We Have Bees!

Yesterday after returning from morning errands I was walking up the drive when I heard a warm welcoming sound.... thousands of honey bees buzzing.  I went over to check the bee tree and sure enough, a swarm has come in.  Yay!  We have bees again.his video is turned correctly on You Tube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYtA9bcP584

The Zucchini that ate....

Well I don't know what it ate.  But it sure looks like it ate something.  A garden toad?  Too many cherry tomatoes?  What do you think is in there?

Winding Down

August has caught up to us.  Over the past week or two, the garden has succumbed to the normal garden diseases.  My Dunja zucchini finally got Mildew. And Late Blight arrived in my gorgeous Tomato Jungle so now it looks like everyone else's tomato patch.

The Black Beans are reaching the end of their lives and looking pretty ragged.

This Bean Bed is two weeks behind

The bean hulls are beginning to dry and look papery.  At this point they will pop open and release their beans so I'm paroling the beds and beginning to pick as they reach the right stage.

Oh Melon Patch you were so beautiful in your younger days!

But we have your melons now and all good things must come to an end. 

We are enjoying wonderful sweet cantaloupe for breakfast and snacks.  The advantage to small melons is that they are single serving size.  I'm not sure what we would have done if a half dozen 6# melons ripened all on one day.

Yup, there's the tomato bed in its old age.  What a mess.

But it is still producing gorgeous fruit.

This Prosperosa Eggplant and Blue Beauty tomato were my dinner yesterday.
Grilled Eggplant Parmigiana Hero

But not everyone is showing their age.  The carrots are in the prime of their lives, and the bush beans down the center are growing well.  I am relying on these for freezer beans.  I only have about 25% of what I need in the freezer.

And the second planting of cucumbers which replaced the lettuce in Mid-July is absolutely AMAZING.  They are planning on taking over the world.

I am getting beautiful, long, fully pollinated cukes.

But in their enthusiasm the cucumbers are being a bit thuggish,  The purple bush beans have climbed enough to be holding their own in there but I think I am going to move these lettuce babies before they get too stunted.

There is one lone cucumber beetle that I haven't had the heart to kill.  He's helping the Bumble Bees pollinate. 

And they've been working overtime on the cherry tomatoes and cucumbers.  We lost our hive of honey bees to the brutal winter and no new swarm has found the bee tree.  Fortunately we have a good population of Bumbles.

The sweet potatoes are loving the recent heat.  I hope we get as good a result from them as we did the regular potatoes.

I made the decision to pull the "everbearing" strawberries.  I had those plants for five or six years and they were pretty tired.  I amended the soil and it is ready for new June Bearing plants next spring.  I think I'll put the lettuce babies in here for fall.

Cantaloupes and Tomatoes

Every day I've been picking up the oldest cantaloupe hoping it would slip off the stem.  Tonight when I got home, it was sitting there off it's vine, and the next one in line slipped when I picked it up.  The variety is Burpee's Sweet N' Early.  The fruit are supposed to be 6 pounds.   Mmmmm... not so much.  Mine are a pound and a half.  They claim that each vine bears 6-8 fruit.  Again... an over estimation.  I planted 16 plants and I have 30 melons.  That's two per vine.  But that's where my complaint ends.  The vines are vigorous.  No signs of mildew.  The melons are very sweet and flavorful. I haven't tasted a vine ripened cantaloupe since my grandfather in Kentucky used to grow them and the store bought ones just can't compare. So was the size due to the lousy weather or something to do with my soil?  Whatever it was I'd say this was a good starting point.

Other firsts this past week.  First (finally) ripe tomato was the Blue Beauty.  It's a really good tomato!  I'm so glad that such a cool looking and fun to grow tomato is also tasty and useful.  I will grow it again.  And there are plenty more where that came from.

Also last week was my first ripe eggplant.  Production is low but I am getting one of each of the four varieties I planted so I'm satisfied.  The only way I really like them is fried in oil, so it is wise not to give me too many. Eggplants are such a long hall.  I planted these seeds April 1st, and I knew I wouldn't get one until August.

The Tomato Jungle and August Update

This has been an unusually cool and wet summer.  The past week has had highs between 61 and 67 degrees with overcast skies and rain more days than not.  Despite this (opportunity for rampant disease), my tomato plants have never looked better.  You can see above that they are a green, disease free, jungle of foliage.  I generally, but not always,  plant peppers and eggplants or carrots and beans at their feet.  This minimizes the soil splashed up onto the lower leaves in the rain thereby reducing the chance of disease.  This year I have a thick "under story" of peppers and basil.  By this time of year I expect that the lower leaves would at least be yellowing and dying of old age but they aren't.  Only the far end plant, the Sungold cherry is showing any sign at all of septorial speck or yellowing.

Beautiful, healthy foliage with clumps of fruit

And the production is good.  Each plant has a normal amount of large fruit set and waiting for warmer days and nights to ripen.  Last year I was very diligent about standard tomato pruning theories, removing suckers and all leaves below the first blossoms.  But the result of that was a reduction of producing vines.  That combined with the poor growing season seemed to completely demoralize the plants and they gave up the will to live.

For comparison:  my main tomato bed the first week of August 2013 teeters on the brink of extinction.

A more typical August (2012) picture with diseased and dying lower leaves removed.

August 2011 lower leaves removed and fruit ripening

Typical August picture (2011).  Onions pulled and drying and tomatoes doing well.

Elsewhere in the garden the potato plants have died back and been removed.  Now that all the plant has been cut back and the potatoes have no way of continuing to grow, the tubers should be left in the soil for a week or two for the skin to begin to harden before storing.  I plan on leaving mine in the soil until frost since the bed is well drained and I am not concerned about pests.  There are some small onions along one side which I plan on pickling for "cocktail" onions.

Here is a first for my garden.  My potato plants produced berries.  The potato is a first cousin of the tomato and will sometimes produce berries from the flowers.  These look just like cherry tomatoes but are not edible.

Each berry contains seeds just like a tomato and would produce potato plants that would not necessarily have the same characteristics of the parent plant.

The melon patch is still looking great.  I have 30 cantaloupes and I'm guessing they will ripen in the next week or two.  I have a dozen watermelons growing and getting bigger every day.

 The sweet potato plants (and zucchini beyond) are doing well.

Back in the tomato bed the bell peppers are soldiering on.  They were late to flower and what few flowers did come have dropped half of the set fruit due to the cool damp conditions.  Each plant has one or two fruit doing fine.  Above is my single Purple Beauty pepper.  The second plant is just now blooming.  You can see in the lower background of the photo above one of the few examples of a tomato leaf yellowing from old age.

In the next bed the second planting of cucumbers are flowering well and setting fruit.  The earlier row has produced well and are fighting through wilt but as soon as this row begins producing the old diseased row is coming out.

Behind the cukes the bush beans are pushing through the fusarium root rot which is taking half the seedlings sometimes before they break through the soil.  There is room down one side for a row of fall lettuce to be transplanted soon.

This was the earlier bed of peas.  The peas have been pulled out leaving the carrots and now I have planted two rows of bush beans down the center.  I have learned that the Purple Queen beans, although sold as "bush" beans, really want to climb at least 3 feet and so, when available, I put pieces of fencing along their rows for them.  This keeps the plants supported off the ground and allows the beans to grow long and straight instead of curling when they meet with the resistance of the ground.  It also prevents the bean pods from picking up rot in the soil. I have been pulling carrots as needed for more than a month.

The two beds of black beans are producing.

These black bean seed pods will be allowed to dry on the plant before being shelled and stored as dry beans.  The garden is feeding us well this year and has been much less work than normal.  This time last year I was in the heat of battle with cucumber beetles and other pests which are no significant trouble this year.  In 2012 we were on the brink of drought with a significant amount of watering in July, but the season was going well.  In 2011, August was a break from constant morning watering in July but an exhaustion of tomato sauce and other harvest preserving.  This past week my efforts have been concentrated on baking and freezing zucchini bread.  The weather has been cool enough to make baking a possibility and I still have one monster zucchini lurking about the kitchen demanding further action.  This is about the time of year when I begin to fantasize about a summer without garden chores and ensuing food preservation labors.

Norman Thelwell, an English artist renowned for his cartoons of ponies and children and other English life, illustrates the possibilities very well in this garden allotment illustration from the PUNCH Summer 1954 number.