Tomatoes!

Tomatoes! I finally have ripe tomatoes! My early efforts in the garden have also turned up garlic and some very poorly weeded, but not too small onions. They tasted great, we had some last night! Also, the raspberries are starting to ripen - yum! Tom served me some last night with homemade whipped cream I had made and frozen earlier this year. A little bit of garden happiness!



Oh, I forgot to mention what kind of tomatoes they are! The big ones are "Sioux" from Pemberton Farms. The pear-shaped ones are "Beam's Yellow Pear", the tiny gold ones are "Gold Rush Currant", the red cherries are either "Tommy Toe" or "Peacevine", I can't find the tag, and the purple cherries are actually volunteers from last year that turned up in my asparagus bed, but I can't remember the name right now. Apparently my compost bin does NOT get hot enough to kill seeds! They sure are good, though.

Bummer of a year

Well, this has been a real bummer of a year in gardening. I haven't been posting, because there hasn't been much to post! Well, I do have some good news: I'm pregnant! The bad news is I've been too busy barfing and sleeping to get much done in either my garden or my community garden.

Between the slugs and the rain, about all that has survived at the community garden is some of the Federle paste tomatoes, but they haven't gotten green yet. There might be ripe corn by now, I'll have to check and see this weekend.

At home the weeds pretty much overtook everything, while I hid from the rain and then later the heat inside. We're starting to get some "Gold Rush" currant tomatoes, Tom says they taste good. I also got about one serving of green beans.

The flowers, however, are going to town! My butterfly bush is almost as big as the garage, we've got zinnia and a million zillion self-sown black-eyed susans. The Red Milkweed was gorgeous, and the phlox seemed to be brighter than ever before. Even the Bee Balm obliged by blooming this year.

The one food item I've had success with is fruit! I just picked about a pint of black currants for drying and making into scones. The spring black raspberries were delicious, and the fall raspberries look to be a gianormous bumper crop. The blueberries were tasty, and the quantity wasn't bad for the first year, and I had so many strawberries I was giving them away. Even the grapes are starting to ripen, and we finally got a plastic sheet over them, so we should be able to rescue some from the birds. I had gooseberries at one point, but I think the birds got to them, because they weren't there when I got the black currants. And soon, I'll have about 6 golden delicious apples from my little trellised apple-frankentree.

And that's about it. All my lettuces went to seed, the kale and broccoli got taken down by millions of slugs, the carrots never germinated, I missed the "good" window on the radishes, and the tomatoes had a very, very slow start. But oh! I forgot about the potatoes. Those are starting to die back, and I suspect there are tons of red, white, and blue potatoes waiting for me under the soil! I'm letting them cure a few weeks in the ground, but then I'll let you know!

Next year I'm scaling back. Kinda makes sense if I'm having a baby, right? No community garden, and I'm going to switch to just a few raised beds instead of half the yard as a garden.

I'm glad we have the CSA farm share! They at least managed to produce everything but tomatoes, even if their lettuce was a bit flea-bitten. It would REALLY be a rotten year if we only had to eat what we could grow!