This Year's Garden

Fair Warning:  this post may bore you to tears.

Those of you who have gardens measured in the hundreds of acres
may find our few square feet amusing.

This spring Amy and I decided to make our small garden behind the garage a bit bigger by adding two plots.  We dug and rototilled eighteen inches down adding humus and manure as amendment, then surrounded them with 4 x 4s held in place with very long bolts driven into the earth.

Since I didn't think the whole area could be reached with a lawn sprinkler and had no wish to water weeds I put in a simple irrigation system aimed to water the plants and nothing else.

Amy came up with a design for a tomato vine support system that used drift wood picked up from the shore of the Long Island Sound lashed to driven stakes.  To make the half circle pieces she tied heavy string from one end of a stick to the other, then soaked them in the bathtub for a few days.   As they got more pliant she would repeat the process tightening the string.  It brings Georgia O'Keefe's desert style to my mind.

We planted eight potato-tomato plants in the supported bed as they get very tall.   We put Tiny Tim cherry tomatoes, Black Russians we got visiting in Vancouver with Evan and Janice and tomatoes from Tuscany all started from seed in the third bed.  I had no idea the Black Russians would get so huge and dense as I'd never seen the plant before.

The hot Thai peppers start out purple then turn cream, then orange then red when they're ripe.

The squash is doing well with enough to go to neighbors and friends along with tomatoes, basil, rosemary and sage.

They've been tasty hardwood grilled with a little olive oil.  Also very good butter steamed.

We've never tried tomatillos before but they're coming in nicely.  We like the papery outer "lantern" which should eventually turn brown and burst showing ripe fruit much like ground cherries.   These will be going into Amy's guacamole, the best that any of us around here have tasted.

This Spring when we started to transfer the plants from pots into the beds I discovered a Yukon Gold potato in the pantry that was sprouting all over, cut it up and and stuck the pieces into the ground.  They grew large, bloomed and eventually two of the plants turned brown and died and withered.  I cut off the dead tops and didn't pull the roots or disturb the salt hay covering them.  Yesterday as Amy was driving us to Agway for birdseed a hopper truck fully loaded with potatoes passed us in the other direction and we said to each other, "time to dig them up".  It was fun digging in the dirt with our hands discovering  more potatoes of all sizes one after another.