Relax! I’m talking about showing you my vegetables and gardens and would love to see photographs of yours as well.
Our scheduled diarist for today was unable to make it. I would never mention any names (there will be strong hints in the comments below that will leave no doubts about who it was) So with a bit of nudging from estreya and kishik I have happily agreed to do today’s diary.
We’ll take a walk around my Connecticut Valley yard and gardens to see what’s going on in late August.
This year in the vegetable garden, I decided to go with less variety and more quantity. I have about forty-four tomato plants this year. They are doing so well that I’m having to put wooden stakes inside some cages to keep them upright. I’m very popular with co-workers right now when I arrive carrying plastic bags. One of the pleasures of growing so many is having plenty to share.
This is my first year trying the black plastic garden cloth at the insistence of a friend. I admit she was right and I’ll be using it every year from here on out. Normally by this time of the year, I can hardly find my vegetables because of the weeds.
I have just a seven-foot tepee of green beans but it’s kept me busy picking.
We eat them both raw and cooked
Of course, I grow only Kentucky pole beans since I am originally from the Blue Grass State.
(Go UK!)
I have thirty-four eggplant plants and growing four varieties to see which we like the best. Hands-down it’s been the long thin baby ones for grilling. The white and purple stuffing ones were good but not as great as the others.
If anyone knows the name of the tan type, please let me know. They are especially nice grilled.
we eat a lot of raw kale in the summer on sandwiches and as salads after the lettuce season. Here some is being washed. We save the stalks to later grill or to saute with other ingredients. We also freeze some stalks to add to soups in the winter.
The peach crop was a complete failure in most of Connecticut this year because of our spring weather. I didn’t get one peach from my tree below. Some of you might remember last year, I had so many white peaches that I had to learn how to freeze them.
The above tansy and Chinese lanterns are doing great though as shown below
I have a second crop of figs coming along. Maybe I’ll get to eat one this time as some creature beat me to the earlier crop. This is my first year growing them.
Here is my offering of black and blue saliva to the majestic hummingbirds
This is looking into the backyard.
I am surprised how green everything appears because of our lack of rain.
various plants around the yard
I really enjoy the different colors and markings on leaves. Below left is a banana plant with oat grass and Canna on the right does a wonderful job of camouflaging a car
my white hydrangeas are the most beautiful right now when they turn a lime green before going brown.
Birds appear to really be loving the birdbaths this year
Okay, I still have painters working on my house. The four to five weeks job will now be week twelve this Monday. Various reasons for setbacks but they are doing excellent work or I would have ran them off a long time ago. They should be finished in two weeks
So my house on the bottom left has not put forth a pretty face toward the street in a long time. (especially with a port-o-let in the front yard!) The house on the right is on my way to the flea market on Sunday mornings. Yes, I pulled in the driveway to take a photo for you. That is weeds growing inside the screened-in-porch!
The above is all the motivation I need to keep pulling weeds in my own yard. I don’t want strangers taking photographs. (although I have seen a few do it, when I was gardening in a speedo but I am not sure it was in a good way) So this completes our tour.
Okay ladies, you can stop now as I did a diary for you.
I am beginning to think you two are enjoying this way too much!
I know that this past July was the hottest month ever recorded for most of the country. It was not for Connecticut though as 2013 was our record July. Stay cool, water deeply and I am a firm believer in checking in on your neighbors. My mother in the 1960s would force me to go to elderly neighbors’ houses with a piece of cake so I could see that they were okay. Amazing how many of them had extra candy or cookies to secretly share with me . My mother started wondering why every time she baked a cake, I suddenly started volunteering to take a piece to Ms. Newport or Ms. Lee’s until I came home one day with chocolate all over my face.
So this is what is going on in my garden and yard right now. And what about that weed-infested Long Island garden of the scheduled male diarist that canceled? Oops, I’ve said too much. And your garden?
(DISCLAIMER: I actually volunteered to do the above diary and was only kidding about Estreya and Kishik. They are both perfect polite young ladies except when over-caffeinated or their keys are locked in their car. ;-) And the canceled scheduled diarist is a gentleman, as well, and he had legitimate need to cancel. Though he does owe me a beer now.)