Back in June, I posted a "first half of the summer" update about our little garden. We had just been able to expand into our neighbors yard, and we were thrilled!
This post picks up on June 22 and will share some social media posts and pics from the last part of summer (with the date and caption first, and the photos after):
June 22: Pulled up all of our overgrown cilantro (3 in the old beds, 4 in the new). Got 3 small “cucamelon” plants from a stranger - they will produce grape-sized sour cucumbers that look like tiny watermelons. They went in the bare spot in the old bed. The new bed has 3 smaller cilantros started, and I will drop in a few more seeds tomorrow. Drying a few bundles of cilantro, and hoping the cucamelons take off!
July 1: First zucchini of the year! And I built a little trellis for the cucamelons - still curious about those little guys.
July 2: This morning in the garden: the old beds are doing great. These cucumbers put us at 26 on the year so far. The big tomatoes are coming along! In the new beds, the tomato plants are getting too big - may need to trim. And the chipmunks are digging up our cilantro seeds (3rd planting), so I’ll put down some chicken wire over those. I’ve never grown so many cherry tomatoes on each vine (16+!), so hopefully they keep doing well!
July 7: Thiiiiis close to having cherry tomatoes.
July 8: Today’s #UrbanGarden harvest. We’ve now harvested over 40 cucumbers this year. Our neighbor (who’s yard we took over for our 2nd garden) loves tomatoes, and she *really* loves cherry tomatoes, so these first 4 are going to her (with lots more on the way - she’ll get plenty). And the boys wanted to check on the carrots... so we did. #TooSoon #StillGonnaEatIt
July 9: Man... I didn’t think expanding our garden would go *this* well. Here’s today’s harvest from our small beds.
July 15: #TodaysHarvest #UrbanGarden
July 18: Morning harvest. #UrbanGarden
July 25: Post-vacation harvest. That’s our 3rd big tomato of the year. And Henry was thrilled to find a tiny cucamelon forming!
July 26: Found a tasty new way to use up some garden produce: America's Test Kitchen’s “zucchini fritters with cucumber and garlic yogurt sauce.” Amazing. And our beefsteak tomatoes are coming along!
July 30: Our 4 small beds are doing so well! In the last 24 hours, we’ve harvested 80 cherry tomatoes (with the bowl going to our neighbor as “rent” for letting us use her yard for our 2 new beds), a meal of green beans, and 30 beefsteak tomatoes! And not pictured: 2 zucchinis and 3 cucumbers. #BLTSeason #UrbanGarden
Aug 1: This morning’s harvest. With 22 cucumber plants in 5 linear feet, it’s easy to miss one. (Like the clunker on the left.) At my wife’s suggestion, I fertilized today for the first time since planting to help push out the veggies in late summer.
Aug 7: Today’s harvest included our single-day record of 119 cherry tomatoes! (And 15 beefsteak tomatoes, 2 cucumbers, and 56 green beans.) And our yellow peppers are looking better than ever as we have 9 formed already - just waiting for them to turn!
(Yearly count at this point: 554 cherry tomatoes, 67 beefsteaks, and 78 cucumbers.)
Aug 15: Henry came to “help” me in the garden... but just snacked on green beans the entire time.
Aug 17: Cucamelon harvest and taste-test!
Aug 21: The start of our carrot harvest: my “helpers” just spent time helping themselves. #CharlieAteFive
Aug 25: Our carrots are ready to pull (they’re a smaller, sweeter, less bitter variety), but we’re leaving them for the time being. The boys come out to “help” me in the garden, but instead end up eating however many carrots they can pull. And we’re ok with that. #VeggieIntake #JustWipeOffTheDirt
Sept 5: Pulled the green beans today (foreground of left pic) so I could plant another round of scallions, cilantro, and lettuce in their place. Production of everything is DEFINITELY slowing down, but still got this today (plus a zucchini that went home with Steph).
Sept 6: Our “strategy” of not picking our carrots all at once because the boys love to pick them and eat them immediately so it’s a good way to sneak in some extra veggie intake has been working well. But don’t tell them.
Sept 13: A few more cucamelons and a beautiful yellow pepper! #UrbanGarden
Sept 17: Still getting some small harvests from our tiny #UrbanGarden. And round 2 of scallions have started popping up nicely.
Here's a bit from
a blog post in late September about our Sept 23rd harvest:
A few days ago, I picked all of the remaining carrots from our small urban garden. They were "ready" weeks ago, but the boys have enjoyed pulling them up and immediately eating them, so we've left them in the garden for just that reason: a positive veggie experience for our boys (and an easy uptick in their veggie consumption). But I came in with a handful of the 60 remaining carrots on Wednesday:
Extra small once you see them with the tops removed.
1 lb 1 oz for 60 carrots! (Hand for scale.)
Found this little guy who snuck in on the tops.
Just 5/8s of an inch!
Our tiny onions went into the roast as well. (Hand for scale.)
Sept 25: The heat over the last few days gave our #UrbanGarden a little push. There’s more coming, but this is definitely our last big single-day harvest of the season (156 cherry tomatoes!).
Oct 8: It was a great year for our cherry tomatoes, but a poor year for our regular tomatoes. It’s unusual to get our “sexiest” tomato in October. #HubbaHubba Happy they are still coming though!!
Oct 17: It’s going to freeze tonight, so we cleaned up the garden. The amount of green cherry tomatoes highlight how well those have done all year. Our second planting of scallions ended up not growing too big. The boys loved finding/pulling up that 5’ tomato root! All 4 beds are cleared out for winter!
Oct 19: Tried something new with our green cherry tomatoes. I took 200 of them, 5 onions from my Mom’s garden, some garlic, jalapeños, and herbs, and roasted them before simmering them on the stovetop for a bit with lime juice. After a few pulses in the the blender, we have some green salsa! It’s pretty spicy, and unusually creamy - I wish it had a bit more texture. I can see taking a spoonful of this and smearing it on a tortilla before adding taco fillings. It made two pint jars: one for now, and one for the freezer. The boys loved that the house smelled like Chipotle when they got home.
Here's the recipe. I was a little shy on onions as they were STRONG (fresh farm onions), and I used 2 cups of jalapeño that were seeded and de-ribbed (and still it's plenty spicy - but not TOO spicy). I added fresh lime and lemon juice (not bottled). I maybe would have roasted them longer as I did 35-40 mins but nothing was too broke down. After the roast and the simmer, I pulsed it in 2 batches in the blender because it still looked like the 3rd photo and needed to be broke down a LOT more. [I did this again, and I used all lime juice instead of lemon and lime, and it was WAY to "limey." And I roasted everything for more like 75 minutes while stirring it every 15 or so, and that was good.]
Oct 25: I know I’ve shared this story before, but I don’t care. One of my few memories of my Great-Grandma Anna is the green tomato pie she would make for me and my sister, and she’d tell us it was apple pie so we would eat it.
Today, my mom tried my version, and immediately said it reminded her of great grandma‘s pie. I smiled. (It may have been the first time in 35 years that she had it!) Henry said “It doesn’t really taste like apple, but I LIKE it!”
This pie always marks the end of fall.
The last pic is the piece I delivered to my neighbor who let us garden in her yard all summer.
Nov 2: Ahhh.... the joy of a stocked freezer in the fall.
I posted this photo on Nov 20 that showed my tallies from my 2020 garden:
HERE'S OUR TOTAL COUNT:(Roughly in order from most impressive to least impressive)
Cherry Tomatoes: 1,620 + 400 green in salsa! (Over 2,000 tomatoes from 2 plants!)
Beefsteak Tomatoes: 179 + 20 that turned red after picking them green + 16 in green tomato pie. (Not a great year for these.)
Cucumbers: 130
Zucchini: 30 (Not much, but came nicely all throughout the summer!)
Green Beans: 14 meals or pickings (approx 682 beans)
Carrots: 209
Onions: 18 (all small)
Yellow Peppers: 6
Green Onions: approx 55 (25-30 in our spring harvest, and 27 in the fall)
Radishes (in the spring only): approx 40
Cucamelons: 9
Lettuce Heads (in the spring only): 2
Herbs (in order from most to least): basil, cilantro, rosemary, oregano.
Leaf lettuce in a planter picked a few times for sandwich toppings throughout mid-summer.
I don't know that we're making any wildly different plans for next year's garden. We were so thrilled with everything this year!
My first planting of green onions was great as I planted them close to 2 zucchinis, and they were pulled just as the zucchinis were about to take over that area - that was good planning that worked out exactly as I had hoped. The onions, however, stayed small as tomatoes blocked out their light, so that was less than ideal. And we've NEVER had great luck with peppers (not enough sun is my theory, as it's shaded until around noon).
And I need to keep getting small plants to "a certain size" before transplanting them outside as the chipmunks like to dig them up. The 2nd planting of cilantro barely amounted to anything as they got dug up, and the 3rd planting gave us nothing. Same with a 2nd planting of lettuce. Maybe more cages would be helpful too.
Here's the "first half of the summer" update showing our new beds being built. Bring on the 2021 garden!
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