Summer Veggies

It's been such a sad, sad summer in my garden. It's been so cool that these were the first two tomatoes to ripen and there've been only about five more. None of the bigger tomatoes are red yet...although one of them is a yellow/green tomato anyway. The basil's all ready to go, but no tomatoes to eat it with! The string beans have been fun though. Mam helped me plant a variety of colors, so we've got purple, yellow and green beans. They're good too...although the purple beans actually turn green when you cook them. You can see a couple of funny little squashes. I thought I was buying yellow crook-necked squash, but clearly I blew it. These are little, green spaceship-shaped squashes instead.

Fortunately, I got the netting over the pear tree in time to save our crop from squirrels this year. There are tons of ripening pears out there. And our apple tree will have a crop for the first time this year too...of three different apple varieties. I'm looking forward to seeing how that turns out...although I may have let our little tree become a tad overambitious this year!

Summer's Last Gasp

It's been weeks since I've posted and summer was officially over two days ago. The blog posts are piling up in my head, but that's not a very reliable place to keep them, especially these days.

It was another summer with a bountiful harvest, especially of tomatoes. Early in the season, I lamented that they looked like they had blossom end rot. Some of them did, but even those were salvageable.I love to take pictures of my vegetables just because it somehow makes life seem so colorful and serene...even when it's kind of bland and decidedly not serene at all.

To finish up our summer, we headed out to the ballpark one more time on Labor Day. We got to see the Giants' new pitcher, Brad Penny. We got to see him pretty up close and personal, actually since our seats were about 20 rows up from the bullpen.He's one intimidating-looking dude. The kids came prepared. Although Mam refused to wear her new Giants hat, both of them had insisted on painting their own signs for the event. Not necessarily pretty, but they did the job and how could they be that unattractive with such ethusiastic fans under them?It was a good game. I hadn't wanted to bring Mam because she was predictably pretty annoying. But she was pretty cute for an hour or so. By the end, she only wanted to go home. And home was brought to us by this guy, the Giants' closer, Brian Wilson.We're not always so generous in our praise of Mr. Wilson in our household, but he did a fine job on Labor Day and made the whole trip worthwhile. Thanks, Brian!

I would have loved to take Smunch to see the Giants play the Cubs (one of his other favorite teams) this weekend, but with so many other potential activities and invites, it just wasn't in the cards for us. Maybe next year...

Harvest is here!

And ohmigosh, it couldn't be more lovely. Well...it might be more lovely if we weren't in the quarantine area for the light brown apple moth and I could give more of my beautiful produce away. Remember this? Well, my vegetable garden is now a massive tangle of tomatoes and pumpkin vines. We've had a bunch of crook-necked squash and strawberries and it looks as though we might have a couple of pumpkins in time for Halloween. We've got tomatoes coming out our ears and string beans and basil. It's truly lovely. Oh, and pear season is just around the corner. Yum! Until then, my colorful tapestry of tomatoes and weekly trips to the farmer's market will just have to do.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Like the new look? I thought it was time for a change and somehow the previous template didn't feel so much like me. The photos look prettier on this dark background too.

So, it's spring, which means we were due for a massive gardening weekend. It turned out to be this weekend. Daddy repaired the raised beds in the garden a couple of weeks ago, so it was obviously time for me to make a trip to the nursery. I spared Daddy the torture of watching me impulsively buy as many little seedlings as I can possibly squeeze into the garden...and a few more just for fun. The fact that I spent less than $100 on plants was considered a major success.
I love this time of year. And it's not just because I get to go crazy the plant store. I love planting all those little seedlings and seeing all the new color in the garden. It's so fun to envision everything growing into a crazy, beautiful mass of colorful veggies and great big flowers.
It rarely turns out that way, of course! All the promise of the season has yet to meet my black thumb at this point. I think the snails could hear all that digging and their slimey little mouths started watering. I've created a virtual gastropod buffet. I love them that much.

I'm tired. I'm probably a little sunburned despite slathering myself in sunblock. The driplines are in. The Sluggo is on. And yeah, I'll be out there tomorrow inspecting everything over again.