Turns out it’s been a minute since I updated on the garden. I got the mowing done and Brooke did some weeding, so figured now was a good time. Overall, it’s been a “good” summer for the garden, but not its most spectacular year. We’ve had produce all year, but despite getting a pretty reasonable amount of rain, strangely, the product coming out of it has been kinda limited.
First of all, zucchini and cucumbers did pretty well! We’ve gotten enough zucchini: there’s only a few things we like to do with zucchini, anyway, so we got what we wanted out of it (gotta get some fried zucchini in, like, once a summer…). The cucumbers we ate on as they appeared, and Brooke tried pickling them, but they shriveled up more than we were expecting in the canning jars. Not really sure what happened there, but maybe they’ll be good??? She sliced and pickled some, as well, and those seem to have turned out better.
What you’re seeing above is mostly sweet potatoes, which we’ll dig up in a month or two. Given how much foliage is on there, surely they turned out alright!
The kale and the green beans are done, as well as the corn. We ended up with almost 20 cans of green beans, but again, it was kind of a “down year” for them. Usually, Brooke will can 20 jars of them and we’ll eat on the rest, and give some away, but we didn’t really have excess this year, for whatever reason. She got some dried beans, as well, and the soup beans are trailing up the corn stalks, so we’ll get that harvest over the next month. Those always do well, and this year’s no different.
The tomatoes are another thing. None of the paste tomatoes really took off, and while we got a few good slicers, a lot of the are more of the heirloom-type tomato that ended up going well. As usual, cherry tomatoes (two varieties this year) always are very productive, but those aren’t as good for making tomato sauce (though Brooke throws them in, anyway….you just don’t get much from a small tomato…).
The pepper plants are doing pretty well, though. The red ones above are kind of a sweet jalapeño, so we’ve tossed those onto nachos all summer. They aren’t very hot: mostly sweet with a slight “kick.” Also pictured above, the heirloom tomatoes and a zucchini (again, like, one a week? “Enough” of them…).
We’ve also got bell peppers like these doing pretty well. Nothing too fancy. Our bell peppers are usually kind of “gamey,” for lack of a better word, so they aren’t as good to eat sliced for lunch, for example, but they’ll still go in mixtures of other things well. Grilled kielbasa, peppers, and potatoes have been a summer favorite of ours this year.
Pretty good harvest of “rattlesnake” beans this year! Last year, we didn’t get all that many, but the pods this time around are pretty substantial. Still not enough to have for a meal, but fun to throw into something this winter.
The bees are doing their thing, too! Calvin’s been really helpful with the hives this summer. The “north hive” has two supers on it, and a week ago when Brooke and Calvin got in there, the top super didn’t have much, but the bottom was full, yet uncapped. Today, it was 93 F, so they were “bearding” quite a bit.
The “south hive” is also doing okay…we think? We got a package to establish the hive months ago, and we think the bees killed their queen. They slowly kept building, but never really left, so we tried to “re-queen” with one we ordered to see if it would work. Brooke got in a month ago and couldn’t find much evidence of the queen we had put in, but when she and Calvin got in last week, they found some younger bees in there (still didn’t see a queen, but they didn’t want to disturb it any more than they already were). There’s hope for that one, but we won’t get any honey out of it this year. The northern hive will do the heavy lifting this time around!
And last, but not least, Brooke’s “cut flower” bed. We put some bricks to help block it off from the rest of the yard and it’s really taken off this year! The zinnias have been going all summer long, and in the past few weeks, the mix of sunflower varieties has been fun to watch grow. They’re rather annoying to mow/trim around, frankly, since they’re tall enough that they bend into the rest of the yard, but that’s a minor complaint. It’s been nice having fresh flowers around the house all the time!
No promises on when the next post will be about the garden, but it’s clearly waning into its twilight. Probably one more as a wrap-up, of sorts, but now that school has started, the garden will become an afterthought. Until next year!