Second Flush
Around the beginning or middle of July, I often seed a second flush of peas, beans, and zucchini. These plants often exhaust themselves and don’t fruit for a long period of time. I really like them, so I find planting a second batch gives me a long season. It also allows me to easily pull out the exhausted plants to replace them with fall crops when they begin to languish.
The great thing about a second planting is that the seeds germinate quickly and the plants grow like gangbusters with the heat and long days. I’m always amazed at how quickly they grow and fruit. Zucchini that I seed in May often takes 6-8 weeks to start fruiting. This zucchini started fruiting only four weeks after being seeded.
Succession planting is something that I’m getting better and better at the longer I garden. It really is amazing how much you can grow in a small space when you do it. I find that it also makes it much easier for me to pull up exhausted veggies that I used to let hang on in the garden even with meager harvest (broccoli offshoots ring a bell?). These aren’t the only vegetables I plant in succession, I have lettuce, broccoli, fennel, carrots, beets, and a few others that were seeded throughout the summer as space became available in the garden.
Are you in the habit of planting in succession to lengthen the harvest and maximize your garden space?
Share this:
Here They Come
The heirloom tomatoes are coming in hot & heavy. The ‘Ten Fingers of Naples’ have been the MVP of the season. I’m super impressed with the vines, the fruit, and the harvest.
The heirloom beefsteaks are coming in strong, I have multiple varieties ripening daily. I’m happily gifting them to friends and gobbling them up at every meal. My favorite way to eat them is sliced with a little sprinkle of sea salt.
This year I also grew a wide variety of small cherry type tomatoes. The most beautiful ones are the Bumblebee varieties, there are three of them: ‘Sunrise’, ‘Purple’, and ‘Pink’. They’re lovely little beauties with great flavor and good production.
Now the race begins to preserve the bounty. I don’t do much canning at all, but I always make a batch or two of tomato soup for the pantry and some jars of whole tomatoes. My ‘Principe Borghese’ tomatoes get dried in the oven like sun dried tomatoes. I love using them throughout the winter, their intense tomatoey flavor is perfection! Overall, the tomato season has been wonderful this year. I’m hoping to get out to get a few more photos of the different varieties I’m growing to give you a full report, right now getting all these lovelies into jars take priority.
What’s your favorite kind of tomato to grow?
Share this:
What a Beauty
I don’t eat much chard, but I grow it every year. Mostly because I love the colors of the stems and the structure of the leaves. I like that it looks good all summer long and it provides some much needed longevity in the potager. This year I’m really loving ‘Peppermint Stick’ Chard from Renee’s Garden.
Isn’t it lovely? I smile every time I see it. I’ll definitely continue growing this beauty.
What’s your favorite beautiful vegetable?
Share this:
The Search is Over
For the past year, I’ve been searching for bricks for a walkway in the potager. I wanted old bricks, not the shiny new pavers from the home improvement store. I wanted bricks with a history, ones that had been a chimney, a house, or something else. A few weeks ago, I found an ad on Craigslist for bricks, old ones, lots of them. Just what I was looking for!
We picked up one load in our little car 2 weeks ago, and quickly realized we needed bigger guns. Enter Brian’s work truck.
On Saturday, we made our way back down to Biddeford to get the remaining bricks from the bottom of the Cleaves Castle in Biddeford. This basement was a mansion at one time, then eventually became a city building with a jail in the bottom. These bricks may have been the walls between the cells.
Regardless of what these bricks have seen in their lifetime, they will now be perfectly at home in my garden. This fall I hope to start the preparation for the walkways. That will be a lot of work, but well worth the effort.
What’s your favorite pathway material in the garden?
Share this:
Sweet Delight
Last night we harvested the first sweet corn from the garden. And I mean the first sweet corn I’ve every grown (by myself anyways, we always grew it when I was a kid).
It’s really surprising that it’s ready this early, it wasn’t supposed to be ripe until the end of August, next week at the earliest.
I checked last week and it was still not ready, then we checked last night a few ears were.
What a great treat indeed. ‘Fisher’s Earliest’ was the variety, I got the seed from High Mowing Seeds. This is an old fashioned variety, not a super sweet hybrid. It’s lightly sweet with a good corn flavor. in fact, it reminds me a lot of the corn I grew as a kid. Personally, I’m not a fan of the sugar enhanced newer varieties, give me a variety like this please!
We’re certainly looking forward to having sweet corn for dinner every night this week. I didn’t plant a lot, only about 30 plants. That should do us for eating and I should get a few pints to freeze as well.
Do you grow sweet corn?
