Once again it’s been a while since our last garden update so here goes…
I mentioned once or twice that we are giving our lettuce a try in window boxes along our courtyard and at the front of the house. These are the plants by the courtyard which are really thriving. They apparently get just enough sun during the day and I water them all the time too. We’re looking forward to starting to harvest a few leaves at a time from each plant so we can hopefully keep them growing but still enjoy our own fresh salad.
These are the plants at the front of the house. They look nearly as good as the others but when the sun comes over in the morning these plants seem to be getting a bit too much sun and some of the lower leaves were scorched early on.
It’s nearly time to start harvesting the grapes climbing along the barn. The lower grapes are mostly purple now but we may have to wait a bit longer on those higher up the wall. Although they should have been getting more sun, they don’t seem to have ripened as quickly.
This fat, nasty slug was munching down on the remains of a decomposing zucchini we tossed into one of the beds the other day. I thought it was rather interesting the way they had eaten the flesh out and left the green zucchini shell so I thought I’d share. Yucky, I know. They did actually eat the rest of it the next day, though.
Corn! You can see that one of the Jala Maize plants is doing very well. The other two are just sort of average and the 2 sweet corn plants don’t seem to be growing much at all anymore. We’re not sure how the corn will turn out in the end but it’s been an interesting experiment at least. The tall Jala stalk is well over 7 feet tall now.
Our cucumbers which we aren’t have the greatest of luck with. Many of the leaves are yellow and after checking out many of the other plants in the gardens around us, it seems that it might be a local fungus or bug problem? We do get a few cukes from the plants but not often and most of the new fruit that begins to develop quickly dies off. I thought it might be a lack of pollination but we seem to only get female blooms so perhaps it doesn’t need to be pollinated?
We ate our first eggplant last weekend (I took these photos a week ago) and it was very tasty. We prepared it with one of our very hot Cayenne peppers, some fresh tomatoes and pasta (turned out very good) and are looking forward to many more eggplant in our future.
This is actually the one we ate. The slugs LOVE the fruit and the eggplant plants themselves. Those and our zucchini seem to be the preferred items to eat in our greenhouse.
A sample of one of our cayenne peppers. Nothing has turned red yet although we did harvest a few green ones which were already quite hot. You may also notice that a slug decided to eat one of the cayenne…and I hope that it managed to cause him some severe pains if not death!
The tomatoes are coming along finally. Looks like we’ll have a few to harvest this weekend finally!
A sample of the Colibri tomatoes we planted. Some decent sized fruit on there.
And a lovely Black Krim tomato which we can’t wait to taste. None of them are turning yet so I guess we have to wait a while longer but they are getting nice and big.
Here’s one of the Red Zebra tomatoes which so far have tasted great. We seem to have left them on a bit long each time and the skin was rather tough so it will be interesting to see if the other tomatoes are also a bit tough or if it’s just something about this breed.
And the sweet potato plant is still thriving now that the slugs have found more interesting things to eat. No clue what we’ll be able to harvest here but at least they look really pretty.
