Anyone need any tomatoes?

Had a banner week for 'maters this week. This is only a fraction of the light bulb (yellow pear) tomatoes on the vine. My kids can't eat them fast enough! The weird looking yellow one is some unknown variety - I think the tags were mixed up on the baby plants I bought - but my hubby ate it yesterday and said it tasted better than it looked. A little bland but tomato-y and pretty. The round, baseball sized tomatoes (Wisconsin) are some of the best I've ever tasted. Nice and meaty without a lot of juice and seeds so they are excellent for sandwiches. My favorite from the garden this year is the 'Health Kick' Italian tomato. It's larger than a regular 'Roma' with a nice thick, hard skin and is dark red inside. It's a little meatier than Roma, but still is good to eat plain or in a salad. Lately I've been cutting them up and just drizzling with balsamic vinegar and salt. Yum!

I'm tempted to can some of the tomatoes and make sauce or salsa or something. We have so many (and so do our friends and family) that we can't keep up with them! It's so different from last year when we had about three red tomatoes all year! The vines are starting to decline already but we still have tons of green ones too. I usually pick all the green ones right before any danger of frost and put them in the house. They will ripen inside (most of them) and we can enjoy them well into October.

Our cucumbers/pickles are officially done - the vines are all dried up. Hard to say why, probably neglect more than anything else! Oh well - we got tons and made plenty of bread & butter pickles. Next year we plan to plant two or three times as many pickles so we are able to can more of them.

One last thing - my cabbage are about ready for harvest. Two out of three heads did great. One head got all rotten (probably due to all the rain) but the other two are gorgeous. I'll probably just make some corned beef & cabbage or just smother them with peanut butter and eat them raw!

The Great Tomato Caper....

I came home the other day only to find about 6 or 8 green tomatoes scattered around the lawn. I was furious...thinking that the raccoons we have seen recently around the neighborhood had invaded my garden. (At the time, it didn't occur to me that they probably can't get in my fenced in backyard...). I picked up the tomatoes and threw them back in the garden hoping that they would just eat the ones they left, rather than pick more!
A few days later...more tomatoes in the yard. Still furious...


Then...a revelation...and a certain dog with a green head...

Turns out our 100 lb. Alaskan Malamute, Lucy, has been "sneaking" in the garden and eating the green tomatoes. Her head is all green from digging around in the plants trying to get the tomatoes out. She tends to like green ones for some reason but has eaten a red one or two as I've found evidence strewn around the lawn. If someone can tell me why dogs like green tomatoes that would be great! Needless to say, we need to keep a better eye on her while she is basking outside so she doesn't destroy our whole crop!

I do have some beauty Italian tomatoes ripening now...we've harvested a few already...they are called 'Health Kick' and are supposed to have more lycopene than normal tomatoes. Lycopene is supposed to be good for you. I'll do a little more research on it and post next time!

FINALLY!!!

We finally had a red tomato!!! It was a 'Wisconsin 55' variety and it was fabulous. There are two more beauties on the vine that are about a day away from ripening. My 'Health Kick' Italian tomatoes are numerous but only a tint of pink.

We have harvested about two to three cucumbers per day and lots of little pickles. My hubby made "fridge pickles" this week. He got five pint jars and they turned out awesome! Maybe if you are nice, we'll share! :) We've decided that we need to plant about 4-6 pickle plants as they don't produce enough to pickle in one batch. We only have two plants, and while those two are churning out pickles as fast as they can, we only get about a dozen per harvest.

Our cabbage look beautiful - we dusted them with a little Sevin (so much for organic!) because we had caterpillars but they seem to have moved on. We lost our entire crop of beets for reasons unknown but might sow some more this week and see if we can get a fall harvest.

We are learning a lot from our veggie experiment and hope that next year some of our "issues" will be easily resolved. But for now, we are excited to have lots of tomatoes coming on! My kids eat them right from the vine and stuff their little mouths with Light Bulb tomatoes so it's fun to watch!

WE'VE GOT A CUCUMBER!!!

We finally have something worthy of harvest! Got our first awesome cucumber today. It's so nice not to have to use Dawn to get the oily junk off of a cucumber like a store bought one! We literally have tons of baby cukes and pickles that will be ready any day now. They are sooooo beautiful too! It helps to grow cukes on a fence or trellis. Nice long fruit that have no bug spots or discoloration due to touching the ground. So excited!

Trimmed a BUNCH of leaves off the tomatoes too. It helps to get rid of some of the "junk" around the base and hiding the fruit. Removing some of the large leaves at the base helps promote more flowers and also hopefully, promotes ripening. We have a million Roma tomatoes ready to pop any day now and the Light Bulbs are starting to form. Just realized that our "unmarked" tomato from Cub Scouts is a cherry tomato so we'll have a bumper crop of those too! Hopefully heat and sunshine will prevail and get these green guys turnin' red!

Darned Weather...

Well, the radishes are our latest casualty. From what I've read online, this weather stinks for growing cool season crops...even though it's cool! First my lettuce went bad due to the cool then hot weather and now my radishes up and bolted. By bolted, I mean flowered! Once they flower it's all over. We pulled them all out and had absolutely NO fat little red radishes. I guess the cool weather and lots of rain produced lots of green leaves but no roots. But never fear...we'll be seeding a fresh crop of lettuce AND radishes here shortly. They grow so quickly that we still have plenty of time to get another crop before summer ends. Hoping the beets fare better...

On the other hand, our tomatoes, cucumbers, and herbs are growing like crazy! We have tons of Italian tomatoes already (none ripe yet...need the darn sun for that!) and lots and lots of little baby pickles! Our dill is doing magnificent so we'll be canning some pickles before you know it!

Bitter Lettuce...

We harvested the lettuce the other night...but learned a valuable lesson: Pick lettuce before it gets too hot in the summer. I left it grow because it was just so beautiful but evidently, old lettuce gets bitter. So we pretty much had to scrap the crop. Bummer. I think I'll reseed some in the late fall and see if it works. I was so disappointed when I took a bite - couldn't get that taste out of my mouth all night! Guess I should have read up on Lettuce crops a bit more! Oh well - lesson learned!

We did however, have some great basil leaves to harvest. The Big Kid and I made some pesto starter (just chopped up some basil leaves with a few drops of olive oil in the food processor) and stored it in a ziploc bag in the freezer. We also stored some whole leaves in ziploc bags in the freezer. We wanted to try it both ways so we could see which version is easier to use. I also read somewhere that you can take a leaf or two and freeze them with water in ice cube trays. Just drop the cube into what ever you are cooking! We'll try that next!

Looking forward to some radishes soon...hope to have more success with them than we did the lettuce! :)

HOLY COW!

Wow! We went away for the weekend and just got back and took a look at the garden. EVERYTHING GOT HUGE! It rained all day Friday and I guess it was warm here Saturday and Sunday and our little veggies sure appreciated it! (That, and the pile of fertilizer I put on each plant too...). The Radishes are only a few days away from harvest and the Basil and Dill are doing fantastic. The biggest change is in the cucumbers and tomatoes. Both have doubled in size and are setting flowers already! Yippee!!! Cukes and tomatoes love heat so the hotter weather has really helped! We should go out of town more often! :)