August video tour of the kitchen garden

I'm planning on picking lots of tomatoes and basil to make sauce, so I shot a video tour of the garden yesterday while the tomatoes were still on the vine and the basil still flowering with the moonflower.

Moonflowers, finally!

Adirondack Blue potato harvest

As readers of this blog may have noticed in previous posts, I really want to grow blue potatoes. They are just so cool, and since they are also expensive, I figured I'd get a good ROI (return on investment-- sorry, I'm currently taking an online business course....).
When I finally got a shipment of Adirondack blue seed potatoes this spring I was saddened that many of them were rotten. I called Pinetree Garden Seeds, and they promptly sent some fingerling seed potatoes as replacements, since there were no healthy blues left in stock.  I planted the few salvaged  tubers without much hope, thinking I'd have to wait yet another year for my blue potatoes.  To my surprise they sprouted in a couple of weeks.
I weeded and watered the potatoes lovingly all spring and into summer.  Last week the foliage died back, and last night I harvested.
First I removed all the withered foliage, and any remaining weeds. The adjacent planting of fingerlings  is still growing, and the vigorous vines were lying across the bed of blues, so I carefully moved them aside. Here's the potato patch before digging:

I gently forked under the potatoes all through the bed, working from the outside in. I didn't poke one potato!

Here's the bed afterwards with my harvest:

Not a vast haul, but enough for a few meals and a good stock of seed potatoes for next year.

There were a couple of giants--here's one:











And here's a closeup of the harvest -including a few fingerlings that strayed.















As I headed into the house for the night I took this shot of the flower garden side of the yard in the evening light. The two tall yellows are Rudbeckia nitida, a tough as nails and spectacular native flower.

Mortgage Lifter Tomato and a bit of stonework

I always wanted a property with a real New England dry stone wall, and I love the old wall that was carefully rebuilt to make a space for my driveway. But it's  always been a tight space, especially on the right. Twice delivery trucks have hit the wall, and I've paid craftsmen to rebuild the same section.
But I was proud of my ability to avoid the wall.
Until last Friday, when I scattered stones for several feet turning my Tacoma too sharply as I backed up the drive from the garage. When I saw that the only damage to the truck was  some scratches on the wheel well and a bent mudflap, I felt very lucky.
I piled the stones into the now crushed bed of stella d'oro daylilies and went to work. By the time I came home that night, I had a plan. I would rebuild the wall myself, but finally move it further back. And I would make a path through the shade garden with the extra rocks.
And so I did!
Here's the wall before:

And here it is after:

 These pictures show each end of the new path:

And today I ate the first ripe full sized tomato from the garden, a funny looking and delicious Mortgage Lifter.  A wonderful sweet rich heirloom, perfect cut up into chunks with a sherry vinaigrette featuring my own finely diced garlic.

Happy Together: flowers and vegetables

It's late July, and the many annual and perennial flowers in bloom bring lots of bees to the garden, which in turn pollinate the vegetables. My only question is how do people harvest squash blossoms? Mine are always full of bees! Sometimes they get trapped inside the flowers when they close at dusk, and I find and release them (now a bit groggy from the cool night air and lack of food) in the morning when I pick the squash.

Mantis sightings

Here are pictures of two praying mantises I encountered in the garden this week.

The green one was about half the size of the tan one - that probably means the tan one is a female.
Now if only that tomato under the female would turn red-- I have hundreds of tomatoes on my plants, but none are ripening yet!

Fun squash pics and garlic and onion harvest

I know I already wrote about Tromboncino, but here's one last pic from this morning:

And check out the variation in colors and shape (one double, too) in this selection of fruit from Sunburst pattypan squash:

I have been watching the onions and garlic carefully for signs of maturity, and finally dug the  yellow onions and  hardneck garlic this week. They are drying in the garage because we've had a lot of pop up thunderstorms recently, though nothing like the wild storms the rest of the country has experienced this summer.

The red onions are still actively growing. I wonder how much longer they'll go?