Early evening
A couple of new pictures today. These were actually taken yesterday. I took several more, but the others didn't come out because of the lighting. As you can see, the tomato plants are basically sprawling over the entire area they're in, much to the dismay of my poor serrano peppers.
One cucumber is getting pretty big. It will probably be ready to pick in another week or so. I've got scads of cherry tomatoes, but most of them are fairly small, probably about as big around as a penny. All but the latest pepper transplants have flowers and several have small fruit. One of the two Florescent Purple plants has some very striking purple flowers; I'll have to make sure I get a picture of that one soon.
No pictures today, but a quick update since it's been a while. This past weekend I harvested the first zucchini. Actually, the first three. I gave two to some friends and saved the largest for yesterday's dinner. A couple of chicken breasts and zucchini slices on the grill.. yum. I picked another one tonight and I think I'll make zucchini bread with it, just as soon as I find a good recipe for the bread machine. By the way, I think that Ortho book was wrong or something: the things behind the flower that look like zucchini are zucchini.
The Extra Select garlic is pretty much gone. As I said in my last May entry, it had never done as well as the Early Italian, and at this point pretty much all of the plants have died. I dug up one of them, and it looked fine to me, so I'm not entirely sure what happened. I doubt it was too much or too little light; I have some that gets several hours more than the other. The soil in both areas is good. They both get plenty of water, but not too much, either. Someday I'll have to figure this out.
I cut off the main heads from the other broccoli plants, as they had gotten far too large. The flowerettes on the heads were actually blooming. All three plants are already forming side shoots, though, so I'll have more soon enough.
A few of the peppers are flowering now, especially one of the Fluorescent Purples. It's going nuts, and already has a couple of very tiny peppers on it. Other peppers flowering include the Poblano and one of the sweet bells. Most of the others have lots of buds, but no flowers yet.
I also ripped out the remaining radishes and transplanted the last few peppers into the ground. They are the Hungarian Yellow Wax, the Amarillo Aju, the Charleston Cayenne and a couple of habaneros (yes, those seeds that came on the bottle of hot sauce). The plants are quite small, but I'm confident they will catch up soon enough. At least now they will be getting regular water and fertilizer, and they won't dry out as fast.
I transplanted the Sweet Italian and Siam Queen basils into the area with the parsley, garlic chives and coriander. That space was originally reserved for the oregano, but I missed watering it one day and it dried out. Oregano is such a fragile little plant when it's young that it really had no chance.
Finally, I ran drip irrigation to the rest of the garden and cleaned up what is along the fence. The boxes along the fence aren't part of my system, so they don't benefit from the in-line watering trick, but at least they will get regular watering now and I don't have to drag the hose across the yard more than once a week.
We finally had a hauling company come by and take away all of the rocks and pipes that were in a pile on our patio. One of the guys commented on how I must have been doing this (meaning the garden) for a while. He was impressed that this was actually my first year. I've been pretty lucky so far: no pests, no disease, and really great weather. Here's hoping the streak continues.