Friday, July 20, 2012

When tomatoes attack

Today my car spent the day getting serviced, and the lack of wheels plus the cooler temperatures meant that today was an ideal day for doing some housekeeping in the planting beds. One zucchini plant was discarded, weeds were pulled, bugs were picked off, and dead leaves were stripped off vines. By far, though, the most time-consuming and difficult task was re-staking and pruning the tomato vines, which had gotten quite out of control. Vines heavy with fruit were sagging towards the ground and getting tangled with the other plants, and sucker branches were so dense that air couldn't circulate properly. At one point I lifted up a branch that had obscured one of the cucumber vines and found a ready-to-pick cucumber that I had never noticed before. The very hot weather that lingered for over two weeks has  kept me pretty much out of the garden, but now the plants are thinned, staked, and tidy.

In the meantime, Miss Claire has a new homesteading project: yogurt! She's come into a yogurt maker and at this moment there's a quart of the stuff cooking. We've got some raspberry and peach jam leftover from last summer's canning experiment, and I bet it will be fabulous mixed in!

What I picked today: a few green beans, one zucchini, and a cucumber.
Ready soon: corn, tomatoes, spaghetti squash

Theme of the day:



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