Production Commences

April/May 2011

IT'S ALIIIIIIVE......

Look at this! It's as bigger than my head

Well, our lettuce is anyway. Everything else is still recovering from transplant shock.

I would say lettuce is my favorite to grow. That might be because it's the only thing doing well right now, but also I love that I always can have a salad without worrying that it might have gotten old and slimy in my fridge drawer.

You know what? I'm hungry right now

Mmmm salad

June 2011

Ok, the lettuce has pooped out, but the tomatoes are now stealing the show.



We have 1 Big Boy, 1 Better Girl, and 3 'Sweet 100' cherry tomato plants, the latter of which are producing like crazy. David has no idea, because I go out there right after work and eat all I can and then bring the few leftovers into the house.



I won't forget my first taste of a home-grown tomato. I kind of expected any type of produce we grew in the garden to taste like rainbows. It should be beyond amazing, right?! Well, in most cases it just tastes like food. I've since learned that the main difference is in the nutrition it will have, based on your soil and fertilizer. But still.


David and I recently listened to an author speak about the mass-production of tomatoes on NPR the other day. He, like most non-industrialized foodies, was very passionate about his subject, going into long discourses about how most tomatoes are grown in sand in FL, which imparts absolutely no nutrition to the fruits. Furthermore, they are picked very green and then sprayed with ethylene to force them to turn red. He referred to the whole process as something like, 'the prostitution of the tomato', and then told us to only eat tomatoes produced in summer and fall. I snorted. I don't care where it came from, I am not having a tomato-less existence for 6 months out of the year.

Our first 'larger' tomato. I am choosing to ignore that is is freakishly small

But when I bit into that little sphere of deliciousness that spoke to me of days drenched in sunshine, I understood. It was full of flavor, both savory and slightly sweet, with a complexity I was not expecting. If you have a small plot of land that gets decent sun, stick a tomato plant in it. If you want to start from seed, you'll need to do it indoors and start in January. We were a little late because I had no idea, and so our production on the other two plants was kind of low. Once it gets stupid-hot the blooms no longer set and turn into tomatoes. We have several tomatoes that just stopped growing. The fruits have been tiny and on the vine for months with no progression.

Mid-June 2011


Berries! Our blackberry and raspberry bushes are hanging in there. I was told not to expect any fruit the first year as they are getting established, so I was pleasantly surprised to pick these little gems. I am not sure what is up with that midget strawberry, but it helped with the continuity of the picture.


Mmm, future raspberries. My plant is the 'everbearing' variety, which supposedly produced fruit for the entire growing season, instead of one giant harvest in June, like traditional raspberries. Gotta love genetic Frankensteins. Although it did attempt to make fruit over several months, I did notice that it was more productive in June.

July
I know jack about carrots. For some reason, I expected them to just put up a little sign when they were ready, saying, "Hey! We're ready to be picked now!" Not unlike the signs in Wily E Coyote cartoons.

That being said, I wandered over to their corner of the garden one day and thought, Huh, I wonder if these are rotting in the ground or something.

So I pulled a few up.

Looks like a carrot - they are a lot hairier than I was expecting.

I have plenty of memories picking carrots in my grandads garden, and they were always carrot-like and yummy. Ours kind of look like deformed Yeti fingers, and the taste is not what I remember either.
I think I need to read up on how to care for carrots next year, how to tell when to pick them and also not actively deform them. But that's for another post.

Late July/August

It is now stupid hot, and the garden is doing good not to be spontaneously combusting in this heat.

The tomatoes have entered some kind of stasis, strawberries are in hibernation, cucumbers are producing inedible plants, and the poblano plant gave up the ghost, which surprised me. I thought these things were supposed to love hot weather!?

BUT the vine-type plants are coming into their own.

After looking pitiful and doing absolutely nothing for months, our watermelons and cantaloupe have started growing like weeds and are taking over their beds. It used to look pretty stupid, one watermelon plant approx. 4 inches in diameter in a bed all by itself, but it has almost filled the whole bed up now.

7:45 am usually finds me in my nightgown crouching down between the vines with a paintbrush, trying to differentiate between the female and male flowers so I can pollinate them and hopefully end up with some fruit. This bout of weirdness finally paid off:

Baby Cantaloupe!

THE NEXT DAY: Holy crap, these things grow fast.

I love checking on this little guy - he grows so much each day it's fun to watch. Although, strangely, cantaloupes start out looking suspiciously like a watermelon! lots of people have been asking if we mixed up the seeds. Only time will tell!

So that's what's happening in the garden right now. We are basically just sitting back and seeing what happens, planning for next year when things like trellises become an obvious necessity to corral all the unruly vines spilling out of the beds and taking over our lawn.