Weak week

Today was a rough day for my pitchfork... Let's have a moment of peace shall we?


Ok, now another bit of bad news. Unless Mary shows up at work in the morning with some amazing goodies, I'm afraid this is going to be a bit of a "weak week" - there's not much harvestable in the garden right now. The peppers and tomatoes are just starting to form. The eggplants are only just starting to bloom. The okra aren't even close to blooming. Beans are also nowhere near blooming. But alas, there is SOME good news...check this out:


I honestly wasn't sure these guys were even ready to pull. I decided it was their last chance - they were smothering the cucumber plants, many of which were suffocated under the incredibly healthy carrot foliage. Now that most of the carrots are dug up, I'll go back and plant more cucumber seeds to get a second round going. What you see here are a mix of carrot varieties, including Nantes, Nantindo and White Satin. I'll let you guess which variety is White Satin. ;-)


I like this guy here - he's got character. (Carrot-ter?) I'm not sure which of the shares got him...


Now I DO have to warn you - I've found that the home grown carrots aren't as sweet as those little "baby carrots" are you get in bags at the grocery store. So don't expect any of these to be super sugary. There are varieties that are supposed to pack more sugar - so maybe I'll try something like that next year?

Also this week - more salad mix!


I honestly don't know if anyone else gets as big a kick out of the different varieties of lettuce you can grow at home - you just don't see this much versatility in the grocery store!


While the last picture and the next picture might show pieces of lettuce with similar coloring, the two are very different in growth habits and texture.


Unfortunately, there's not as much lettuce ready this week. The weather's been great for the cool-loving greens this week, but they're still recovering from the big hit they took last week. With the forecast hinting we might hit 90 this weekend, I'm not sure how much longer these plants will be producing.


Here's one you guys might be getting a bit bored with - more onions! Sorry - but they're reliable throughout the growing season, plus I really need to start yanking some of them out to make room for other crops, and also because they're getting smothered by other plants they've been interplanted with (such as the squash). On a side note - I've still only seen one pair of squash bugs "co-mingling" in my squash/zucchini plants this year - and there's no signs of eggs on the undersides of the leaves! Could it actually be that the onions and nasturtiums growing in the bed with the squash is confusing them!? Let's hope so! (The same can't be said for the cucumber beetles - they're still all over the place!)


Here's something I'll be offering next week:


I uprooted my entire harvest of garlic! Here's the Chinese Pink garlic:


Annnnd the Spanish Roja (not much "roja" to them apparently).


Check back tomorrow to see what else I "dug up" with the garlic - they were quite a (noisy) surprise!

Anyhow - I've got the garlic drying on racks now, and since I know some of the heads got pierced by the garden tools as I was digging them up, I'll wait till they dry, and I can knock off the dirt, to see which ones didn't get damaged before I pass them along to you.