Starting to Put up the Harvest

A typical day's harvest at the moment.

Our refrigerator has finally filled up enough with fresh veg that it was time to start putting some away for the future. I started with the beans because they are by far the easiest. We are growing two plants each of yellow, green, and purple garden beans. That makes for a fist-full or so picked every day. I added about that much to my ramen at lunchtime today but there was still a lot leftover. So into the freezer the rest of them go! Each bean got lovingly rinsed, trimmed, dried, and gently shoved into a quart size freezer bag. No blanching, no muss, no fuss.

Yellow bean on the vine.

All clean!

Bagged up, labeled, and ready for the freezer.

Before I got too busy cleaning beans, I put a pot of water onto the stove to boil. Once I had the beans all bagged up, it was ready for blanching squash. Summer squash takes a little more prep before freezing. I had two types of squash to put up - the patisson strie melange and the yellow zucchini. I cut the patisson into chunks and blanched them for five minutes. I cut the zucchini into thin wedges so they only got three minutes. After their hot baths, they all dried a little on kitchen towels. Then I spread them all out on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and put them into the freezer. Freezing them this way makes it so they stay loose pieces once frozen. I can take out just the amount I want for a meal and leave the rest frozen if I want. I can also add more to the bags later down the line if/when we get overwhelmed with fresh squash again. After a couple hours, I was able to break them up into individual frozen chunks, put them into freezer bags, and returned them to cold storage.

Two varieties of blanched summer squash ready to freeze.

Bagged, labeled, and back into the freezer.

I'm still happily enjoying my cucumber-a-day habit, but that's not enough to go through them all before they start to turn on us. So, I did a couple of things with our abundance of cukes - I made a creamy cucumber soup for dinner this evening and I made some freezer pickles.

This is starting to get out of hand!

Many of our cucumbers have grown into Mobies (what we call the cucumbers that have managed to grow whale sized - Moby Dills!). Fortunately, we've had nice consistent rain this season, so none have turned bitter even as they grew humongous. They are all actually still quite sweet and tasty and made a wonderful soup. I took the four largest, peeled them (which I normally don't do but I'm following a recipe here), scooped out the seeds, diced them up, and put them in a pot with onions, garlic, a little lemon juice, vegetable broth, salt, pepper, and a dash of cayenne. Ten minutes of simmering later, I added some fresh parsley and whirled it all together in the blender. Into the fridge it went to cool. Just before serving, I whisked in some Greek yogurt to make a creamy, slightly spicy, cucumber soup. So good!

It might look like apples, but those are cucumbers!

This is such a delightful, flavorful, cool soup!

And finally, I used six more cucumbers to make quick freezer pickles. I sliced them up, added garlic and dill from our garden and a few red pepper flakes, and poured on a brine. They'll sit for about a week in the freezer before we can try them, but I've made this recipe before and they turned out well. That leaves seven cucumbers untouched, but that seems more manageable.

I love a simple freezer pickle!

Sleep tight proto-pickles. I'll see you in a week!

All of that took a couple of hours and now we have plenty of space in the refrigerator for more fresh produce. I expect it will start to fill up again very soon!

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.

The Wait is Over

For a couple of weeks, we’ve been tending the garden and waiting for the next round of vegetables. Well, they have arrived. A week ago I picked two yellow squash and one zucchini. They were all a little on the small side compared to when we usually pick but I was running out of patience. I sliced them in half the long way and cooked them with just a little oil, salt and pepper and they were fantastic.

A handful of summer squash

It always amazes me how quickly some vegetables go to just about ready to pick to how they heck did they get so big already. Just four days after the first runt squash, we picked two more yellow squash and three zucchini that were just on the edge of being oversized. Then three days after that there are three more zucchini. I really like summer squash – I would not have planted six of them if I didn’t – so this is not a hardship. I’m glad that we’re actually getting so much from the plants this year. Last year we only got a couple squash before the plants quit. The yellow squash never even really got started.

Cukes and Zukes

We’re also starting to get cucumbers. There are only a few big enough to pick so far but there appear to be more on the way. We decided to try to get them to climb this year. We got our hands on some wooden stakes to reuse so we figured we’d give it a try. They are not stellar climbers on their own but once trained seem to be getting the hang of it.

Climbing cucumbers

I was happy to find that the first cucumbers were not bitter. It has been so hot this summer that I worried that they would turn on us like last year. Maybe they are doing okay because it has been consistently hot. Last year the cucumbers went bitter because a sudden spike in temperature stressed them out. Hopefully, they’ll hold their sweetness this year.

Just one of many tiny cucumbers

The heat has not been the only thing making this year’s growing season so different from last year. We haven’t seen any significant rain in weeks, now. The lawn is brown and crunch so there’s been no need to mow for quite a while. We had been leaving the back lawn mostly un-mowed anyway. My husband’s idea was that if we leave the clover and wildflowers in the backyard, they would attract bees. When they were finished blooming, the bees would turn to the garden. My husband is a brilliant man. Now that the clover is brown, the bees are busily working over all the blossoms in the garden.

Because of the lack of rain, we’ve had to water the garden on a regular basis. This has actually turned out to be a good thing. We can make sure the garden is consistently hydrated and fertilize on a regular schedule.

All the veggies get a drink

While this year has been dry, last year was overly wet. The constant rains fostered a fungus on my chard and beets. (click here for details) This year, I chose another bed for the plants, hoping to stop the cycle. Well, that worked but I have a new problem – leaf miners. These nasty little worms burrow into the leaves and eat them from the inside out. I did some research and found that there was little that could be done once the worms were hatched beyond cutting off the infected leaves.

Yuck! Leaf miners.

I did find, however, that with a little effort, I could prevent the worms from being on the leaves in the first place. It’s a fly that lays the eggs, so if you can keep the flies off the plants they can’t lay the eggs. I didn’t really want to engineer a barrier to I decided to tackle the problem post-fly. The fly lays the eggs on the undersides of the leaves so all you have to do is flip over each leaf, find the eggs, and brush them off. My chard bed is very small so this is a perfectly reasonable chore. Every couple of days I inspect the chard, brush off eggs, and cut off infected leaves and I think I’ve gotten ahead of the problem.

Teeny-tiny eggs

Chard all bright and lovely

There are a lot more plants in the garden just on the edge of being ready to pick. A quick rundown: the green beans are flowering like crazy and have put on small beanlets that will be ready to pick before we know it; the tomato plants are covered in small green tomatoes on the verge of blushing; we have a few peppers that are about the size of golf balls; and the pumpkins and acorn squash have tiny little fruits started. I feel we’re just on the cusp of a very busy veggie season.

Tomatoes

Pepper

Cantaloupe vines

Pumpkin

Green beanlet

The Garden's Last Hoorah

This last week of chilly weather has made it clear that autumn is upon us. The garden, however, seems to think it is springtime. Or at least some of the plants are giving things another go. The acorn squash plants have put on three new squash, each the size of a walnut. One year, when we were living on the mountain, we actually got two full rounds of acorn squash. The ones in the second batch were smaller and didn’t have a very long storage life but they were still tasty. I don’t think we’ll have time to see these new squash come to full maturity.

Acorn squash, round two.

The squash are not the only plants trying again. The tomatoes have put out a bunch of new blossoms as have the purple and fillet beans. A single new kohlrabi seedling has even appeared. The yellow squash has set fruit for the first time this season. Too bad they probably won’t get big enough to eat. It’s unusual for a single type of plant to fail me several times in one season. The cucumbers are giving it another go too. The peppers are still trying hard as are the eggplants. This isn’t really a second attempt for either of them as they have been very slow to produce the whole time.

More blossoms on the tomatoes.

Cucumbers making one final, pitiful push.

A new spiky eggplant flower

The rattlesnake beans have put on a fresh batch of blossoms as well. I’m really enjoying those beans. I grew them primarily for shell beans but as I picked the dried pods today, I also was able to pick a generous handful of fresh beans. With the new blossoms and tiny beans just starting, I may get more fresh beans before frost comes. As for the dried beans, we got 3 ½ cups from about a dozen plants. I’m not sure if that’s good or not but I’m pleased.

New bean blossom.

Rattlesnake beans to shell.

Beans!

Rattlesnake beans ready to become baked beans or soup.

The garden is apparently not ready to be put to bed yet. That’s okay. It’ll be nice to get those last few beans and tomatoes. We did do some final harvesting, though. We pulled all the carrots and dug the rest of the potatoes. The potato harvest was not overwhelming by any means but the carrots made up for it. 

Our meager harvest of potatoes.

Carrots enjoying some afternoon sun.

The corn and pumpkins are definitely finished. There is no way that either will be attempting a second round. The plants are completely dead. The corn was rather disappointing. I think it was the variety. It made small, irregular ears that grew up through the leaves. Weird. I plan on looking for a different type next year. But I collected the stalks and bound them together to decorate the front of our house. We got two pumpkins but one was chewed on while still on the vine. It still makes a decent decoration with the other pumpkin and a ceramic chicken.  

This corn is finished.

One perfect little pumpkin.

All decorated for autumn.