It's hard to tell from that pic, but the tops of some of them are as tall (or maybe even a little taller) than I am (5'5'')! Many of them are more than twice as tall as the tomato cages they're in, so I headed to Ocean State Job Lots yesterday to get some stakes to help support them. I'm in awe, because I started every one of these plants from seed, on my windowsill back in March. My friend Karen always says that tomatoes are the most amazing plant in the world because from a *teeny* tiny seed you get a giant sprawling plant and so much bounty. I totally agree.
Still no ripe big beefs yet (any day now, I hope!), but I've picked a couple pints of cherry tomatoes so far.
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| cherry tomatoes starting to ripen |
I'm also excited because it looks like I'll get a good zucchini harvest for the first time in a few years. The last couple summers the darn vine borers killed my squash plants before I could pick anything. Somehow the bugs haven't found them yet this year!
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| Zukes! |
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| A zuke hiding among the stems |
It's also green bean harvest time.
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| Beans, beans, good for your heart... |
Today's haul:
Should have a ground cherry harvest sometime soon too.
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| The yellow one in the center is almost ready to drop. They're ripe when they fall to the ground, hence their name. |
My back garden area, planted a couple weeks ago, is starting to come in. There are purple and green snap beans in the center section and transplanted ground cherry volunteers in the right. I still need to plant some fall crops (probably carrots, spinach, arugula, radishes - whatever other seeds I have on hand) in the left section (not shown).
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| Beans (left) and ground cherries (right) |
I'm so happy the ground cherries I transplanted are growing! They looked pretty small and wilty right after I moved them. Wasn't sure they were going to make it.
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| Sad little ground cherries three weeks ago. |
I can't remember if I talked about this in my last entry - but woo. There are ground cherry volunteers *all* over my garden. They're everywhere. I'd say that after crabgrass they're my most common weed. The average ground cherry plant yields *300* little fruit during the season. They grow in husks and are ripe when they fall to the ground. This means that by the fall when they're falling to the ground by the hundreds, it can be easy to miss a few (or many) of them. The missed cherries end up sinking into the soil and leaving their seeds there. The seeds are very tiny (comparable to carrot seeds- maybe even smaller) so I guess must easily get carried by the wind, because they're not only in the bed where I grew them last year, they really are in every little tilled spot in the garden.
I created a brand new little garden bed this year for my ten year old (pics in my next post!), which was just lawn last fall, and *somehow* he has ground cherries growing there too!
I feel like I've unleashed a ground cherry monster. Luckily they're yummy!
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