Tinkering in Our Backyard Garden
We've been away from home a lot over the last three weeks, between an adventure way down South, a trip to Kentucky for a friend's wedding, and work trips for each of us.
With so little use, our kitchen must be feeling abandoned. Goodness knows we're ready to get back to it.
While we've been away, and despite our neglect, our little backyard garden has been chugging along, getting a bit bigger every day.
The squash, as you can see above, are blossoming (unfortunately we haven't been able to use the blossoms yet). Lots of big blossoms, but no actual squash just yet. We've been watching to see if they're male or female blossoms, and if we may need to pollinate the squash by hand, but so far all our blossoms are males. We will get some female blossoms, right?
Lots and lots of lettuces.
As can be expected in spring, our greens have taken off. We planted arugula and four kinds of lettuces (buttercrunch, looseleaf and heatwave mix that we ordered from Burpee) and staggered the planting, so we've had big, beautiful salads several times a week. The arugula is getting out of control, with thick stems. Soon it will need to be pulled up and replanted. The lettuces, though, remain beautiful and the greens have excellent flavor.
Hungarian wax peppers
Our tomatoes are now in the ground -- a friend started the plants at his house, and we transplanted them a few weeks ago. They're not yet to the size that they need stakes for support, but they're getting there fast.
Our CSA gave us some Hungarian wax pepper plants in the weekly share a few weeks ago -- we're eager to see how they do.
Sad radishes
There are, sadly, some casualties. Our radishes have never taken off. Their greens remain beautiful, and the root ends have increased in size, but only as large as a blueberry.
Tiiiiiiiny Swiss chard
We had high hopes for our Swiss chard. Though it looks beautiful, it remains tiny. We're confounded.
Our broccoli and kale have been ravaged by some sort of caterpillar. The plants remain alive and are attempting to come back, but we expect to replace them with something else soon. We're ashamed to report that we haven't yet tried to deter the caterpillars -- that's a project for this weekend.
One broccoli plant has remained nearly untouched. We still doubt that it will produce before the heat takes it over, but it's been interesting watching it grow. It's a beautiful little plant -- we hope to do more of them this winter.
What are you growing this summer? Any luck so far?
