July 1, 2010: Let's Play Catch Up!

It seems as though I've done a lot of double posts lately, but this is the time of year that there is so much going on in the garden. Here it is July, and I haven't yet finished blogging about June!

For starters, I picked my first zucchini on June 29th.! Here it is, with the morning picking of green beans.

And here it is, still sizzling after being fried in real butter. It's no wonder I gain weight in the summer, it seems as though most everything gets cooked in or drenched with butter!


The evening trip to the garden gave me more green beans. A lot more!

So many people ask why I plant my tomatoes in buckets. This is one reason why. There are four indeterminate tomato plants, in buckets, behind this row of green beans. On the other side of the tomato buckets are two rows of mature lettuce. The bed is only 8-feet long and 4-feet wide. If the tomatoes were planted directly in the ground, there would be no room for all these beans and lettuce plants, as the tomatoes would be crowding them out. I'm picking nearly 2 pounds of beans from this bed every other day. That makes using buckets for the tomatoes very worthwhile!

Last night (June 30), our garden dinner consisted of :

Grilled shrimp, basted with roasted garlic butter
Freshly dug baby potatoes, lightly steamed and browned in butter
Green beans seasoned with (what else?) butter
Cole slaw, made with the little Gonzalez cabbage and Walla Walla sweet onion

See what I mean about the butter?

Yesterday I pulled the last of the lettuce from the indeterminate tomato bed, to make room for more carrots. One head had begun to bolt, so I thought it best to pick the rest before it also went to seed. My refrigerator is full of bags of lettuce again, and there's a whole lot more in the other garden that needs to be cut. There were a few broccoli sprouts to cut. I pulled three of the broccoli plants, as they were huge, and taking up too much real estate for the few side shoots they were producing. I haven't quite decided what, if anything, will take their place. Maybe I'll just give that section of garden a rest.

I pulled one of the Red Norland plants, and harvested its potatoes. The Norlands have been a bit disappointing, but the Kennebecs are looking good.


I'm getting fewer raspberries now, but a handful of strawberries most days, so maybe the strawberries will begin where the raspberries end.

And here we are in July! You wouldn't know it by the weather. Our furnace came on this morning. We never have the heat on in July. We don't usually ever have it on in June, and it was on a lot this year! It did get pretty warm today. I worked outside all day, and I was sweating a lot. It was in the mid 80s, and I got down and dirty in the garden. I......

Cleaned out west half of bed #5, double dug it and amended it with composted manure and 10-10-10, planted it with Chantenay carrots (3-1/2 napkin mats plus 3-1/2' of t. tissue)

Cleaned out east half of bed #4, double dug it and amended it with composted manure and 10-10-10, planted it with 4 hills Gonzalez cabbage (2 seeds per hill).

Cut all the leaf miner ravaged beet tops and disposed of them. There were a lot! I should have taken before and after photos, the beet greens were the worst I've ever seen them. They look nice now....the few that are left.

Fertilized the red onions with 10-10-10.

Fenced the potatoes, which were flopping all over the onions. I topped a couple that were completely out of control.

Pulled about half the shallots. Can't reach the other half until a gigantic broccoli is harvested. This is the biggest broccoli plant I've ever seen. the shallots are between it and the biggest red cabbage I've ever seen. Not the head of cabbage, which is rather small, but the outer leaves. I finally cut several of them off so I could reach the shallots. I'd take a picture, but it's now cold outside...and raining! It never rains here in July.

Mowed the back yard with push mower, so I could get grass clippings for garden paths. Put said lawn clippings on a garden path.


Before I came in from the garden, I dug another hill of Norlands, harvested a big bunch of absolutely gorgeous carrots (quite a few are 6"-7" long), and pulled out an onion, whose top looked to be rotting.

The garden dinner was:

Ground sirloin patty with sweet onion barbecue sauce
Buttered carrots and broccoli
French fried new potatoes
Lettuce salad with balsamic vinegar dressing and cold leftover shrimp

I was too stuffed to finish my salad, so Otto and Annie had a garden dinner, too. They licked the dressing off, then spit the lettuce out all over the patio. They did snag two of the shrimp.

After dinner, I picked raspberries and strawberries.

WHEW! Now we're all caught up.