Hooray! I actually grew something!!

Check it out, it’s my garlic harvest!  I pulled up the garlic today out of the Oakdale garden, and none too soon.  I think this is the first time I have actually brought home anything out of my garden in any real quantity.  There are a couple of runts in here, but more real big head of garlic, most of them are not quite as big as the ones I get from the farm, but big enough to make me happy!! I braided them (a good trick, as they are hard-neck garlic) and hung them under cover on the front porch. 

The fava bean harvest has been a little less successful:

This is basically my whole harvest of fava beans.  I picked and ate another handful, smaller than this one, today (the first one was 7/12).  Even though the plants were big and healthy looking for a while there, now their leaves are getting yellow and brown.  There were lots of flowers on them, but they didn’t make beans, they turned black and shriveled instead.  The beans that did develop are often misshapen and covered in black spots (although the beans inside the pods were still OK).  So sad!  There are still aphids on them, and those tiny little jumping cricket like things.  I actually wonder if I could have damaged the flowers by spraying for the aphids.  I sprayed them with a solution of Dr. Brommer’s soap, and I remember they had flowers on them when I did, but I didn’t really try to avoid the flowers. 

In other news, the onions are looking OK – it will be my best effort yet for onions, but still not quite up to my expectations.  The greens on my onions never did really get big enough – maybe too much time in the small pots, too late going into the ground.  They are forming bulbs now, and some are pretty healthy looking, but none look like they’re going to be really big, and some are still teeny babies.  The shallots look good – actually I’m wondering if I should pull them.  But their tops aren’t brown yet and I’m assuming you treat them the same as onions.  The swedish brown beans are doing well in the BUG garden.  Hopefully that will be a success.  The corn is growing, and it’s just barely ahead of the scarlet runner beans, which some of them have found a will to live and have started vining up the corn plants.  Hopefully something good will come of that. 

In the Oakdale garden, I now have a crazy mishmash of all kinds of beans.  I’ve been planting them over and over again, and the squirrels have been eating them relentlessly, but each time I plant them again some survive, and now it looks like the space will be reasonably full of beans.  In addition to a lot of soybeans (the original planting was from seeds I saved from plants I grew from seeds I think from High Mowing, the later plantings were of soybeans I got in the CSA last year), there are just a few survivors of Jacob’s Cattle beans, which were the ones I really wanted to grow, some black turtle beans, and a new addition, some speckly cranberry beans.  Those came from my friend Anne’s farm in Asheville – she gave them to Arik last year for Christmas.  Since then they’ve been sitting in a cloth bag in our pantry, and the other day he pulled them out to find them infested with bugs.  I mean really crawling with bugs.  They were definitely not salvagable for eating, almost every bean had maggots in it, but I managed to find some I was willing to plant.  Not many, it was gross.  But the ones I did plant are coming up pretty well.

Around the house, the herb garden is recovering.  I still haven’t sowed new plantings of cilantro and parseley, gotta get around to that.  And my basil is still in 3" pots, eek.  The tomatoes are showing definite signs of disease, but I’m hopefully they will cough up some fruits for us before they go.  Eggplants are not as big as they should be, but they’re making flowers.  I wonder if I should hand pollinate them to be sure getting fruits.  There are a lot of flowers on the tomatoes not making fruit, and it could be the disease they’ve got, or maybe the bee blight that’s going to kill us all if the oil peak doesn’t first….  I ate the very first cherry tomato off the blondkopfchen plant – really good!  Not unlike sun gold, as promised.  Peppers are also small – the plants haven’t got much bigger, but they’re making peppers, which is nice of them.  The paprika peppers are making bigger fruits than it even looks like they can support on their puny little bodies.  Cayenne peppers, not so much.  In the backyard, the broccoli is over.  I managed to produce a couple of measly, tiny little heads of broccoli that didn’t taste that good.  Even so, it has been my best year yet for broccoli.  It’s a little late, but maybe I’ll still try a fall crop.  Yellow beets back there are actually looking pretty good.  Apparently the thing to do about leaf miners is to wait them out.  I should sow another crop of those too.  Beets, not leaf miners. 

And on the fruit watch:  gooseberries are done, some raspberries are done, others are still working.  Peaches, apples, and grapes are ripening.  The backyard blackberries are just getting started – there is a going to be a huge crop of these this year.  There are a lot more berries than most years, but they’re a little smaller than usual.