Here Comes the Harvest

Every day I have more and more tomatoes coming ripe. This year I’m growing only 2 kinds of tomatoes: Viva Italia and Lemon Boy. I have picked 4 lbs of Viva Italia so far and only 1 Lemon Boy.

So what am I doing with all these tomatoes? I’m planning on canning them later on, but right now we’re eating them as fast as I can pick them. We love them grilled and tossed with pasta or on top of a pizza.


What are you doing with all your ripe tomatoes?

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Inspiration

While reading a book a while back I came across this photo.

I love the sapling fence! I can’t imagine how much work it is to cut all those saplings to the proper length and attach them. This would be a good fencing option for my garden. I have an ample supply of saplings around so it would be inexpensive. But would it be worth the time and energy to cut them all? I’m not sure.

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Crazy Little Birds

We seem to have a few new male hummingbirds around chasing all the young ones away from our feeders. I think they may be ones that are migrating through, since they just appeared today. There are 2 of them as far as I can tell. One sits on top of the feed in the back and chasing away any other birds that come and the other one sits in the maple tree on the side of the house and chases away any birds that try to go to the side feeder. They’re so crazy!


They will probably be leaving soon, the males usually migrate mid-august and the females follow in a couple weeks. The young may stick around through October.

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Up on the Soap Box

I’m a big advocate for organic gardening, not using chemicals & pesticides at all. I wish more people were of that thought since streams in residential areas are more polluted than ones in agricultural areas. While reading I came across this quote and thought I would share.

After years of gardening – and as I grew older and a little wiser – I began to really listen to the message of the environmentalists. The razing of woodlots and the loss of farmland for factories and monster housing developments in my growing city helped me understand how cavalierly we were treating our world, and how endangered the species in it were becoming. It seemed strange to send money to preserve the disappearing rain wildlife in the rain forests of the Amazon, or to sign petitions to save our own declining prairies, when we weren’t considering the importance of nature in our own back (and front) yards.

-Liz Primeau, (Front Yard Gardens: Growing more than Grass)

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Great Gardening Books: Creative Vegetable Gardening

Creative Vegetable Gardeningis a useful book if you are interested in growing vegetables in non-traditional way. There are no squares of tilled earth lined with rows of veggies in this book. The garden photos and plans are creative and beautiful, often including a mix of perennials, bushes and edible plants all in the same garden. These gardens have structure in the winter and beauty in the summer. There were tons a great photos in this book and many different garden plans that could be implemented in many differently sized & shaped gardens. Joy includes a lot details in this book. It explains in depth how to make your own espalier fence or fruit tree, how to lay a garden path, and how to build small garden structures out of natural material. There is also a section in the back devoted to all kinds of garden plants and their specific growing conditions & needs. This book would be a great reference book for anyone interested in growing a beautiful edible garden.

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