Well, well, well….time seems to pass rather quickly these days. It is already almost mid-August and some things are rockin’ in the free world, and others aren’t. From what I’ve heard, many folks lost a number of crop varieties due to some sort of extreme weather. There has been the occasional gardener who hasn’t lost anything and has a beautiful garden…God bless ’em! In our garden our onions, carrots, kale and chard seem very happy. The cucurbita(that’s my newly acquired word for the squash family!) seem very unhappy, both in the garden and the greenhouse. Both were planted a little late from transplants that were probably not 100%, but I’m sure the weather has not helped the situation. We have had some cucumbers from the greenhouse, but not many. There seems to be a low level population of squash bugs. I’ve now learned to recognize their eggs on the underside of nearby leaves(i.e. tomato leaves near the cukes). Here’s a picture. They’re really somewhat attractive, I think, with the shiny copper look.
Squash Bug Eggs!
The greenhouse really is something! We’ve been eating cherry tomatoes for about a month now, lately harvesting about six pints a week between the two varieties(Sungold and Sakura). Sungolds are of course my favorite! Little oranges…I love ’em!
The Sakura on the other hand have been quite an interesting experiment. I won’t even tell you how much the seed cost, except to say that it was a lot more than all the other seeds. Why I chose this variety, I still really am not sure. But I can say this, they do seem to produce quite a nice tomato. Fairly large cherries, not so much the “pop in your mouth” type, but something you can slice in half and fill up a salad rather quickly with. and abundant fruit on the plants, as well. All the cherries are about seven feet tall now, anyway. I’m wondering if I should top them or what. They are destined to be pulled the second week of September to make way for spinach. I suppose if I’ll end up doing something and will learning. That has been the pattern thus far…
The slicing tomatoes have behaved a little differently. I suppose they’re taking longer for an obvious reason: the fruit is so much bigger. We have started to harvest some of these last week. I think they are going to come on strong very soon, as a bunch are starting to turn color. It seems like the Big Beef have produced the most so far. These are mostly planted on the South end, where the spinach all seemed to produce better than in other parts of the greenhouse. Maybe I did put the compost in unevenly last fall; laid it on a littlet too heavy on that end and lighter elsewhere. Or maybe its the sun? Soil test is the way to go. Got to get on that soon.
Jill direct seed a bed of basil which seems very happy. She made the first round of pesto this past weekend…so good!!
The hot cherry peppers(Capperino, for those of you keeping score), are doing very well, as far as my untrained and inexperienced eyes tell me. Why? Because they are producing very nice looking cherry peppers. I guess its that simple(yeah, right. Nothing is that simple!) The cherries have been fine for the most part without being staked or trellised, but it seems that some support may be necessary in the future(like maybe the near future). I have staked some of the bell peppers with some small bamboo stakes, but some of those are not doing the trick. The chile peppers(Red Rocket Ristra) seem to be doing fine. Nothing turning red yet but lots of fruit with no apparent support needed in the iminent future.
The cukes….ah, the cukes. As I said, I think we planted these too late with stressed plants. We will do better next year.
I decided that planting the whole greenhouse for the summer might turn into more work than we could effectively handle this year(both of us having full time jobs and little kids and etc etc etc). So I threw down some vetch, oats, peas mix that I got from High Mowing earlier this summer, in hopes of building some organic matter into the soil. For those of you who haven’t been following along in this birth of a farm saga, the greenhouse site had to be completely leveled, thereby scraping away all the topsoil, this leaving me with having to build our soil from scratch. So I thought the cover crop was a good idea. Maybe I’m just introducing a bunch of seeds into the greenhouse…who knows. I’ve tried to mow it before I see flowers, so hopefully all will end well on that front.
I had a grand idea to can stuffed hot cherry peppers in olive oil and spices and give them away for the holidays this year, but I’m not sure how to store them. Some recipes online say to store them in the fridge without canning, and they will last a month to a year, depending on which recipe you look at. A couple other recipes say to heat up a water, vinegar mixture and pour it over the peppers in the jar, add some olive oil on top and cover, thus sealing. Yet another says to just can the stuffed peppers, but I have seen warnings that this would melt the cheese…what to do? Use the force.