Harvest

Despite my fears that our two veggie gardens will dry up and blow away with all the relentless heat we've had, we harvested our first garden items the other night: a gorgeous medium-sized head of broccoli, and two funny, sort of hard (but nicely red) Early Girl tomatoes. (Note: by "our first garden items," I mean the ones we planted ourselves. This doesn't take into account the piles of peas we ate off the vine, nor the few asparagus spears we ate from the plants over by the potting shed, nor does it count the handfuls of white chard I've been plucking and feeding to the cows.)


I watered the big garden for a couple of hours two nights ago, and that, coupled with the heat yesterday, led to an explosion of growth. The beets look like they might amount to something, we have several little pickling cucumbers growing away, and the corn has gained a couple inches. We went down the row of cauliflower and broke the first leaves down to shade the developing heads as a few were showing signs of scald. I suppose I'll have to start picking green bell peppers soon, too...most of the ones on the single plant that lived have bits of sunburn, blackened skin that look unattractive. The largest pepper is probably only two inches in diameter, but I'm not sure how much larger they'll get, especially with the number of smaller ones growing on the same plant. Does anyone know?



Our broccoli was so tasty...I can't wait to cut more. It was freakishly hot Tuesday night (wait, that's been the story every night lately, so it seems), and we had fresh caught salmon and tuna grilling on cedar planks with Tom Douglas's Salmon Rub With Love (http://www.tomdouglas.com/products/spice-rub.html - the Chicken one is super fabulous), so I opted for raw broccoli with ranch dressing to dip in. Can't wait to see what we can harvest next!