An Update From My Garden - August 23

Good Morning and welcome back to my garden blog.  After an extremely hot, humid and dry summer, it has finally started to cool down a bit.  We got some major rain storms so that our grass is once again green.  The garden is much happier and here are some of the things I picked yesterday to put into a salad.  We have the very first broccoli of the season.  It looks very nice and fingers crossed that we will get a lot more broccoli.  Then we have some cherry and Roma tomatoes.  They taste really sweet and are slowly getting ripe.  Then we have our kale.  We have lots and lots of kale.  So much kale from 3 plants that we are sick of eating kale.  Next year only one plant.

Sadly, most of our zucchini plants did not survive the drought or the zucchini fungus.  One plant after the other shriveled up and died.  It was one of the worst zucchini growing seasons ever.  Another of our failures this year, was our cucumbers.  They flower, you get a tiny cucumber and then they die.  I'm not sure what the problem is, but next year we may have to rethink our placement of the cucumbers or even if we will attempt to grow them again.

Gardening is hard to predict what will and won't grow.  It totally depends on the weather and the bugs.  If we get too much rain or not enough things won't grow.  If you get bugs or animals they will eat your plants.  We plant on a wing and a prayer.

Way Too Many Weeds

So last night I set out to clean up the garden.  The weeds seem to be the only thing doing really well during our summer long heatwave and drought.  I spent over 2 hours pulling this grass like weed from the garden.  I filled up two huge yard wast bags with this grassy stuff.  It was so hot, even after 8 p.m. and I almost passed out.  There is still a little left to do, but really I have absolutely no desire to do this again.  Next year when we plant our garden, I'm going to make sure that the soil we buy says pasteurized.  I'm very sure that the cheap soil that we bought lead to the weeds.  I guess you get what you paid for.

Squash Was Yummy!

We cooked up the spaghetti squash with our dinner last night and it was really good.  All I did, was cut off both ends and then cut down the middle and removed the seeds.  In a glass microwave pie plate, I placed both halves down with water in the glass microwave pie plate and cover with Saran Wrap until soft.  Once it cools a bit, scrape out the inside with a fork and add some tomato sauce.  It was so good.

We also had a salad from the garden.  I cut off some kale, tomatoes, cucumber and added some shaved carrots.  You can't get much more local than that.