A Teeny Harvest

Last weekend I picked a bunch of zucchini, squash, and pumpkin blossoms and made cheese-stuffed, fried blossoms. Fantastic! I had these as an appetizer in Italy last year. There are tons of recipes on the internet if you want to try it. Great way to use the male blooms.

I'm growing some cherry tomatoes this year. Hoping they will mature and ripen faster than your average size tomato.

Green bean vines are producing about a handful a day. Maybe I'll have enough to cook a mess by the end of the week?

The first zucchini. I hope I can harvest a few more before the borers strike. Yesterday the local paper had a huge photo of borer damage on a squash vine and basically said it was a difficult problem to solve. I put some foil around the stems but now I'm worried that I won't be able to see what's happening under there.

Not much else going on except lots of time in the pool and keeping an eye on the garden.

Harvest Time

This is my fruit bowl in the kitchen. The tomatoes are here and they came all at once. Needless to say, I've been spending a lot of my time in the garden or putting away things from the garden.

Green beans, white half runners. I really don't tire of these. I snap them while I watch TV and they freeze easily. I've been trying to cook them in the pressure cooker (like my Mom does) but I keep letting them dry out and burn. Maybe I should start measuring the water more exactly.

Next year, plant only one jalapeno plant. I plan on making jelly from these. I've used them in quacamole and salsa and I want to make some poppers too.

Tomato ripening spot. I had an attack of ants, so I had to move everything to the other side.

Varieties: Green Zebra, Celebrity, Mortgage Lifter, Cherokee Purple. The Celebrity is a hybrid, the rest heirloom. I'm finding the Celebrity bears more fruit, but it's not as tasty. Cherokee Purple is least prolific.

If you have read Crazy Aunt Purl lately, she's been making salads from Marc Bittman's 101 Summer Salads article. Here is a picture of #2, peach and tomato salad. I've also made #1, watermelon and tomato, #21 avocado cucumber, and #54 roasted red peppers and mozzarella. These are fun and easy and things I mostly have around anyway. Wish I wasn't the only at my house who eats them! I think today I'll make a tuna salad for lunch (#59) and eat it with tomatoes.

We have back-to-school open houses today and tomorrow. I am ready. We're taking it easy this week before we have to submit to the routine on Monday. I'm having dd's 13th birthday party at an art place on Saturday, so not a whole lot for me to do on that. I'm very much between projects when it comes to knitting/crochet/sewing, but I did finish a crochet project which I'll try to post tomorrow.

Garden

Can't wait for the tomatoes to get ripe. I've seen a few of my neighbors selling theirs by the roadside, but mine are ripening so slowly. . .

This is my first try at bell peppers. They are supposed to get red, so I'm going to leave them on the plant for longer. It's tempting to go ahead and harvest them, before something gets them. I have a ton of jalapenos and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them. I'll probably make some jelly, but I have more than I can use for that.

Okra blossom. I made fried okra the other night. I really love it, but I'm the only one at my house who does. . .

Gazania. I grew a couple of these plants from seed and they are blooming beautifully right now. The blooms are very distinctive looking and they can take the heat very well.

I'm leaving for a week in Wyoming tomorrow, we're staying at Yellowstone for part of the time. I hate to leave my garden right when everything's coming in, but this should be my last trip of the summer. Dd is already ready for school to start. We've been gone a lot and she's missing her friends (although they text each other all day and night long!). . .

Garden

Here's my first green bean harvest. I'm going to cook some when I get another handful. These are White Half Runners.

The vines are really huge. I have a few pests on the green beans, but never enough to jeopardize the plant, which is nice. No spraying required.

Okra on the right, peppers on the left. I'm growing jalapeno, ancho, and red bell peppers. I didn't grow any peppers last year, so I hope these do well. Peppers are supposed to be easy.

I took this photo of a pearl sized tomato on Tuesday. Today, they are the size of golf balls. Growing well.

I wish I had some summer squash and zucchini, but after least year's stem borer heartache, I'm just. not. doing. that. again.

Needless to say, these lazy critters are no help in the garden. . .

In the Garden, On the Porch

I've switched over to summer clothes, the air conditioner is on upstairs, but I'm spending mornings in the garden, then on the porch.

Sage blooming.

Geraniums.

Veggie garden. Need to spread the mulch. Loving my soaker hose.

Stawberries are going crazy. I'm on ripeness patrol about five times a day. Don't want the birds to get to them first!

Bye Bye Squash

I have to admit, I've reached the point where I look at all my unread bloglines and think to myself, don't you people have something better to do?? All this posting?? Every day??? I guess that means I either need to Mark All Read or unsubscribe to a few.

This week has been a bad gardening week. My squash was looking great.


Pretty blossoms, and some fruit. I finally had a few honeybees visiting. They had been a little scarce until recently and I was getting worried about the reported die off.

Back to the squash. I came outside and saw the zucchini lying over.

Then I examined the stems.

The stems on the squash were looking a little strange, but the zucchini,

Ewww. You can't see the actual pest, the squash vine borer, in the photo.  That's a rolypoly.  The actual pest looks like a giant maggot. I read some advice that said to slit the stems with a knife and take them out, but I couldn't do it without destroying the plants, they were too far gone.

I ripped them out and planted more seeds. I'm going to try and keep a better watch next time. The prevention advice seems to go the spectrum from spray! (which I want to avoid) to wrap the stems with foil and use diotomaceous earth, etc.

I'm going out of town again next week to stay with my folks. I love to visit their town and play tourist with the kids. It's the same place where I went to high school and college but it's changed a lot since I lived there 20 years ago. I've got a cute crochet project going and I hope to finish it while away next week.


Have a good week.

Zucchini

My first vegetable of the season. I don't really like zucchini all that well, but I saw a recipe for chocolate chip muffins made with it. I might try to trick the kids.

I am growing flowers on my porch. Literally.

I haven't had a flower in my house in three years because the cats knock them over. For some reason they haven't found this bouquet yet. (I love the bag of Tidy Cat in the background.)

Chuy is still adjusting. True to her name, she chews on everything, including me, so we're trying to break that habit.

I've been taking her out to look for letterboxes and geocaches this week while dd was at art camp. Puppy gets so tired in the afternoon and conks out in the car.

*I really, really, don't like dogs.*

I'm not making anything lately. Reading, swimming, gardening, driving kids around mostly. I did finish a first sock, started the second yesterday, so maybe I'll have something to post next week. I already feel like the summer is getting away from me. . .

Summer Stuff

I couldn't resist showing this photo from the beach trip. The starfish seems to pick one arm and propel itself in that direction with all the tiny legs on the underside waving. Very interesting to watch. When a wave comes over, the legs go back out evenly, back to a star shape.

Zucchini blossom. I wish I had enough to stirfry them in butter, but I (wisely) only planted one zucchini plant. I don't LOVE zucchini and I think I'll have more fruit than I want with just one plant. I have two summer squash plants coming along, also with the edible blossom/baby fruit.

The green beans are needing support. I'm getting dh on that this weekend.

Weeding help. I think I've created a monster. I was using a claw to dig up some grass runners and little pup wants a part of the action.

She is learning to swim. We are trying to show her how to find the steps in the pool so she can get out if she accidentally falls in. She is terrified of course, but this is one of those safety things we have to teach her. She's definitely not a water dog.

I did a little letterboxing this week while my youngest is at sports camp. The camp is in an area with a lot of boxes, which I don't get to very often although it's close by.

There are two extra girls at my house who spent the night after last night's swim meet party. They were up really late and I won't be here to see them off to swim practice this morning because I'm taking ds to camp. It's so strange having kids old enough to get themselves where they need to be. I really like it though. . .

My friend's dd went with us on vacation and stayed here all week, so I'm delivering her back this weekend. My brother is breezing into town briefly at some point, so he might come by. Dh is leaving for Europe on Sunday, so I'll be on my own next week.

I'm not making anything much, a pair of socks on the needles barely started. I've been working on the garden and sitting by the pool reading mostly (the new David Sedaris book, can't put it down). Have a great weekend. . .

Garden

Red Geraniums. I always plant these on the porch of the pool house.

Green Beans. White Half Runners, the ones my grandmother swore by. They have major strings, so you have to work a little harder than the typical grocery store bean, but they are tender and delicious.

Strawberries. Only about half the plants survived the winter, so I bought some more at the farmer's market. Ds is excited about these, his favorite fruit.

Promise not to laugh too much:

Self portrait made in drawing class. Ds said *it looks like a grandma, not like you*. The eyes are too big, and one is higher than the other, but that is actually true in real life. It reminds me of the depression-era photo of the dust bowler mother and child sitting on the running board of the car. . .

Garden

We are finally getting some much needed rain, which means I'm spending less time watering, whew. . . We have restrictions on watering the grass, but I never bother with that. It costs a lot more to replace a tree or shrub than a little grass.



This flower bed is a bit crowded. When I planted the seedlings out, it looked very sparse, but of course the plants ended up being much bigger than I anticipated. I blame this on the fact that dd selected the seeds from *mixed annuals* pack, so I had no idea what some of them were (still don't on a couple of them). At least I knew the hollyhocks were tall and needed to go in the back row.

My first two cherry tomatoes. The big tomatoes should be ripe in another week or so. Mine were just so late getting growing this year.

I'm tempted to jump the gun and fry some green ones, but am forcing myself to wait. I have white bread and Duke's mayo waiting for the first ripe ones.

This sunflower was planted by a squirrel or a chipmunk with some seed from the bird feeder. The yard as a whole looks pretty crappy with all the construction stuff lying around, but I made them throw away the trash that they were leaving around the base of my cherry tree.

We had to replace the entire swimming pool filter system yesterday. We changed over to the salt water type, which should save us a lot of money in the long run and uses a lot less chemicals. It still looks really nasty from all the problems we've been having, but it should clear up soon.

In the winter I always fantasize about sitting in my beautiful garden by a sparkling pool, drinking a nice beverage, but the reality is very different. The reality is scooping dead bugs and lizards out of a algae infested muck, while slapping mosquitoes from my ankles and guzzling a hot, flat beer. Ewww. Sounds like I'm getting tired of summer. . .

Flowers

I've got nothing of substance to report, so I'll dazzle you with flowers. This is the first moonvine blossom. There's something so romantic about flowers that bloom only at night. I used to have some angel trumpets when I lived in TX and the bats would come to them in the evenings. I think they will grow here too, although they die all the way back to the ground in the winter.

These are WAVE petunias and alyssum that I grew from seed. The petunia seed packet was rather stingy but I got enough plants for the eight pots on my porch.

My tomatoes are way behind this year, I'm starting to see a few small flowers, but no fruit has developed yet. We're in a serious drought, but I'm watering faithfully. I'm guessing I'll have tomatoes in August and September. It's hard to be patient.

Outside

This is how I spent my weekend, doily making in the shade. I'll have an FO soon, I hope, but the rows get longer and longer.

The thing I love about crochet (as compared to knitting) is that you only have one live stitch going. This allows you to check the size any time, any where. Also you can check your lace pattern and find errors right away since the stitches aren't bunched up on a needle. I put a safety pin in the live stitch and lay the piece out periodically to look at it -- no life lines needed.

And here's a brief gardening update:

This rosebush was two 6 foot canes last year, leggy as can be. I pruned it down to nothing and fertilized it about a year ago. It looks like a real rose bush now. I can't believe it, I never have luck with roses.

My lame vine trellis. I was seriously considering crocheting something and sticking it up there. . . Maybe next year.

The gardenias are blooming by the front porch and they smell heavenly. We have a little bunny living there, but dh saw a cat chasing him Saturday and the hawks were all around on Sunday. Hope he makes it a awhile.

I didn't make it into the sewing room, what with all the doily-making and outside stuff, but my cats were in there raising cain all night. One of them got stuck in the bag (his head through the handle) with silk flowers and wooden beads, etc. and ran through the house trying to get it off. I've been finding stuff all morning. . .