9/12/08: Pic Catchup: Garden on 8/25/08

We love taking pictures of our goodies growing in our garden so here's a few that we snapped on August 25:

Spaghetti squash, above. One of three on this vine, located in the corn patch. Highly recommend this as one of the squashes that work well with the "three sisters".

Two squash growing in the corn patch. As you can see from the front one, they have begun being choked by bindweed. It's gotten to the point that we can't keep up with the weeding. And we don't recommend this as being part of the Three Sisters as it bushes (no vines) and pushes the corn stalks out of the way.

A big beautiful sunflower in the "corn patch" - this is one of the shorter ones but the tallest at 11 foot can easily be seen above the fence that separates our front yard to our back. We love pulling up in the driveway and have the sunflowers peeking over, greeting us back home.

This is our favorite tomato plant: the yellow pear. This particular bush has given us probably 200 tomatoes this summer. We're thinking we should pull this one inside soon so we can harvest from it all Winter. AFTER we check it for bugs. Ugh.

Look at the size of this Striata d'Italia zucchini! I left the scissors on the ground beside it and using my hand to hold it away from the ground. We then cut this one off the vine and measured it to be over 12 inches long. This particular zucchini plant, located in the corn patch which is NOT a good idea for a bushing squash, has given us about 13 zucchini's. Most delicious zucchini I've ever eaten.

This is the eggplant/okra container that is located near the pumpkin patch. We've harvested about 8 "black beauty" eggplant from the two plants and have probably another 5 or 6 on there that we're waiting on.

This is a Mexican X-Top cushaw squash. I had asked Baker Heirloom Seeds for a squash or gourd that was edible AND provided good seeds to eat, so they recommended this. The seeds are really big and coverfed with a weird papery film. Every seed we started sprouted.

I keep searching online for pictures and it appears I'm the only one who's taken pictures! The seed was started mid May, and until mid June the vine grew a little slowly at first. The coloring on the leaves really bothered us, so we took a sample to a local nursery that told us it was "powdery mildew". Um, nope. Upon further analyzing of all our gourd and squash vines, the white spots on these leaves are in an actual pattern and are just how this particular squash leaves look.

Anyway, towards the end of June, it had a burst of growth and still hasn't stopped. We were worried, though, because even though we saw plenty of flowers, we saw no fruit until the first week in August. Suddenly, there were about 3 per vine. The one above was about 8 inches big when this pic was taken on 8/25 and as of 9/11 was about 13 inches big. As with all winter squashes, we are going to let it stay where it is until the first light frost, harvest before the first hard frost, then cut off the vine leaving as much stem as possible. We'll cure it and store for winter eating. I hope to post more about it during the winter.

By the way, this is a great vining squash for your Three Sisters planting. The leaves and vines are a bit prickly, which will prevent raccoons from harvesting your corn before you do, and they absolutely provide terrific ground cover, helping to keep moisture in.

We planted some Envy soybeans in the front, and almost a whole bed in the back. NOT ENOUGH!!! Here's the back soybeans shortly before we harvested. The leaves are a light olive green, and the pods are fuzzy and green. Most had 2 beans in each pod, but a few had 3. They can be grown pretty close together, a few inches apart, but it made it difficult to harvest. But since they are all ready at one time, we decided to harvest by pulling up each individual plant, pulling off the pods, discarding the now-empty plant into the compost pile, and moving on to the next. Weslee LOVED doing this.

These are asparagas. Thankfully we used these "trash cans" instead of planting directly into the ground... since we're moving next Spring (probably). These are first year, but in July we discovered little asparagas spears in each. Of course, we didn't harvest them. We understand that asparagas are supposed to be "mowed down" every Fall, so probably in October, we'll take some scissors or clippers and cut them down. Thinking we'll sample the little spears to see the quality (er, Doug will since Weslee and I don't particularly care for asparagas).

This is a butternut squash, about 14 inches long and it feels heavy. There's a second one to the left (barely in the picture) that's a little smaller. This might be an okay vine to use in your Three Sisters but it didn't get very long/sprawling. We planted it in a tire near our blackberries but see how close it clung to the tire. Anyway, I've never tasted butternut so I'm hoping it will be yummy!

This is a pic of our corn patch - facing southeast. The vines in the foreground are mostly Mexican X-Top with a pumpkin off towards the left. The tallest plants in the front are sunflowers (before they opened and began drooping) but you can still see a lot of the corn stalks in the background.

That's all the pictures we took on 8/25/08! Pretty good garden for first-time gardeners, huh?!

Vikki www.newviewgroupllc.com