It's time for the semi-regular, fortnightly garden update, so here's the full-garden photo taken earlier today to compare to 7 weeks, 5 weeks, 3 weeks, and zero weeks. I was planning on skipping this update in favor of one two weeks from now, but everything in the garden has grown rapidly, and plants seem about to jump out of the garden plot.
Our Anaheim pepper plants are growing tall. This one and one other are about two feet high, two others are smaller but doing well, one other is still quite small but blooming. The small one doesn't get much sun and is now being crowded by zucchini, kale, and mint.
An Anaheim pepper, green and growing.
This green mass is a tangled affair of two tomato plants with one large zucchini plant behind them.
The current generation of tomatoes, red and ripening.
The next generation of tomatoes, green and still growing.
The third generation of tomotoes, just blooming.
The zucchinis will hopefully grow a little bigger than this. Some small ones turned yellow and wilted - I presume their flowers didn't get pollenated.
A zucchini flower.
Hopefully the ants inside the zucchini flowers are doing something useful like contributing to pollenation.
One of our darned cabbage butterflies - there seem to be half a million of them.
They flit around from leaf to leaf, leaving little tiny eggs everywhere. The eggs become green caterpillars, which can destroy the inner leaves of our red kale. Otherwise, the red kale is doing well, growing like crazy.
This is a yellow jacket, or other waspy-type bug - and I'm hoping it's eating lots of caterpillar eggs and some tiny caterpillars.
Chocolate mint! Yay!
The marigolds have gotten quite large in the front row of the garden. They may have some effect on the location of butterfly egg-laying practices: possibly the front two kales have had fewer caterpillars on them. Possibly. So I'm not sure if they've helped with keeping pests out of the garden. They do add a lot of color, though.Date and time of photos: August 4, 2009, at 12:30 pm.
4 comments:
We had the first of our big tomatoes yesterday and it was phenomenal. The cherry toms have been great too. No zucs yet, but lots of other squash!
So far, our toms haven't been very large, but they sure are good!
Hurrah for the chocolate mint!! And those toms are looking great. Mine never ripened last year, but at least I was able to make green tomato chutney from my great grandmother's recipe. We've been buying courgettes (it's British - or French - for zucchini!) from our local farm shop and they're yummy.
I suspect we'll have some green tomatoes at the end of the season - whenever that is. It takes 5 weeks of ground temps of 65 to 70 degrees (or more) to ripen tomatoes. I don't know how long our summer heat will last.
We'll have fried green tomatoes, and maybe try something like the chutney you made.
Now, where is my recipe for chocolate mint tea? :)
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