Summer harvest pics

This is the last couple days worth of tomato and pepper harvest. It piles up quick. We have had one serious canning party and I expect we will have to have another one soon. I think the next time we can will will make sauce.

Shucking sweet corn on the stoop. I am really pleaseed with the quality of the corn. No earworms and I have not had any animal problems.

John helping shuck corn. John and Hiya are leaving tommorrow. They found a Kansas Museum of Agriculture and Agriculture Hall of Fame that I did not know exsisted. I am really excited to go.

The sweet corn. You can just eat it raw and it is like candy.

The Dutch Crookneck squash. Same type of orange flesh as butternut but it has this long, somtimes curved neck.

We have a lot of butternut and spaggetti squash to last us into the winter

The "Black Crowder" bean. I let them dry on the vine and we have beans for the winter.

These are red and green "asparagus yard long beans". They are not as good raw as a bush snap bean, but they are productive and they do well in the hot weather. Great in stir fry.

July pics

More Pics for July. The garden is going strong. I am starting to get ready for the fall planting. We had a strech of super hot weather, but it has cooled off again and the plants are thriving. I am thinking about doing a crop by crop listing of improtant info like planting dates, harvest dates, bug or diseaes problems and solutions, perfered soil conditions, etc... I can't decide if that is just the sort of knowledge you need to build in your head or if writing it out would be helpful. Anyways, here are some more garden pics.

View through the tomato tunnel. Tomato harvest started about 2 weeks ago and was pretty thin the first week. We have started to can some sauces.

View from my neighbors step. You can't make out much detail, b/c the tomato patch and the peppers have got huge and kinda obscure the rest of the garden.

These are the "black eyed peas" and the "black crowders" crawling up the south side of the house.

Some of the tomato bounty. I grew about 40 plant and probably about 20 different varieties. We have white (light yellow), green stripe, purple rose, old german yellow and pinks, bannana, yellow cherry, red cherry, roma, and many more...

Some of the black eyed peas after shelling. Ryan says he will make a minestrone soup.

A few bell peppers. I have left some out there to turn yellow, but they taste great green too.

A close up of my favorites. The green zebra tomato might be my all time favorite. Although the orange bannana tomato is in the competition.

Eggplant of different varieties. The green ones are called "Laotion Green Stripe" and they are great in a curry.

More eggplant... we made a big eggplant parm with these

We have way too much red cabbage. It looks really good in the garden though. Ellen calls them the dinosour plant, b/c they don't feel like they belong in this age. I need to find some more cabbage recipes.

Tomatoes that will ripen on the vine.

The herb garden with some squash plants growing out of it.

Hot hungarian wax peppers. Once again, I grew far too many hot peppers.

Me buried in the corn field. The corn is making me proud. Now corn stem borers, no earworms, not problems with animals. And the corn tastes like candy.

One of our many snakes that patrol the garden. They are a good garden friend. They can't bite me I don't think.

Showing off the snake to John and Hiya. They are visiting from San Fran.

Tossing corn to our dinner guests. It is most sweet for the first hour after you pick it off the stalk.

A veiw from the tomato tunnel into the cabbage and brocolli

Old German yellow stripe. They get huge and they are very very tasty.

A lot of these pics are our friend Amy's. That is her foot.

Ellen and Elena showing off the tomatillos

Elena with the chard up front.

Ellen underneath the sunflowers

Hiya in the tomato tunnel

John playing "boll weevil" and "marxist cowboy".

July Garden

My cousins and aunt and uncle from colorado came and visited a while back. Here is Sarah and Grace checking out the garden

This is my mom and I at this blueberry farm nearby. The bag I am holding is probably 5 pounds of blueberries and we got a lot of bags like that in our freezer now. Blackberry season is just starting now. There are a few farms with pick-your-own blackberry patches, so I hope to get a bunch of those soon.

Here is Alex showing of one of our early leeks. You can see that they have been blanched about 6 inchs up the stem. That makes them more tender and tasty. I pike straw over the leeks and they withstand the summer heat pretty well and are good eating all the way into november.

The first tomatoes of the year have been coming in this week. We already have too many cherry tomatoes. They are delicious. I want to try and dry them. You can see the very light yellow ones in this pic are actually called a "white tomato" and they are really tasty. Store bought tastes disgusting after eating these.

I was a little dissapointed in the onion crop. I grew from bulb starts. I think they do better growing from seed. I think I will start some trays of some unique varieties next year in the greenhouse or buy the starts from the community garden association. The bulbs don't seem to get as big. They do store great though. This is about 1/3 of the harvest.

The bell peppers are about to start turning. We are already eating lots of peppers, but the bells take longer to mature.

The corn field is full grown and the ear are ripening. Soon we will have more corn than we know what to do with. I plan on freezing a lot of it.

One of the ear ripening on the stalk. I pulled back the husk of one and it looked like it needed a little more time. I have not had any animal or ear-worm or stem borer problems yet. First year is always problem free and I don't think corn have been grown in this local for a long time.

The black-eyed peas on the south side of the house. They are really taking off. I have to extend their trellis to 20 ft.

A developing butternut squash. It is about ready to pick. You cure it for a while and the skin turns that nice tan color and then you know it is ready to use. It stores for about 6 months.

The "yellow currant" cerry tomatoes

One of the mammoth sunflowers. I need to find a better way to collext the seeds. I think I need to bag the heads, but I don't want to keep the polinators out.

Clemson green spinless okra. I am freezing everything that is coming off the stalk now. Good in soups in the winter and besides we have so much produce we don't know what to do with it all.

Red burgandy okra. Tastes great! Not really spinny or hard to pick.