A Little Bit Of This, A Little Bit Of That

This week it seems that the summer garden is kicking into high gear and with it a few interesting observations and oddities. The weather went briefly back to warm and muggy, but not really as hot as was forecast. Now it is dry, but sunny and somewhat cooler again. What strange weather this summer!
I am busy with harvesting and preserving veggies and though I've had the tendency to focus on my losses, the truth is the gains have far outweighed them and I'm enjoying my pest-prone, disease-filled, sun-limited garden more than ever. I like to try new things, so this year it is sauerkraut. I've never made it before, but you can see the batch I have going is fermenting nicely as evidenced by the bubbles. I tasted it yesterday and it is sour and delicious! It's magic! Just a combination of shredded cabbage and salt and voila! It really does taste like it's ready, so I'll be canning it soon, I hope. I've read that I should wait until the fermentation is complete and I don't see bubbling anymore.

 The bush green beans exploded into action this week! I picked 2 and 1/2 pounds of them here and there is a whole other bed that is just ripening and will be ready to pick in a day or so. I ended up giving these away since there'll be more coming in and I've already frozen some thirty bags of beans. The Chinese Red Noodle beans are almost ready to pick too and I've decided to let the Scarlet Runner beans mature into dry beans for seed.

 What I am really excited about are my parsnips. I experimented with interplanting them this year since I had no room in the garden for them this spring. What you see below are a few thinnings and I am so pleased at how good they look, albeit small. But they have another two months of growing ahead, so barring any marauding voles, I may end up with a good crop. Here's hoping. This interplanting seems like the way for me to go with such a slow-growing crop as parsnips are.

 The cucumbers are in high gear now and unlike last summer, I'm overflowing with them enough to make relish, pickles, eat fresh and give away. And my second planting is just setting fruit, so I'd better come up with some more ideas. I found this monster hiding behind a fence post yesterday. It's funny, I've never really had the experience of monster zucchinis hidden away under the foliage, but cucumbers get me every year! I can't figure out how I can carefully check the vines, which by the way are growing up a fence, not on the ground, every day and still miss such a big guy. Notice it weighs 3/4 of a pound!

 Thought I'd show him beside the next biggest cuke I got, by way of contrast. Wow.

 My second planting of yellow summer squash (variety is Saffron) consists of a single plant, but that single plant has already put out three times as much fruit as my two earlier plants. I picked five off the bush yesterday, including this Siamese twin. Garden oddity indeed! I also found a "horned" tomato, but forgot to get a picture before it ended up in the stew pot.

The garden is calling me, so it's time to get to work. It's the time of year when there is low humming going on constantly from all the bees enjoying the flowers down there, not to mention the hummingbirds who have discovered the runner bean blossoms. I love the summery sound of it. We need rain and I am getting tired of watering, but it has to be done for the small fall seedlings to stand any kind of chance out there. Time to pull some old plants and to plant some new ones. Time to consider how I'm going to improve the soil for next season and to clear areas around the garden fence so it doesn't feel so threatened by the jungle out there.