Summer Vegetable Garden Recap

Hello blog! It's been a while.

We had a busy summer around here, with short trips, visitors, weddings to attend, and work. The new job is still going well, although I'm currently working without pay because of the government shutdown. I wish I had insight as to when this will end, but we don't know anything. We just hope that we'll get back pay since we've been deemed "essential employees" and are required to work now. Just another reason to appreciate my low-maintenance vegetable garden and the ability to have some fresh veggies without having to buy them at the store! The plan worked like a charm and has been manageable with our limited time at home.

My container garden this year consisted of tomatoes, peppers, and four tomatillo plants. We had a relatively mild summer in the DC area--plenty of rain and not too many scorching hot days. It seemed like ideal conditions for the veggies. Bugs didn't seem to be as big of a problem this year as in previous years. We didn't grow cucumbers or any summer squash, so cucumber beetles, squash bugs, and squash vine borers weren't an issue. We had aphids and spider mites, but were able to control them somewhat by spraying the underside of the leaves with the hose on the high-pressure setting. We still have spider mites on some tomato plants, but it hasn't been enough to affect the yield too much.

I haven't been great at keeping track of how many pounds of tomatoes we have harvested, but I haven't bought tomatoes in about 6 weeks. This past week has brought back summer-like temperatures in October, and I think the plants are enjoying the surprise weather. The tomatillos have just starting ripening in the past week or so. You can tell they're ripe when the husk starts drying out and clings to the fruit. I'm looking forward to all the green salsa I'll be making once I harvest enough of them.

We just pulled these beautiful yellow bell peppers yesterday.

We've harvested more jalapenos, serranos, and habaneros than we can eat, so we've given some away. All of the hot peppers have had a lot of heat, more than in other years. I wonder if the milder temperatures and plenty of rain helped?

 

Our bell pepper harvest has been amazing. We're growing red, yellow, and orange bell peppers (all are green before they turn ripe) and use them in everything from soups to sauces to soffritos. 

And the sizes have been great, too. Several of them have been big enough to fit and my hand and perfect for stuffing.

 

We harvested this bowl of bell peppers mid-September and it yielded four pounds! 

I hope you and your garden had a wonderful summer. How's your fall garden looking?

The Low Maintenance Garden

I wasn't able to start many seeds this year for my edible garden, so we bought a few transplants instead.  This year's low maintenance garden consists of only 15 plants, about half the number I usually have.

Instead of planting squash, cucumber, beans, and other vegetables, I decided to keep it simple and focus on just two items for my kitchen garden this summer: tomatoes and peppers.
We bought both sweet and hot peppers, including a jalapeno plant because we have to have some hot peppers in the garden. So far the plants and pests have been manageable. There are even a few blushing Super Fantastic tomatoes right now.

I did start a few seeds, including two habaneros and two tomatillo plants, which are also doing really well.  Between the tomatoes, tomatillos, jalapenos, and habaneros, I expect to have a nice salsa garden this year. If only I could grow cilantro...

And here's a nice surprise--two potato plants from my failed crop last year made an appearance.  Last year potato beetles decimated the potatoes I had started from seed. I was going to turn this into an onion patch, and these two potato plants surprised me by sprouting this spring.  I've left them alone just to see what happens. Wouldn't it be nice to get some potatoes this year?

How is your summer edible garden doing?

End of Summer Garden Recap

I realize that I'm talking about the end of Summer while we're well into Fall, but we have had quite a busy last few months. The best news--the new windows are in! They were installed a week earlier than expected, and I can already tell the difference. We have needed new windows for years. The old ones were the crappy builder quality ones. Two had broken seals and moisture had come in. Some didn't close right and you could see gaps (which meant bugs could slither their way in). The screens didn't fit in all of them, so I couldn't open windows to let fresh air in. However, that didn't matter upstairs because all the windows on the top floor were so drafty. That meant that while the temperature was perfectly comfortable downstairs, as soon as you'd walk up the stairs you could feel the cold winter air, and cranking the heat up did not make a difference. In the summer the upstairs was stuffy. Our new windows are the energy efficient kind, and I think we'll see a real difference in our heating and cooling bills over the next year. Actually, I think I can already tell the difference. It's not chilly upstairs, I don't feel the draft when I walk up the stairs, and I have screens that fit so I can actually open windows to let fresh air in without worrying about flies or stink bugs flying in. Life is good.

So, about the garden. The pepper plants are the only thing that made it through the summer with flying colors. The photo above is of habanero peppers, but our 3 bell pepper plants are doing well too. The fruit are small, but it's nice not to have to buy peppers at the store.


Things That Didn't Work

{Mortgage Lifter on August 1}

{Mortgage Lifter on September 21--dry as a bone}

The Mortgage Lifter tomatoes never did take off. If you remember I posted a Mortgage Lifter SOS back in August because the plants were not producing anything. Actually, that's not true--one plant grew one tomato and that was it. Some suggested giving them an Epsom salt spray, which I did. That, plus the slightly cooler temperatures after the heat wave broke in August, seemed to help the plant that already had a tomato, because many more flowers appeared. Unfortunately, none of those flowers resulted in a tomato. The other plant was sucked dry by a tomato horn work. I came back from Maine to find that plant brown and dry, and Friends, I touched that creepy worm while moving the plant around. I almost died. Anyway, no luck with the ML variety this year. Not sure if I'll try again next year. But, as you can see, the basil has got on smashingly!

Also, before I left for Maine, this is what the two surviving corn stalks looked like. This was the first time I tried growing corn. They were tasseling and we were looking forward to the home-grown sweet corn later in summer. Alas, we got back from Maine to find both stalks cut down and the corn completely chewed up (by the evil squirrel). Wah-wah.


A Pleasant Surprise

I want to end on a high note.Although squirrels and rabbits dug up all my sunflower seedlings and plants, one sunflower made it!  This is the only picture I managed to take, a little blurry, sorry about that. It attracted lots of bees, unfortunately a little too late in the season to help pollinate my veggies. But it was nice to have a sunny sunflower in my garden. They're my favorite flower, that's why they're on my blog header. Some of the seeds have dropped to the ground and I've seen a few new sunflower volunteers popping up. I doubt they'll make it through the freeze that's coming soon, but I was happy to see at least one sunflower pop up in my garden.

Did your garden have a good summer?

Harvest Monday, August 13

July 21 squash harvest

                                                      
Wow--is it already August 13??? I realized I haven't posted about my veggie harvests since June, but i've been taking pictures of harvests, so I'm going to talk about it all at once here.

My squash plants have pretty much ended their production cycles, and we yanked out all the dead brown plants over the weekend. This wasn't a good year for squash for us, between the squash bugs, vine borers, and cucumber beetles, but I managed to get a few. We grew zucchini, yellow crookneck, and the pale green one above is Sweet Gourmet (all from Burpee). Back in July when the squash production started to slow down, I thought about starting some new seeds, but time got away from me and then we went to Maine, and now I think it's too late. Ah well, there's always next year!

July 26 harvest

Then came the cucumber harvests. Despite the beetles, the cucumber plants have done really well, and did I mention they're growing in containers? Cucumbers grow well in containers, by the way! We used to put up a trellis for the vines to climb, but it got messy, so now we just let the vines hang over the side of the deck. It's a hanging garden! I tried to make tzatziki with these cukes but it came out really runny. I didn't have Greek yogurt on hand, and even though I tried to drain the yogurt and seeded the cukes, it still came out watery. I plan to try again with Greek yogurt. I spent an unreasonable amount of time on the internet yesterday  researching how to make non-runny tzatziki while I watched the Olympics. (I think I'll be trying this version of the recipe next).

August 1 harvest

 Right before the Maine trip we pulled every and any vegetable that had any color in it so that the squirrels wouldn't feast on them while we were gone. Clockwise from the top, we harvested cucumbers, habanero peppers, anaheims, jalapeños, pepperoncini, banana peppers, and Sweet Snack tomatoes.

Nothing EVER bothers the peppers, not squirrels, birds, bugs, anything (except for the occasional spider mite). We brought all of these to Maine and grilled the peppers one night when we all cooked out. The tomatoes are Burpee Sweet Snack and the plants have been producing well. Yay!

August 8 harvest

As you can see, August is going to be about the tomatoes {knock on wood, cross your fingers, make a wish}, although I'm nowhere near harvesting the amount of tomatoes I have in past year.  (No change on the Mortgage Lifter situation, I'll write a tomato update post later this week). Most exciting--the ground cherries are starting to come in!! They're the little nubbins in the container with husks. (I ordered them from SESE and first wrote about them here, if you'd like to see). We're growing two varieties of pink tomatoes--Burpee Pink Girl hybrids (left, next to the cuke) and Burpee Pink Brandywine (heirloom, single one on the right with the long stem). We bought both as small plants and I want to see which plant produces better.

Not pictured: basil. I've harvested about a cup of basil so far and have added it to sauces, Caprese salads, and pesto.

So far this season I've harvested 11 cucumbers, 4 ½ pounds of squash, just over 2 pounds of peppers, and about 4.3 pounds of tomatoes. I track all my harvests on this tab.

I'm linking up with Daphne's Dandelions Harvest Monday meme. Check it out to see what other gardeners are harvesting this week.

Best and Worst of my Garden - July 2012

I was up late watching the Olympic games and Breaking Bad (well , fell asleep halfway through that show) and my brain isn't totally focused yet, but I need to recap the Best/Worst of my little garden this month.

The "Worst" this month goes to the squirrels making off with my produce. It's actually just one squirrel, the mangy brown one that's torturing me. I was about to call a truce and then I found this on my deck. {Serenity now......}

The "Best" of my garden this month is that other parts of my garden are doing OK. The peppers are growing nicely. (These habaneros are growing upside down!)

My tomatoes (the ones that the squirrels have left alone) are blushing. (This picture is of the Marglobes, supposedly very good for making sauces. Can't wait to actually try them!)

And the ground cherry plants are coming along beautifully. After several false starts, the two seedlings that survived are growing strong and there is fruit on the branches.

Deb over at Deb's Garden wrote this lovely post about experiencing the garden, the elements, the weather, the soil, and being aware of it rather than just going through the motions of gardening. I often find myself falling into the trap of just getting my garden chores done so I can move on to something else involving air conditioning, but the garden is much more rewarding when I slow down and pay attention to what's going on. Gardening has taught me to be patient and trust nature (like with the ground cherries pulling through), to be flexible when things don't go as planned (like with the death of my potatoes and starting over), and I'm always amazed that a beautiful flower or vegetable or fruit can grow from a tiny seed. Despite the "Worsts", the "Bests" make gardening so rewarding!

Please link up below if you'd like to share your Best and Worst gardening experiences this month. I'm only going to visit garden sites for the next couple of weeks to avoid accidentally seeing the Olympic spoilers on the news sites.;)

June Harvests

It was too hot this weekend to do anything but stay inside and watch the Olympic trials. The streets were more crowded than usual, traffic seemed as heavy as it does during weekday rush hour. I wonder if these were all people who had lost power and were going somewhere cool? So lucky we didn't lose power from the Friday night storm.


We've harvested a fair amount of vegetables so far. The jalapeno and green bell peppers above came from the plants we overwintered. The bell peppers were small and total weight was about 10 ounces. The handful of jalapenos were about 2 ounces (they're small but mighty!)




In other pepper news, our new banana pepper plant has cranked out about 4 ounces worth of peppers. We put some on the grill last week when cooking burgers, and they had a nice mild flavor, not spicy at all.


That tiny zucchini looks like a jalapeno pepper. Sneaky!


We're in a lull right now with the squash plants. We've harvested about 2 1/2 pounds of zucchini and yellow squash so far, but the plants seem to be on break now. I've seen a lot of male flowers, and only two or three females amongst all the plants. We usually help the fruit along with some hand pollination, though I have seen quite a few bees in the garden.




Finally, we have garlic and onions. We stuck the sprouting garlic cloves in the ground last fall just to see if they'd grow into something, having never grown garlic before. The tops were brown and on the ground, and this is what popped up when I pulled them. Nothing big here, but it's nice to have some garden fresh garlic in the pantry, especially when participating in my local meal challenges. Same for the onions--these two onions weight about half a pound and smell so good! There are still a few more in the ground which look ready to harvest, so I'll be pulling them this week.


Thanks to everyone who left encouraging comments on my last post about my potatoes' death. I guess these things just happen sometimes. Hope you're staying cool, wherever you are.

Update: Forgot to mention that I'm linking up with Daphne's Dandelions to show off my harvests. Check out her site to see what other gardeners have harvested.

I'm also linking up with Two Gardens' Garden Bloggers Harvest Day. Visit their site to see their own beautiful photos and what gardeners around the world are harvesting.

Working for the Weekend

hostas 4-14-12, originally uploaded by Bumble Lush.

I'm sooooo glad it's the weekend. Work has been busy and frustrating lately, and I can't wait for this project to be finished (4 more weeks!)

These are a few odds and ends around my garden.

First, my second hosta is making a comeback. You can sort of see the shoots on the right of the photo above. I'm not sure why one sprouted so much faster than the other. That's never happened before. I was worried that the one on the right wasn't going to come back, but I'm glad it did. Although they're somewhat plain, I do love these plants.



I have a volunteer parsley plant! It looks great too. It appeared in our small yard patch where we're growing onions. Something bad happened to my container parsley, so I'm happy to see some in the garden.




Remember the saga with the pepper plants I tried to over winter? Only two survived--a jalapeno plant and a golden bell pepper plant.




The jalapeno plant already has a fruit. I'm sad we lost so many pepper plants to aphids, but we have a lot of pepper seedlings going so I'm hoping to replenish our pepper crops this summer.

I'm off to Baltimore this weekend to hang out with a couple of college girlfriends. Have a great weekend!

Almost Indoor Pepper Garden

{sub-title: Garden Fail #1}

Many weeks ago we decided to over-winter several pepper plants in our office. Many still had ripe fruit on them and it's way too cold to leave them outside at night.

We have overwintered this two-year-old anaheim pepper plant before. I started it from seed in spring 2009, and this is the exact same plant. This will be the third winter that we bring it inside. It's still cranking out nice-looking peppers! (I gave this plant its own special post here).

That's the anaheim plant in the green pot. We brought in the cherry, bell, serrano, and jalapeno peppers overwinter. The office actually gets a little humid with all the plants and the sunlight, and we water as necessary. We'd never over-wintered this many plants before, and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if they would all make it.

{Yellow bell pepper that I harvested from the indoor crop}

For example, we harvested this big juicy yellow pepper from the plants indoors, as well as a handful of other serranos and cherry peppers. Everything seemed to be going well until we went in one day and saw that one of the plants had exploded in aphids. We took that plant outside so the aphids wouldn't infest the other plants. Once again, everything seemed to be going well until I went in last week and saw almost every single plant crawling with aphids. I'm talking it looked like the pots were moving. It was indescribably disgusting. We moved them all outside again, but at that point the cold temperatures were too much for the plants and they just died. 

We were able to save a few that didn't have any aphids on them. Don't they look pathetic?

So the lesson I learned was, wait until the temps are cooler before bringing plants inside in case there are bugs waiting to manifest themselves. I hope they pull through, especially my 3-year-old anaheim pepper plant. 

Do you overwinter any vegetable plants?

Garden Harvest Welcome Home

The garden did well while we were on vacation. It rained a lot here, so the plants didn't get thirsty. The peppers did really, really well while we were gone, despite the cool fall temperatures that have settled around the DC area. We have more purple peppers to look forward to.

And what a wonderful homecoming gift--we harvested a couple of bell peppers, choricero peppers, a pint of cherry peppers, and a handful of cayenne, jalapeno, and green  beans when we got home last week.

I should have mentioned in my anniversary post a Happy Anniversary to my wonderful husband. He's definitely the muscle in the Bumble Lush garden. He does all the heavy lifting and is always on bug patrol. I wouldn't have this garden without him. Plus, he's super cute. Love you! xoxoxoxox