The Harvest, Part 3

The first cucumber.

We have patiently waited for the day we could pluck cucumbers and carrots from the garden to throw into a salad - and it's finally here! We also have zucchini now, and wow are they growing fast! I made zucchini bread with one large zucchini last week, only to have 3 more in the fridge this week. Since I actually bought fresh zucchini from the grocery store last week because I was convinced ours wouldn't be ready in time, we are still polishing off leftover zucchini with quinoa stuffing (yum!). So working the homegrown zucchini into the menu before they go bad might be somewhat challening. But I'm up to the challenge. I'm thinking I'll do a pasta primavera for starters. If anyone has a good zucchini recipe, please share!

One of our first carrots.

Green beans are still sprouting, but the harvest seems to be slowing. I have a feeling if we were out there picking on the daily we'd have a higher yield, but we're still pretty happy with them regardless. We have about 6 or 7 freezer bags full of blanched green beans in the freezer to be enjoyed at our leisure.

Sadly, our lettuce harvest season has passed and our plants are spent. However, I've been doing some reading on growing lettuce through the fall, so I think we'll be starting another batch sometime soon. The spinach season is long gone and we were somewhat disappointed with how fast it came and went. Not sure if we'll do more spinach for fall or even next spring. One big thing we'd like to do differently in the future is sow seeds in stages over a period of weeks instead of all at once. Hopefully that will help us avoid an all-at-once harvest next time around, and we'll have crops to look forward to for a longer period of time.

The first zucchini.

We finally installed trellises for the tomatoes and cucumbers, and they are much happier with the supports in place. For the cukes, we used found materials that were left in our garage by previous owners. Brian took some heavy gauge wire, cut them into strips roughly 4 feet in length, bent them into U-shapes, and positioned them around the cucumber plants in the soil. We wrapped the vines around the wire, and they took it from there.

For the tomatoes, we decided to build a trellis like this one. Instead of metal poles, Brian buried cinder blocks in the ground with the holes facing up and placed inexpensive 2x2s into one of the holes. He cut off small pieces from the 2x2 and wedged them in the hole around the pole to keep it from moving. He did this for each side and got some garden wire from the hardware store and ran it from pole to pole about once every foot off the ground. The wire is coated in plastic to keep it from rusting. Then we attached the tomato stems to the wires with twist ties.

tomato trellis

tomato tied to trellis

bell pepper

The tomatoes are growing nicely, but still have some growing to do. Also, we finally have some tiny bell peppers growing on the pepper plants! They are super cute.

Finally, I've been reading Lasagna Gardening by Patricia Lanza and finding her gardening methods very inspiring. I want to start building my own lasagna garden this fall and pick it up again in the spring. More on that later.

Happy gardening!