We have a number of other herbs growing in our garden, including basil, stevia, oregano, rosemary, thyme, catnip, mint, chamomile, and dill. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little tour of our garden. We definitely love this time of year!
August 5th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Your garden is so exciting to see! 😀 Hopefully next year I’ll have my garden back, since this year it got stomped flat for construction on the house. D:
August 6th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
[…] this week, I posted a photographic tour of my garden, but I purposely left out my raised brick pond. That’s not because it’s not doing well, […]
August 7th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Oh, I’m jealous! Your garden looks gorgeous and so productive. My squash has vine borers and I may only be able to salvage one of the plants in the backyard, and the (*&#%(^&!! raccoon destroyed my tomato plant last night. >:(
August 7th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Thanks Rami and OG. I don’t think I’ve run into vine borers or racoons, but squash bugs have been my nemesis. We also have a ground hog that likes to burrow under my fence, but amazingly, hasn’t quite figured out there’s a vegetable garden inside. (Let’s hope it stays that way!)
August 7th, 2008 at 9:59 am
I love these intimate shots of all of our plants – you got some great ones. That eggplant is no longer with us, now in the form of the delicious bhagan bharta 🙂 and i have one of the jalapenos in my lunch today!
April 3rd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Any hints on what to do about neighboring ducks raiding the figs in the morning?
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Hey Rene, I’m not sure right off. Perhaps leave a dog outside in the mornings. 😉 Good luck!