The last garden update post featured our best radishes of the season. For some strange reason our radishes have decided not to actually set fruit but instead bolt and shoot greens high into the air. Honestly, most were shin high and some really crazy ones went up to our knees. All of this crazy/backwards growth happened over the last week. We pulled 99% of our radishes yesterday and made greens. We fried ham bits with beer and added in all of our radish greens. Note: radish stems (at least the big mamajamas like ours) are really tough no matter how long you pressure cook them.
Out of all of those greens we only got six stunted radishes. It was pretty sad and pretty hilarious at the same time. Radishes are normally so easy to grow. We have our theories as to what went wrong. The greens (the leaves at least) were pretty tasty and we got to hang out in the yard so they weren't a total bust. I think we are done with radishes for now and next year we are going to do better... hopefully.
Our mouse melon plant is finally growing! It is climbing up our little trellis like crazy. It seems to really like the warmer weather. It has one little fruit bud. Cliff and I can't wait until we start to see more fruit. Did I mention that they are suppose to drop the fruit automatically when they are ripe? How awesome is that!
Our two tomato plants are also going nuts. Cliff is going to top them next weekend as we think they are getting close to shading other plants out. We have a few fruits on each. Very exciting. I hope these are actually successful as I really like fresh mini tomatos.
Our lettuce is doing really awesome. Lettuce is so gratifying to grow! We have eaten all of the arugula and we have been using restraint on eating the tom thumb and oakleaf. The tom thumb is my favorite hands down. The mini lettuce heads are so pretty and the leaves are really buttery and tender. We started more seed a few weeks ago so hopefully they will start to get bigger as it makes me sad to think we may only have eight little heads left.
Otherwise things are going ok. We are starting to see our flowers and squash shoot up little sprouts. Many of our herbs are doing really well. Our peppers still look sad as it really hasn't been sunny and hot enough for them to hit their stride. Between the slugs and the weather we have hit some roadblocks. But that is ok because we are really excited. This is our first in-the-ground garden and we are still feeling really proud.
Last weekend Cliff, Rudy, and I stopped by Detering Orchard. I love Detering! When we lived in Oregon the first time our group regularly frequented Detering. In the fall you an pick your own apples, pears, and pumpkins. Plus they have apple fest and give out free apple cobbler and ice cream. In the summers we would pick peaches, cherries, and pickling cucumbers. They also have a really wonderful produce stand and one time Cliff and I got bell peppers for $.10 a piece. Victory.
When we stopped in last week they had their first set of peaches ready. We all went out into the orachrd and picked. Rudy was pretty excited with himself. We didn't get a ton as we knew we weren't prepared to do any canning. The peaches aren't free stone but they were really good. We made a big cobbler and ate all of it in one night. It was probably best that we didn't pick more as we probably would have done that every night until they were gone. We want to go back in a few weeks when the Suncrests are ready. Oh I love summer.
