Thursday, June 13, 2013

In the Garden


melon plants

GARLIC!

harvesting the one and only pumpkin

fiona with the pumpkin

eggplant doing it's thing

herbs doing great, loads of mint and cat nip

Ahhhh, the blazing summer of the Phoenix area does a number on the garden. Everything sort of slows down. A few heat hardy plants seem to still be chugging along growing some food for us. The Japanese eggplants seem to like the heat and keep growing and are actually continuing to bloom and produce fruits, which is really exciting. The harder herbs, like mint, thyme and catnip, are still growing by leaps and bounds. The tomatoes are ripening, but have otherwise given up the ghost on producing any more fruits, they just do not like 110, go figure. My hope is to keep the plants alive until the weather turns (sometimes in September) and we might get them to bloom and fruit again. We planted some melons about a week or two ago (I have such a hard timekeeping track of the days anymore... baby brain maybe??) and I am delighted that they are actually GROWING! I was sure it would just be too hot for them, but my planting guide said you could plant melons this time of year, so we gave it a shot.
I gave all the plants a watering with fish goo (some sort of fish emulsion, it is nasty) and then mulched with some straw that also contained chicken poo, so here is hoping they like the goodies.
We picked our one and only pumpkin, it is sitting in the fridge right now so it won't rot before I can bake it and make a pumpkin cheese cake with it (Caelan's request), and I harvested the last of the garlic, I know 5 heads is not a big deal... but I have never actually grown garlic before, it is so super exciting. I have them drying in the laundry room/pantry area and it smells heaven back there now. I am planning on planting some more this weekend and seeing if we can't get a few more to harvest for fall/winter.

3 comments:

fairymom aka Victorymama aka Rachel said...

Cute little pumpkin. I've never grown garlic either, but want to try someday. And we're on the same wave length, with posts on our gardens today. :)

Anonymous said...

Love the pumpkin! We harvested 3 or 4 last fall and our children were thrilled. :) I would love to try growing garlic, my neighbor has great success with it.

Enjoy that lovely garden.

karisma said...

Beautiful garden and thats an awesome first pumpkin. I have just harvested a few myself. I had only one and then went with the helping them along with the pollination. Not enough bees around here at this time of year, its too cold. I ended up with around ten. Not too bad for a little garden. :-)