a female pumpkin blossom!
Finally a female pumpkin flower has opened on my giant pumpkin vines! I’m sooo excited. But am keeping my fingers crossed that the fruit sets. This flower bloomed three days ago – on Sunday. There were lots of bumble bees around, so I am hoping they pollinated this flower. Yesterday the flower had closed and the pumpkin still looked good. We’ll see. I was surprised to see how different the female flower looks from all the male ones (the plants have many of these). Very fancy! “The female flower contains…
juicy sweet watermelon
This melon was grown by Belmont CSA. A beautiful dark green round fruit that I bought last week at the Farmer’s Market. It tastes as good as it looks. Sweet and juicy. I didn’t ask the variety, but it looks like an heirloom Sugar Baby Watermelon. I saved all of the seeds and am looking forward to a nice patch of these in my garden next year! Watermelon (Citrullus lanatus (Thunb.) Matsum & Nakai, family Cucurbitaceae) CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)
fading summer
It looks like summer is winding down. The seed heads are drying on my zinnias. Summer crops are fading. Even though the fall crops are perking up, the garden has a different feel to it now. Its time to gather the harvest and save seeds for next year. “summer’s lease hath all too short a date” Shakespeare I haven’t been doing much in the garden this week. I picked lots of tomatoes, cucumbers and chile peppers of course. And this weekend I planted some radish seeds in the sunniest spot…
winner of the too-tall-tomato vine contest!!!
I was really impressed with The Tiniest Tomato of the Year at May Dreams Gardens and at The Gardeners Anonymous Blog. Wow! I’ve always wanted to win a contest, so I’m entering myself in the Tallest Tomatoes Vines contest and am officially declaring myself the winner! It seems there has never been a contest before for tall tomato vines, but nevertheless, there is one now. What clued me in to my unusually tall vines was when my neighbor stopped by. He looked over the garden fence and said “What’s with…
garden web
A black and yellow garden spider has spun a nice web across my eggplant leaves. In the autumn, I often see these large female garden spiders on their webs waiting for flies. There’s another one with a nice web in my tomatoes. I carefully reach around it when picking tomatoes. Spiders give me the willies, so I stay away from them and let them do their job of eating garden pests.
pizza with tomato sauce
We have a convenient tomato processor that separates the skins and seeds from tomato juice and pulp. We add quartered tomatoes to the hopper and crank them through. The skin and seeds come out one side and the pulp comes out the other. We ran about 25 big tomatoes through the tomato machine and make a nice batch of puree, which we simmered about an hour to make a nice sauce for pizza. We used a bit of this and froze the rest in baggies. Almost everything is better grilled…
green metallic bee on a sunflower
In place of honeybees, we have lots of Green Metallics and bumblebees this year.Hymenoptera
beet greens
I thinned some beets and cooked them up. Delicious. There were even a few 1-2 inch roots. Its a mix of three colors of beets, yellow, red and purple. To cook, I wrapped the larger beets in foil and baked them at about 375 about 20 min. I sauteed some onions and yellow peppers (delicious ones from the Belmont CSA farm) in olive oil and butter, then sliced and added the cooked beets. Last I added the beet greens and cooked everything until the greens wilted. The best beet green…
This is a journal of my vegetable gardens. Skippy thinks the garden is his, even though I do all the work. We're located near Boston, in USDA zone 6. I have bees, chickens, fruit trees and berry bushes, too. I use all sustainable organic methods and strive to grow all of my family's vegetables myself. -Kathy
weeks and counting until my last spring frost
My garden this week
Skippy’s vegetable of the month – Egyptian walking onions!
