Yeah, I know, it’s technically September now. Whatever.
The main garden has looked like this for a few weeks now. Brooke pulled out the green beans a few weeks ago and the corn has been done for awhile (we ended up with 24 pint jars, a few quart-size bags we gave to others, and a decent amount we could eat on at dinner – not bad for a first year). We didn’t end up with much corn, sadly. Some of the ears were actually pretty good, while others were under-developed or pre-chewed by insects.
In total, I’d say we had less than 15 ears out of our 3 rows of corn. Some of the plants never quite finished up. The ears we did get tasted sweet, yet the overall texture of the corn was a bit tougher than we’d prefer. Still, Brooke turned it into a corn casserole and it was absolutely edible. Not the greatest, but functional.
The pumpkins also finally did something. Brooke planted pie pumpkins, so they’re smaller than regular, Halloween-style carving pumpkins. So far, we’ve got 3, with at least a few more still green on the vine that we’re nursing along.
No word on how they taste, but we wanted to pick them because a). they looked done, and b). beetles have started showing up, so we were afraid they’d chew into the stem and ruin the pumpkins. We’re thinking pumpkins are a safe bet for future planting, and had we planted them sooner (and watered, like, at all), perhaps we’d have even more.
We’ve had to keep trimming the tomatoes to limit their growth. I think our trellis system has worked pretty well, but putting the trellises close together has meant that it is kept pretty shady in between them. I’ve trimmed them since this picture was taken, so more tomatoes have started finally turning red. Not a ton yet, sadly.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got a decent number, and we’ve had more than a few good slicing tomatoes. We just haven’t had a huge number of them develop all at once to make it worth Brooke fire up the oven to process and can them. We’ve got lots of little tiny ones still, too, which are great in salads and eating individually, but again, you don’t get much sauce from them. We’ve been trying to water them a bit more judiciously in hopes of keeping them alive long enough to keep developing.
One thing worth mentioning, for posterity, is that we were able to turn our A/C off for the last two weeks. You know, prime tomato-ripening weather? In August? Yeah, didn’t have much of it. Lots of green tomatoes and no hot weather to turn ’em red. Thankfully, it’s 90 F outside again, and it should remain that way at least through this week. I was just out there watering and saw quite a few more red tomatoes, so perhaps we’re finally getting to the point where we’ll get something out of it.
Lastly, the sweet potatoes are still truckin’ along. No actual sweet potatoes to show, but the plants have certainly gotten larger!
Hopefully the next post on this subject will be the last one until next year! Still some work to do…
The concrete blocks look nice. Did you get them all completed? Will be interesting to see what the sweet potatoes do. Vines look pretty! 🙂
We’re done with them around the main garden area, yeah, though we’ll make more next year when we make the new garden plot. I still need to make another set of bricks to finish up the area around the plants behind the house, though. Brooke thought that would look good, and I’ve got 5 or 6 bricks there already. Almost done!