late june garden update--it's summer!

seems like it’s been a long time since i’ve posted about what’s going on in the munchie patch. all i’ve had time for lately is throwing up a few photos--even now i shouldn’t be on here, i should be sleeping because i have to get up in six hours. but there’s so much happening, and i desperately want to talk about it! my snowy eggplant has three fruits already, the largest of which is pictured above. turkish orange eggplant has two tiny fruits, but the other two eggplant varieties are just barely starting to bloom.

i picked two more ripe tomatoes yesterday.

fifteen plants have now set fruit.

this tomato has fuzzy, angora-style leaves and grows stripy orange/red fruit. i love to pet it. it was so adorable as a seedling.

i’m nerding out over these fuzzy-leaf tomatoes...although as far as i know there's no advantage to them aside from the obvious cuddliness. i found a variety called “fuzzy wuzzy” that has fuzzy leaves and fuzzy-skinned, red striped fruit. the only seed source i could find was this guy in the netherlands, so i very carefully composed and translated an email to him in dutch, and he wrote me back in english. the seeds arrived this week--i also got sarga cseresznye peppers, whippersnapper and lime green salad tomatoes. my collection of tomato seeds now numbers 70 varieties, and total seed collection is over 270. i should cut myself off but i won’t.

black hungarian pepper, close to maturity (i think?)

marbles pepper. almost all the peppers are doing so great, with the exception of bell peppers that stubbornly refuse to set fruit and a choricero pepper plant that’s just puny. i started it too late and transplanted it too early.

some favas are almost ready to pick. i pinched out the tops so they won’t get any taller. they have such interesting square-shaped stalks.

i’m getting a lot of sugar snap peas right now...almost none of them stick around long enough to be photographed. i learned i’ve been picking them too young for the last couple years--now i let them plump up much more and they taste so much sweeter.

first garlic--i pulled these because they were getting crowded out by other plants. i used them as “wet garlic” (a.k.a. “green garlic”--garlic that hasn’t been dried) and made delicious garlic bread.

first purple radish, and possibly the last. i think it’s gotten too hot for them. it was such a cool spring, but when it turned to summer (literally, from the very first day of summer) a switch was flipped somewhere and it suddenly became really hot. it was 91 today, 95 a few days ago.

this might be the first time i’ve remembered to harvest oregano before it blooms. i harvested and dried a basket full--cut back a lot because it was strangling its sage neighbor.

the raspberries are fruiting but not as much as i hoped. i think i let too many canes grow, they might be overcrowded.

nasties bloomed this week. they’re not as vigorous as the ones i grew last year, unfortunately.

around five borage plants started blooming this week too.

pumpkin is blooming but i only see males right now,

i’m just a few days away from harvestable zucchini,

roses are in full bloom,

some lilies are popping open in the front yard,

sage and thyme are both blooming,

venous orange is still blooming but the other two citrus plants are only growing foliage, no buds.

i made a goal to not buy any salad greens for the whole month of june. tall order--i eat salads almost every day. the garden supplied me with enough to feed myself and give bags away to friends and family.