I promise I’ll make it to the farmers market eventually to price this all out!
Tomatoes! 2 more Purple Cherokee, the rest are black plums
The first batch of tomatoes made 1.5 quarts of sauce, this batch made 2.5 quarts. Course, we’ve eaten several handfuls of the plum tomatoes too.
8 more cucumbers.
3 Sugar Baby Watermelons, two of which were quite small, but they were sure tasty!
1 carrot. But there are two going to seed, which is screwy as heck, but a google search tells me that it’s not completely out of normal for carrots to seed in their first year. I’m letting them go mostly for curiosities sake.
There are now several Pumpkins “ripe enough” to be picked and finish ripening in storage, but since the weather’s gorgeous I’m letting them ripen on the vine. I’m not counting them towards totals till I pick them.
I’ll likely be picking hot peppers this weekend, as the Jalapenos are starting to turn red and so are a couple of the Hot Wax peppers.
Just realized I never counted the lettuce or radishes I picked earlier in the season. I’ll have to guestimate off of memory.
Sunflowers are blooming. So far they’ve all been the same variety, I planted 4 varieties total, including one variety of fancy dark colored flowers, hope I get at least a few of those this year!
If you ever wanted to know what lettuce allowed to go to flower looks like:
Thats a Purple Romaine in case you’re curious.
Flushed a tiny tiny baby rabbit (like, barely old enough to be out of the nest tiny) out of the garden while picking watermelon on Wednesday. Looked like he was using the vines for cover more than for food, but I re-treated the garden with the deer and bunny repellent just to be on the safe side. He was a cutie though, glad I didn’t have the dogs with me!
I’ve got a weird wilt/leaf die off happening. In both Sugar Baby Watermelon tires, one pumpkin tire, and I noticed yesterday that now some of the Blazing Star flowers look like they’re succumbing. I’ll have to get pictures. Took me a bit to figure out what was going on. I initially took it for a fertilization or water problem. And maybe it is, but that doesn’t completely explain it. Treated all affected areas (and several other tires that looked like maybes) with a heavy coat of diluted neem oil in hopes of stopping the problem.
The plum tomatoes are definitely being hit with wilt too, but that’s not abnormal for tomatoes, especially considering the weather. I didn’t treat them with neem, no way to avoid the ripening fruits, and I don’t want to have to worry about washing the neem off.
No more sign of the nest of stinging insects I found last week. I was able to finish weeding that tire safely. Here’s hoping the permethrin can go stale on the shelf now and I won’t need it again! I discovered that apparently some people with arthritis find relief from pain by using bee stings. I can promise you that I won’t be trying it. I spent almost three full days on a max dose of benedryl because the hand closest to the sting (the sting was on my lower right arm) became extremely painful to use. There was essentially no external swelling from the sting after the first 8hrs, but something was clearly going on internally. I haven’t felt joint pain like that since the time the doctor prescribed me Levaquin for a respiratory infection! Gives me a better appreciation for how much worse my joints could be…..
Started pots of the Purple Sprouting Broccoli that I’m going to try over-wintering this year. I’ll plant them out end of August/beginning of September -ish depending on the weather. Then I have to figure out how to protect them from the extreme cold lows we get in the winter. I’m thinking a plastic teepee type setup ought to work.
Looks like your vegetables are doing well – I am envious. I have only gotten 3 tomatoes and the plants have not grown up like they should. The soil may be too heavy so maybe next year I’l remove some and add shredded paper to lighten it up some.
I’ll bet that bunny was cute as heck!
Glad you got rid of the yellow jackets. That is one wasp that I just despise since they are so aggressive. Hope your joints get better. One gal at work was stung last weekend and she ended up on heavy duty antibiotics because she got cellulitus from it. If it starts getting flushed and spreads, get thee to a doctor quick – cellulitis is nothing to mess around with!
So far it appears to be fading fine, but I’ll keep that in mind. I did have that sort of scare last year when I got stung though, a full week after the initial sting the site flared up, swelled up, and itched like mad for 24hrs! If it had lasted any longer I’d have been headed for the urgent care!
I’m pretty happy with the garden. Even the fancy cantaloupe that failed last year has 5 fruits growing on it! I’m crediting the farm produced compost I added to all the tires this spring. The broccoli appears to be a failure, but I’m putting that down to the insanely warm spring.
I was kicking myself for not having the camera (or even my phone) on me to snap a picture of the bunny. They’re horrid pests, and its a PIA to have to treat the garden to keep them from munching, but gosh the little ones are adorable!
There is one really big reason for having your own garden staring you in the face. The food is right outside your back door. If you had to trek to the farmer’s market, would your diet have as many fresh fruits and vegetables? The farmers market in my town is a really predictable way to get annoyed by clogged traffic, insufficient parking all while being fleeced by vendors. It is nice to have a quantifiable way of justifying all the expenditures on gardening stuff, but in the end knowing exactly from where the food comes and that it is fresh is difficult to assign a monetary value.
Sorry you were stung by yellow jackets. That part of gardening is never fun.
Speaking of rabbits, Chloe ran to the back yard this afternoon to check on the live trap. While she was sniffing it, a rabbit bolted for the other side of the street from a different part of the yard. Thankfully, Chloe didn’t see it. I really need to bait the trap with a dish of black raspberries that started fermenting in the fridge. Maybe then it will catch something. All the pests in my neighborhood seem to like consuming fermented fruits.
Oh absolutely, if I had to rely on buying it all at the market, or even the grocery store, we honestly wouldn’t eat half as well. So that alone is worth it!