Although I am without a camera, as Charmaine is still in San Diego, I thought I’d post a quick update about the latest harvest. The corn may be down, but the rest of the garden is picking up steam.
Today I was forced to pick:
2 Cucumbers (I’m eating one like an apple right now)
2 Zucchini (total is now 13)
3 Yellow Squash (total is now 18)
We came home from participating in the Burley Lions Spudman Triathlon to a huge windstorm. When we got up this morning, most of the corn was down. The wind had snapped several of the stalks and pushed most of the rest to the ground. I went out and pulled some of them back up, but I don’t think they’ll make it. At this point we’ll be lucky to get any corn this year. What a shame.
Next year we’ll plant all the corn together, so the outer rows can protect the inner rows. I’m not sure how much protection that will give it, but it should help with the pollination process.
Charmaine is in San Diego this week, and she took the camera with her, so I have no pictures. In fact, I won’t be able to take the week 11 photos on Thursday either. Oh well. I’m not all that upset about not having a picture of this destruction.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 weeks already. It’s even harder to believe how much has changed in the last 3 weeks. I’m hoping the fertilizer we added yesterday will kick things into an even higher gear for the next couple weeks.
Our corn has topped our fence and is now almost 7 feet tall. It doesn’t look like it will get any taller, though, as it has finally grown tassels. This is exciting news, since it means the first ears of corn will start growing soon.
In other news, we finally broke down and spread some fertilizer around the garden tonight. I guess this means we can’t say our garden is organic anymore, but at least we haven’t used any chemicals for killing weeds or bugs. I just hope we can stay ahead of the squash bugs.
I’ve decided to keep a tally of things we’ve harvested. I’m not sure how often I’ll update the blog with the current tally, but it will be interesting to see how things measure up next year. Here’s the current tally:
Radishes – 20 (I didn’t keep an exact count, but they’re done for the year)
Yellow Squash – 8 (4 were sampled by magpies)
Zucchini – 8 (1 was sampled by magpies)
Turnips – 3 (I’m only counting the really big ones)
Bell Peppers – 3
Red Peppers – 2
Beet Greens – 1 bowl
Blackberry – 2 berries (so good)
Incidentally, if you’re wondering how the yellow squash caught up to the zucchini so quickly, we have 6 yellow squash plants and only 3 zucchini plants.
I finally finished building the enclosure for the pole beans this week, and they’ve already climbed all the way up and over the top of the strands of twine we tied up as a temporary stop-gap until we get some webbing or netting for them to fill out.
Charmaine also added tomato cages for some of the larger tomato plants, and did a bunch of weeding. I’m not a very good helper when it comes to weeding, but at least I feel like I’m not completely useless after building that bean cage.
The onslaught of the zucchini has begun. In the past 3 days I’ve picked 3 that were almost too large, and there’s another 10 that will be ready this week. The yellow squash will probably start this week as well. The cucumber hasn’t started, but it’s spreading out and blooming everywhere, so I’m sure we’ll wind up with more cucumbers than we can use.
Maybe all my joking about building a catapult to toss some of this produce at the neighbors isn’t such a bad idea after all?
