TY VeggiePatch: Summer Goodness

written by Yvonne

Tom (and Olive) decided to take a look and see if the potatoes he planted produced anything.

Yes and no.

There are some potatoes but they're very small. Nonetheless, he pulled them up and I threw them into a pot of green beans and they were delicious.

Bye bye cucumbers. Cucus are done for this year so I pulled them up. I'm always sad to see them go, just as Tom is sad to see okra go. But it's OK 'cause we'll grow more next year. I think we finally found a balance of how many cucumbers to plant. The first year where we got 12 - not nearly enough, and last year when we got 171 - maybe just a few too many. (We have stopped logging how much harvest we're getting from TYs VeggiePatch. Seemed like an unnecessary step when we can simply look back at this blog for comparison.) Anyway, my estimate is that we probably got a good 50 or so cucumbers this year. That was just about right to make several quarts of refrigerator pickles, cold cucumber soup, many many cucumber salads, and quite a few straight up sliced cucumbers.

In the foreground is another round of cow peas, Borllotto beans, and burgundy beans. We had mixed results with the first round of each of these (see below). The large, darker green leaves in the background is okra. I must have planted the dwarf variety because they plants are MUCH shorter than last year. They should be flowering any minute now.

These are the Borlotto beans. Last year, they did great but we harvested them a bit too early. This year, we decided to keep the pods on the vine longer so they'd dry for use this winter. That sort of worked except it didn't produce nearly as many beans as last year. I think it had something to do with the critters that are eatin' up the leaves. The burgundy beans were very disappointing as well. You can see the bare green stakes where they should have been growing, but didn't. The same critters that feasted on the Borlotto leaves ate the burgundy bean leaves too.

The cow peas, on the other hand, have been doing GREAT. We go out about every other day and pull of a hand full of dried pods...

bring them inside and shell them. We've now filled a 1 quart Mason jar and we're still going! I can't wait to make some of these on a cool Sunday while watching a Panthers game on TV.

Tomatoes are doing fine, fine, fine! We planted five varieties and they're all doing great. These are from seeds that a friend gave to me. They're called Black Cherry. They're ripening slower than the Black Giants and they are a little smaller, but visually they are the most perfect looking tomato.

This is a Black Giant.

We've been pulling the tomatoes off before they are actually ready so we can stay ahead of any bugs. The widow sill in the laundry room and kitchen have been filled with ripening tomatoes.

You can see here the difference between the ones with some green left on them and others that are finishing the ripening process. These are a mixture of Black Giants and Black Cherries.