Garden 2026 is Upon Us!

Our Garden - July 25, 2026

We're back at it for another season! This is our 13th year gardening in this particular spot. (12th if you don't count the year I seeded all the beds in flowers and just let it go.) Over those years, I have realized one important thing: I'm a lazy gardener. I really enjoy gardening...every now and then when the mood strikes me. I wish I was a spend-time-in-the-garden-everyday type of gal, but I'm not. This revelation is a good thing! It has led me to plan this year's garden with my laziness in mind. 

Nearly everything in this year's garden is as close to "set it and forget it" as I could get. I planted summer and winter squash, pumpkins, beans (three kinds), corn, melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, and garlic. I've weeded a couple of times, watered and fertilized, but overall I've only gone into the garden a couple times a week to look over its progress. 

Oh! I did plant radishes too and they turned out beautifully.

Most of the work on the garden was at the beginning of the season. Let's go back in time to the middle of May. Since I had no plans to plant hardy crops like chard, beets, or peas, there was no need to get out and clean up the garden any earlier. My general rule of thumb is to plant the garden on Memorial Day weekend. This year, since that fell on the earliest date possible, I actually waited until the next weekend. Back on May 10, however, I did go through and clear the garden beds of weeds and last year's detritus. I also repaired the upper extension of the garden fence. We added an extra four feet to the top of the fence last year in an effort to keep the deer out (click here to read about that). Over the winter, the wind and the weight of the snow broke many of the bamboo uprights, so I had to repair them in anticipation of this year's onslaught of deer.

The garden on May 10, ready for clearing and repairs.

Nearly three weeks later, I did the actual planting. Everything was from seed in the main garden. I did try to start some seeds indoors, but that was not as successful as in years past. That failure didn't effect me much, though, as I had not planned on transplanting anything into the garden beds in the first place. The first thing I did was dig into the compost bin. 

Mmmm compost!

Rather than add the compost broadly to all the beds, I targeted application to just where the seeds would be planted. I did a lot of digging, but it seemed like the most efficient thing to do.

Targeted composting.

Once that was all set, I put the seeds into the ground, watered them in, wished them luck ("Do your duty!"), took a picture, and walked away.

Not quite like walking away from an explosion. 

Over the next two weeks, all my little seeds started growing (except for one zucchini) and I occasionally pulled weeds to give them the best shot.

June 14

And two weeks after that, the little seedlings were bigger plants and I was weeding less.

June 29

A month after that, the garden is beautifully lush. The vegetable plants are easily out competing the weeds and we've started to harvest. After the radishes, our first fruits of the garden were patisson strie melange squash. The heirloom pattypan squash are fun and funky. They taste pretty good too.

They can be eaten as summer squash or left to become decorative gourds.

The tri-color garden beans have started to come in and we're on the verge of being overwhelmed by cucumbers (my favorite time of the year!).

Yesterday's haul.

My new favorite thing to grow is garlic. I had never considered planting it in the past. For some reason, I thought it was too complicated or too much work. But, in the fall of 2024, we planted garlic just to have scapes the next spring. We ended up actually getting a few bulbs of garlic. I replanted eight of the cloves last fall and all of them grew! We had a lovely, tiny side dish of scapes one night for dinner and, just this morning, I harvested eight beautiful bulbs. I only have a 50/50 idea of what variety of garlic it is. I originally planted two types. Only one grew and I don't know which one. But that's okay. I like the taste of it and really love how easy and effortless it is to grow.

The garlic bed at the end of May.

Yummy garlic scapes!

Garlic sharing its bed with the morning glories.

Look at those beautiful bulbs!

I think that's enough of a report for today. As always, I hope to actually write here more often. Perhaps I actually will this year since the garden itself is so little work! 

Golden zucchini

Honeynut squash

Picklebush cucumbers

Honeybees busy at work!

A couple of our resident lurkers.

Enjoying the Vegetables of Our Labor

 Every evening after dinner, my husband and I go out to the garden. Nearly every single day since the end of June, we have picked something while there. Sometimes it was just a handful of snap peas. Other times, it filled that nice old square gathering basket we've had for years. It's been a lovely, steady stream of fresh produce filling our refrigerator. So, what have we done with our harvest?

The daily haul on July 27, 2024

Pak Choi

Our first bulk harvest in June was the pak choi. We cooked up most of the little greens with some butter beans (from a can), garlic, herbs, and a touch of vinegar to make a fairly hearty dish. A sprinkle of bacon bits really made it.

Beets

People either love or hate beets. I happen to love them. This year, I planted some beet seeds that have been sitting in my seed collection for several years. I wasn't sure if any would actually grow, but they did. The vast majority of the small crop were chioggia beets, which have lovely interior rings like a target. There were also two or three Detroit dark red beets in the mix. I picked them in two rounds. The first batch I cooked whole in our Instant Pot, skinned them, then sliced them up. I toasted a couple rounds of naan, spread a mix of mayonnaise and feta cheese on them, layered on the beet slices and sprinkled it all with fresh thyme. Sooooo good!

A couple weeks later, I picked the rest of the beets, Instant Pot-ed and peeled them again, then used them to make pickled beet eggs. The recipe is simple. I put 1cup of cider vinegar, 1 cup of water, half a cup of sugar, and a teaspoon of salt together in a pan and heated it until everything dissolved. I also sliced up the one and only Detroit beet and added it to the pan. The chioggia are a light pink color when cooked and I worried they wouldn't dye the eggs that beautiful fuchsia. I put six hard boiled eggs and the whole chioggia beets into a glass canning jar and poured the vinegar mixture on top. After a few days in the fridge, we pulled them out and had very tasty pickled beet eggs.

Eggs and beets ready to soak up that pickle-y goodness.

That color just three days later!

Green Beans

Actually, they're Royal Burgundy garden beans, but they cook up green. I really love these purple beans because of how well they grow and because they have a built-in cooking indicator - as soon as they turn from deep purple to a beautiful bright green, they are cooked just the right amount. No squishy, overcooked beans! 

My husband is not a huge fan of green beans, so I just had four plants this year. It was still enough for several lunches for me (and the plants are still making beans). One nice way to use them is in ramen. I put a pack of instant soy sauce flavored ramen noodle in a pan with the seasoning pack and enough water to cover the noodles. I then put whole trimmed purple beans around the edges of the noodles before turning on the stove. As the water starts to heat up, I crack a whole egg on top, then put on the lid and let it all come to a boil. As soon as it does, I stir up the egg to make sure it cooks all the way. Within another minute or two the noodles, egg, and beans are all cooked just right.

Green bean and egg ramen with a side of cucumbers and dill.

Cucumbers

For the last month, nearly every meal has had a side of cucumbers - and I love that! This year, I planted a mix of old Chicago Pickling cucumber and Garden Bush Pickle Hybrid cucumber seeds. I'm not sure which ones actually grew, but they are all lovely. I eat them dipped in hummus, swimming in a light vinegar brine as quick-pickles, and mixed with sour cream.

Cucumber slices with sour cream and dill looks a bit slimy but is very tasty.

I also diced them up in salads. For one salad, I used a bag of riced cauliflower as a base. I added diced cucumber, tomato, pepperoncini pepper, and avocado (not from our garden) and dressed it with a little oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper, and fresh flat leaf parsley. 

So cool and fresh on a hot summer day.

Honestly, most of the cucumbers were consumed straight from the fridge all on their own.

Mmmm. Crunchy.

Tomatoes

I didn't start my own tomato seed this year. Instead, I got a grape tomato and a Supersteak tomato plant from a small local garden center. Both have produced a prodigious amount of fruit, though they have been slow to ripen. This is a good thing, however, so we're not overwhelmed by tomatoes. Even so, the grape tomatoes have become a breakfast staple for me, slice up with cottage cheese and fresh chives. 

A breakfast of champions.

 The beefsteaks are perfect for slicing on sandwiches, and that is exactly what we've been doing with them. Toasted white bread, spread with a layer of mayonnaise, topped with thick slices of tomato, and sprinkled with chiffonaded basil. There is no better seasonal treat.

Summer on toast.

Herbs

I've tried to add fresh herbs to as much as I can this summer, which has become much easier since moving some of them from the garden to our new patio container garden. But what we can't use fresh needs to be preserved for the long dark winter. I've dried two rounds of herbs so far, with at least on more batch to be done later in the fall. I have also made pesto to put in the freezer. I went online and found a good basic recipe - 2 cups fresh basil leaves, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 1 small garlic clove, 1/4 teaspoon salt, black pepper to taste, 1/4 cup of oil, and 1/4 cup of grated Parmesan cheese (I don't bother with the pine nuts) - whipped up a batch and then carefully scooped it into a silicone ice cube tray. Each cube is about 1 1/2 tablespoons of pesto. Into the freezer it went. Once they set up, I popped the cubes out of the tray and put them into a sealed container back in the freezer.

One batch down, several more to go. We have A LOT of basil.

Squash

And finally, the squash and zucchini. I love them in so many ways - diced up and sauteed with garlic and herbs, sliced and coated in cornstarch then fried, layered in long slabs instead of noodles in lasagna (we haven't done that one yet because it's been so hot this summer!). A perennial favorite in our house this year has been to spiralize them into zoodles (or squoodles, I guess, depending on variety).  

Zoodles and squoodles together.

These thin-cut curling veggies can then be cooked and topped like spaghetti. I made a nice dish of the mixed yellow squash and zucchini noodles with sliced faux chicken cutlets and several blocks of our homemade pesto.

So creamy and fresh.

I'm going to be so sad when our harvest finally ends and we have to go back to flavorless off-season grocery store produce.

Our August Garden

My middle name is Augusta. Or at least it was until I got married many years ago and the Social Security Administration decided that I could only have one middle name so now my maiden name is my middle name. In my heart, it's still my middle name, though. It was a good choice for both sides of the family - my mother's maternal grandmother and my father's mother were both named Augusta. One would think that I would have some sort of special affinity for August because of my name but I don't. I actually didn't even think of the connection at all until this last week as I considered writing an update on our garden here. 

Anyhoo, the garden has been doing well. It's starting to remind me of an autumn garden, though. We had a cold snap last week that has me ready for fall. That may tint my view a bit but the garden is starting to peter out. It's been a couple of days now since we picked any cucumbers. That had been a half-dozen-a-day thing for a couple weeks. The plants are still setting fruit but they look like the last hoorah - tiny and super prickly. The leaves are starting to give up too.

The cucumbers' leaves are getting crunchy.

Overall, it's been a very fruitful season. There's never a huge amount of any one thing at a time, except for the cucumbers, but we've enjoyed a steady stream of fresh veggies. (Look for another post coming soon telling what we did with our produce.)

A little bit of this and a little bit of that.

The snap peas had a nice long run and are now providing support for some morning glories that seeded themselves from last year. 

It's fun seeing the peas and morning glories intertwining.

Underground, we had a nice daikon crop, which my husband pickled. We also had a handful of two different types of beets. They are all entirely finished now.

Just one of a dozen or so daikons.

Can't beet this!

On the topside, both the yellow squash and zucchini produced well. I would have liked more zucchini. Maybe because I like it so well, it didn't feel the need to overwhelm us, as is so cliche for zucchini. There are still a few small squash on the vine, so we'll probably get a couple more this season.

Yellow there!

Um...I can't think of another pun. It's a zucchini.

The tomatillos put on flowers like crazy but have only made a few fruits so far. The tomatoes, both beefsteak and grape, have put on fruit like crazy. They're just both taking their sweet time turning red. We've started bringing them in as soon as they start to blush so our lovely summer rainstorms don't make them explode before we can pick them. I think they still taste just a good (much better than store-bought, at least) when they ripen inside rather than out on the vine.

At least the tomatillo plant is pretty.

Tomatoes ripening inside...

...and more still waiting to go.

The Three Sisters bed has been doing it's thing mostly untouched all season. The rattlesnake beans grew well as always. They're just starting to dry on the vine now. Similarly, the turtle beans in a different bed put on tons of beans and are now slowly drying before we can shell them. The popcorn seems a bit odd, making two or three ears in the same spot. I've never grown it before, so maybe that's normal. I'm just glad that after being flattened during several thunderstorms, the stalks straightened right back up again. We're just waiting for it to all dry out now. The Long Pie pumpkin vine has woven its way happily between the corn stalks and up the bean trellis. We've picked two them already and there's a third still on the vine.

I love that shell beans are fairly self-sufficient.

I hope the popcorn is doing as it's supposed to. It looks nice.

Two Long Pie pumpkins curing in the dining room.

One more still hanging out.

I'm not sure if our One Too Many pumpkin plant is actually going to have time to do it's thing. The strong seedling we transplanted in June struggled to establish itself. Perhaps it was a bit resentful. The vine finally had a growth spurt just a couple of weeks ago and has filled the entire bed. It has even put on a couple of pumpkins - one the size of a ping-pong ball and one like a baseball. I'm hoping we've got enough warm days ahead so that they can grow and prosper, but the days are getting noticeably shorter. Like with all the garden, we'll have to wait and see.

Finally, our resentful teen pumpkin is becoming a better-adjusted young adult.

You grow little pumpkin! I believe in you!

Not all has been happy fun time in the garden, however. Somehow, a deer or multiple deer, found their way inside. I'm guessing they accidentally hopped the fence while cavorting in the back yard. The yard slopes slightly so the fence on the north side is shorter than on the south side. Once inside, the deer stomped around in most of the beds, ate many of the leaves off my purple snap beans, and decimated the chard. It wasn't a very good year for the chard anyway. It didn't grow very well, I think because the location I chose for it was a bit shady and damp, and then it got leaf miners and I didn't make an effort to remove them. So, we haven't harvested any of it yet and it looks like we might not get much at all. I guess that's the compromise we make when our neighborhood is filled with deer and we do little to discourage them from getting comfortable.

I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.

It's kinda nice just hanging out with the local baby wildlife.