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?
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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?
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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?
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Happy Camper
Mr Chiots is a happy camper, yesterday we got a sailboat from a friend. He’s been wanting one for a while, he did a lot of sailing on this type of catamaran in high school. It’s a Hobiecat 16.
We went to our friend Joan’s house and got the boat in the water. Then we loaded up all the sails and the mast on it and our neighbor came to pull the sailboat to the boat launch.
We loaded it onto the trailer, but of course it wasn’t quite that simple. Mr Chiots and I went down to Joan’s house a few weeks ago to check out the trailer and pump up the tires. When we arrived yesterday one of the tires was flat. Thankfully, Joan had a compressor and we pumped it back up. We crossed our fingers when we loaded the boat on it and headed home. Taking back roads and watching the trailer.
Luckily we made it home without issue. Mr Chiots spent the afternoon putting it all together, checking to see which parts are missing and what needs fixing. There probably isn’t enough summer yet to get it out on the water this fall, but by next summer it should be ready.
Have you ever been sailing?
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Friday Favorite: Vegetable Soup
Since the garden is bursting with fresh vegetables, I’ve been making pots of vegetable soup. The soup gets ladled into wide mouth pint mason jars and tucked away in the freezer, ready for quick meals come cold weather. We eat some in the summer too, last night I made a pot of minestrone and we will be enjoying that this weekend. It was filled with: potatoes, cabbage, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, garlic, celery, green beans, and herbs from the garden.
I make soup with whatever vegetables are ready to harvest, curried broccoli, tomato, vegetable, etc. It’s nice to know that there are instant meals ready for fall days when I’d rather spend every drop of sunlight working in the garden. I also love using up all those bits of vegetable peels to make vegetable stock for all these soups. I feel like I’m making the most of the bounty of summer.
What’s your favorite kind of soup?
