I think we picked a lot more stuff this week than we normally do. The tomatoes have just been going crazy… Almost as crazy as the zucchini. The corn is on. The beans are finally on. The peppers are just amazing. The tomatillos are coming so fast that I have even been throwing some away because I wasn’t able to pick them soon enough. It’s been a really great week for harvesting things.

I haven’t gone out of my way to count or weigh everything, but I’m guessing we picked between 80 and 100 tomatoes this week. That’s a lot of tomatoes. Luckily we have been able to give some away. The tomatoes look like they’ll continue coming in at this rate for a few weeks. These are going to be great weeks. Yesterday we did a tomato cook-down with some hot peppers. It really turned out well… but at a ratio of 2 cayenne peppers to about 30 tomatoes, we’re not going to use up those hot peppers nearly fast enough.

We also started picking and eating corn, and it’s been really great. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot more corn out there. The beets are looking good. We picked four or five beets this week, but I don’t think we’ve eaten them yet.

So from a harvest perspective, it was a great week.

The weeds have been getting out of control recently, and Charmaine has really been working hard to get the cleaned up. She’s really made great progress along the zucchini row along the fence. It’s like a completely new garden. She also tilled under the remaining potatoes, lettuce, broccolini, and cabbage (and all the weeds that were intermixed). She ran into a bit of trouble while tilling those under… the tiller found and grabbed some sprinkler funny-pipe, twisting it around the tines of the tiller and binding the tiller down. In her attempts to free the tiller, she wound up breaking the welds that hold the handles of the tiller to the tiller itself. So we’ll need to find a solution for that before the end of the year.

I disabled the sprinklers in that section in hopes of avoiding a flood. Well, that section stayed dry, but the lawn flooded. I’m still not sure how or why. We did a bunch of digging and investigating, but haven’t figured anything out. It seemed almost like a sprinkler pipe was broken under the lawn, but as we’ve turned on sprinklers since then, everything has been fine… it hasn’t flooded again. I don’t like problems that go away without an explanation, so I’m not satisfied yet. Kyle should be coming back this week to add some curbing to the new side yard. I hope I get a chance to ask him about it and have him take a look and tell me what he thinks.

As we were closing our garage today, a hummingbird flew inside. We opened both garage doors, but the poor bird seemed unable to find its way back out. It kept trying to fly higher, smacking against the ceiling time and time again. It was very upsetting. Charmaine cut a couple tall stalks of hollyhock from the front yard and I was able to hold them up to the bird so it could eat. Suddenly a second hummingbird flew into the garage. This was exactly the opposite of what we wanted to happen. The second bird flew right out again, but the first bird refused to follow it. It was still willing to eat from the hollyhock stem and eventually trusted us enough to stay feeding as we brought the stalk lower and forward, out of the garage. The whole ordeal lasted about 15 minutes.

Also this week, we picked a million pounds of zucchini, a bunch of lettuce and cabbage, some tomatoes, peppers, beets, and tomatillos. The pumpkins are starting to turn orange, which is always fun, but it probably means we’re not going to get any other winter squash. It’s just too late in the year for it to be starting right now.

We’re heading full speed into harvest. These are the types of posts that bore me to write. There’s really nothing new happening, just more and more stuff picked from the garden, and it’s almost always the same every week. Of course, it’s not boring to actually pick it and eat it, but I won’t always have a new exciting thing to talk about.

So what’s new this week?

Our neighbor brought back a few raspberry and blackberry starts from his parents’ house in Alpine, UT. They are not the same variety of blackberries that we had before, so I’m excited to see how they turn out (if they live). The blackberries are looking pretty good, but the raspberries are having a harder time so far.

We’ve started picking tons of zucchini. I’m sure we picked at least 10 last week, and it looks like we’ll have even more this week. The crookneck yellow squash is starting to come on, so it won’t be just a game of peppers and zucchini anymore.

Pumpkins are also starting to pop up under the leaves of the squash plants, and that’s always fun.

Although I was starting to wonder if it would ever happen, we have finally moved from Spring into Summer. It was an exceptionally cold spring, and so far it’s an exceptionally cool summer. It’s the middle of July and I’m not sure we’ve hit 90 degrees yet. Many years we’re above 100 by now.

We went out of town for the past two weekends to drive up around the Olympic Peninsula and then ride our bikes from Seattle to Portland. It was nice a sunny in the northwest, but the neighbors tell me it rained here almost every day. It seems the garden really liked all that extra water. I almost didn’t recognize it when we got back. Everything is looking really good now, even the peppers.

We picked the rest of the peas, though most were way overripe, hard, and woody. We also started digging up potatoes. Charmaine has had fresh potatoes for dinner almost every night since we’ve been home from Seattle. We’ve even been able to start picking peppers. So far just banana peppers, but it looks like it’s going to be a good year for peppers.

Really the only thing still lacking is beans. I don’t know what it is, but they just don’t want to grow this year. They have finally sprouted, but they seem to be way behind. Maybe it’s the lack of hot days? We may never know.

We picked peas several times this week, including two bags at a party last night. The peas are still going strong, but it’s really starting to warm up, and that usually means the peas will stop blooming. We also picked almost all the rest of the radishes. They were intermixed in a row of beets, but the beets are still looking quite small. The giant weeds growing alongside the beets probably don’t help at all.

The tomatoes are looking great. Other than the peas, they are the only part of the garden doing well. I keep avoiding adding a second row of string to help hold the plants in place in the wind, but I think they’re getting big enough now that I can’t avoid it anymore. It may even be time for a third row of string. We’ll have to see.

The peppers are finally starting to grow, but they still look far from anything I would call healthy. It will be sad if we don’t end up getting many peppers this year.

The beans have really been the biggest disappointment. We planted more beans this year than in any previous year, but they just don’t want to grow. We’ve even re-planted several of the rows, hoping to get something. We finally have one row of beans that may grow, but it’s so late now that I question if we’ll really get any.

Maybe next year won’t be so cold. Maybe next year won’t be so windy. Maybe next year I’ll let the soil rest instead of doing a garden again.