Garden Shots

 

Since I still have a number of posts yet to publish on my trip to the Philippines, I thought I would do an extra post this week of my garden as it was a couple days back. Above is our "new" trellis that I erected at one end of our garden. It had been at the old garden but had languished in the weeds elsewhere on the farm until I rented a U-Haul trailer and made the trip down to bring them back up to our urban garden. In the foreground is bitter melon, a Filipino ingredient that is like a bitter tasting squash that they use in several of their dishes. It grows quite well and fast in our climate and has nearly taken over the trellis. Lower down in the middle are cucumbers that my wife planted. They are nearly done producing but this was one of the best years I've ever had growing them. I have enough pickles to last me the next five years. Further down is a failed attempt at watermelon. My wife wanted to plant them on the trellis and I tried to discourage her because I didn't think the vines would climb. I was wrong and they did climb. But neither of us foresaw the repercussions. The watermelon has put on loads of fruit that have gradually grown big until their weight caused them to pick themselves. We've had only one ripe one that grew on ground level thus far. The majority have picked themselves before they were ripe.

Next to the trellis is are row of okra which is really starting to go to town right now. In some places, it is ten feet tall and I pick about a gallon of okra off of it every other day. Besides eating a lot of it right now, we are freezing a bunch of it for later and I've also been pickling a lot of it too. I love pickled okra and I hope to preserve a few years worth. To the right was the former spot of our root crops, i.e. carrots, onions and potatoes. Last week I tilled it up and put in two rows of peas which are just poking up. Our first crop of peas, where the okra is now growing, ripened while we were gone and so we didn't get any. I've never tried growing a fall crop of anything so this attempt to get some peas yet this year falls under the experimental category.

To the left of this picture lie our parsnips which we are eating regularly and leaving the rest to mellow until later this fall and also our tomatoes. I just wanted to grow a plant or two of them for fresh eating but my wife got eight plants and didn't want to kill them so I had to plant all eight of them. I've given away probably 50 gallons of tomatoes to anyone who wanted any and they are still loaded full of tomatoes just rotting away. But hey, I can have a nice vine ripened tomato anytime I want for the rest of the year. The picture above is a row of japanese shishito peppers. We planted two of them a couple years ago and they produced an abundance of peppers. We used them in fresh cooking and I pickled the rest as an experiment. The experiment paid off and the pickled shishito peppers were so good that we blew through our inventory. So to rebuild stocks, I found seed online instead of the live plants we had planted previously, and we ended up with a lot of pepper starts which found their way to an entire row of the garden. I've already pickled more than we are likely to eat in five years so right now they are just chilling. I've tried giving them away but people aren't interested. I don't think they believe me when I tell them they aren't spicy peppers though some do have a little heat to them but more like a green pepper type of heat. The previous time we raised them, some eventually turned red so I'm leaving them in hopes that they turn red and I'll just string them up as a decoration for our pantry.

Finally above is our sweet potato patch which looks very vigorous. I've only planted sweet potatoes once before and that was before Covid so it has been awhile. It grew and did produce a few sweet potatoes but didn't come close to looking as healthy as the crop above which has essentially taken over nearly twenty percent of our garden at this point. I dug the first crop I planted by hand but I'm going to have to try a more efficient method this time around. I do have a potato fork but still, this looks like a lot of work even with that. Time will tell.