Anemones

These are anemones, or windflowers. They're very pretty. They're also not nearly hardy enough for our winters. I can try to dig them out in the fall, but maybe I'll just leave them alone, buy more next spring, and plant them in a planter. That way I can bring them into the house in the fall.

Or not. Whatever I plan for my garden, I never actually do it.

Also, a cauliflower

Have I shown you my cauliflower before? It's called "Orbitz". I picked it because it looks like a fractal. It's awfully late in the season for cauliflower, considering that everyone else is almost done eating theirs, but oh well. At least it's coming. So far it's about big enough for one bite, but in a few more weeks it might be snack-sized.

If at first you don't succeed, there's always blackmail

This is my latest pumpkin. I have three Baby Pam vines, and this one kept producing female flowers and letting them die. So I said I'd just pull it out, since it was just wasting space. But when I went yesterday, finally it had one bud growing instead of shrinking. And if you think it's just a coincidence, you don't know plants. They know everything.

On the other hand, the one Lumina, which is a semi-bush type, hasn't even put out any female flowers yet. It looks like there is one female bud coming, but that's pretty pointless this late in the year. So that one is probably going to get pulled for real.


Meanwhile, this is my second pumpkin. It's two weeks old and bigger than my fist. That's not much for a pumpkin, but it's bigger than any pumpkin I grew up to now, except for:


My first pumpkin. It's turning orange! It's turning orange! It has four more weeks to put on some weight. I hope it gets big enough to feed a few people. My friend Brian claims to make the best pumpkin soup in the world, so I'm hoping he can cook this bad boy for us and we can have some friends together to eat it.

Next year we're supposed to have a greenhouse in the Community Garden, so hopefully I can start pumpkins way ahead of time.

Quousque tandem?

That's Latin for "you're starting to piss me off."

Consider:



The top one is one of my double oriental lilies that I paid a fortune for. They started to come out of the ground May 18, and they've had flower buds since at least July 20. That is, one staid four inches tall for ever, turned brown, and died back, so it won't flower this year, if ever. The second one has buds, but they're not getting bigger, and I don't think they'll flower. And the third one, which I was hoping was Lodewijk, is doing this. One of the petals has since separated from the rest and it seems to have some light pink on it, suggesting it's gonna be Soft Music instead of Lodewijk. But whatever it's doing, it's just not doing it.

And the bottom photo is from the other lily location, where I put my Stargazer from last year and the "black" Asiatic lilies. As you may recall, one bloomed but was orange. The other two got immensely tall, didn't flower, turned brown and died back. And then when I cleared the weeds away some days ago, I saw that three out of the four lilies are coming up again. I'm guessing the two big ones are the two that didn't flower before, and if I recall how they were in the planter before I put them outside, it seems to me that the small one right next to the pear tree (if you can tell what's a pear tree in this mess) is probably the Stargazer. But whatever the case may be, none of the three has a flower bud. Again.

I am not amused.

"They" were right!

What? How is that possible? "They" are never right. You know, "they". As in "they say". "They" never say the right thing. And in the Community Garden, "they" really say all kinds of nonsense. But in this case, "they" are not the people in the garden.

What I'm talking about is this: if you read anything about growing your own vegetables, you'll notice "they" say that vegetables from your own garden are far tastier than the ones from the supermarket. I assumed they were talking metaphorically, as in "you'll enjoy them so much more because of all your hard work" kind of thing.

I was wrong.

On Monday, I picked some peas from my garden. Then I didn't eat them right away, because I had to finish some other food that was in the fridge. Then on... Thursday, I think, I fixed some leftover ground beef with a tiny onion that I had pulled from my garden because it was being crushed by pumpkins. And pasta. And I was gonna cook the peas to go with it, though it seemed kinda weird, in a sense, "cooking" my peas. I mean, clearly, we cook vegetables all the time, but first they've been frozen, wrapped in plastic, and put in the store, and it seems normal to cook them. But somehow, putting my garden peas in hot water seemed weird.

In fact, when you think about it, that's not it at all. I have a mental block about eating food from my garden. Like when my spinach was ready to eat, I didn't feel at all comfortable eating it. I mean, it came out of the dirt. There is manure in there, you know. I put it there myself. And it's all been sitting outside in the dirt, where insects and dogs can pee on it. Ew. I don't want to eat stuff that's been out in the dirt.

That being said, the spinach was really quite tasty. Too bad there was so little of it. And when it comes to peas, if you think about it, they're safely stored in a pod, so they can't get dirty. Much. So I opened one pod and I thought I'd taste one pea to see if it was ok to eat.

Well.

Well, well, well.

Welly, welly, welly.

Wellitsy, wellitsy, wellitsy.

Seriously? That was the best pea I had ever eaten in my life - so far. It's not even "like the store peas except better". It's nothing at all like store peas. It's not nearly as sugary, for one thing. I don't have much of a sweet tooth. These peas, possibly from having grown so far north, are not sugary. They're the most wonderful peas in the world. So I shelled them all and then ate them like candy until they were all gone.

Then I went and picked more.

And more.

Today I just stood in the garden eating peas right off the plant. I did bring some home, too, of course, but only because there were so many, it would have taken all night to eat them. Now they're in a bowl on the table and I keep going over to eat more. Who knew peas were so addictive?

The sad thing is, we only get only two months or so of peas fresh off the plant. The rest of the year, I might have to go back to eating disgusting store peas. Or else never have peas out of season again.

Next year, I'm asking for two plots, and I think one is gonna be just straight peas. A huge forest of peas. Mmmmmm... peas...

Six more weeks...

Only six more weeks of summer left. Poop... However, I think my Brussels sprouts might need it.


See?

I bet you don't see, so here is a detail:


Now you see? Tiny Brussels sprouts. Mmmmmm... Brussels sprouts... All my sources agree that they're tastier after a frost, so if they take six more weeks to get edible-sized, that's ok. So, I might still get some yet.

My cauliflowers, on the other hand, are distinctly unpromising. I found one that's got something like a head, possibly due to the fact that peas had grown over it and tied the leaves shut. It's a common practice to tie leaves over the heads of cauliflower; maybe I should have done that. So I did it after finding that minuscule head (too small to photograph). I guess, you know, six weeks...


And these are my tomatoes. I don't remember what kind of tomatoes they are. I found the plant by the shed, where someone had left a bunch of them in a wheelbarrow, presumably for lack of room to plant them. So I rescued this one, which seemed like the healthiest, and now it's got tomatoes on it. Mmmmmm... Tomatoes...

You know, this vegetable-growing thing is turning out after all.

Pumpy-umpy-umpkin!

20 July:


23 July:


27 July:


Wow. I hadn't taken a photo since this one because every time I looked I kept thinking "it hasn't grown at all". But when I opened this photo to look at it I thought "haha, look at the tiny pumpkin!" Clearly, it's time for another photo.

This is my lead pumpkin so far. There have been several other female flowers that I thought were pollinated, but then the fruit buds just shrivelled and fell off. But as of today, I have one other pumpkin that's clearly growing, and another that I'm fairly confident is growing.

Mmmmmmm... Pumpkin...