Harvest Monday!!

It's getting pretty warm here. We've had our first 100 degree day and I am dreading the days of 115 and higher that we're sure to suffer through in the coming months. More and more I'm liking the idea of just picking up and moving to another state. But we're here for now and I'm going to have to just deal with it.

So I'm thinking either I wasn't watering my tomatoes enough or I overfertalized them. Maybe a combination of both. It came on very suddenly about 2 weeks ago when my plants just turned brown over a period of 2 days. The stems are still nice and green but the leaves were almost completely dead. I've been babying them with some fish emulsion diluted in plenty of water and it really seems to have helped. There's some good new green growth on the tops and coming out of the lower branches. I sure hope they'll last at least a couple of months longer. I get so envious of other parts of the country that although they have to wait longer to put their plants out, once their tomatoes start ripening, the plants keep going for months until they're killed by frost. It seems like for me, my plants grow and produce tomatoes but only that first batch will ripen before my plants get killed by me or the extreme heat. I just want to be a good gardener for Pete's sake!!

Okay, sorry for my pity party. I'm done. For now.

On with the pictures!!


Two of the buttercup squashes were ready. I'm not exactly sure what to do with them. I guess I need to google some recipes. Usually I just cook my winter squashes and use them in place of pumpkin for making pumpkin bread, and pie and cookies. Not sure if I can do that with buttercup squash. I also pulled a few more onions. We've been using these all week and they are really great! Not too strong at all. We've even had them raw on hoagies.


I made a note of when the first silks appeared on the corn stalks and figured they would be ready to harvest on the 24th (today!!) but I checked one on Saturday and it was perfect. So this is the first ear of corn from our garden this year. I showed it to the fam and then dropped it in some boiling water, slathered it with butter, salt and pepper and ate it up. Oh wow! Absolutely delish.


Here was our first large tomato from the garden. It's a Cherokee Purple. We sliced it up and had it on our hoagies along with some of that onion. I loved it! Mike didn't think it was too special but he's not a big tomato person.


We've got some blushers!! Here's the tomato haul from this morning. I pull them when they first start to blush because we have some evil birds who live in the evil trees who like to do evil things like peck huge holes in ripe tomatoes. This way the tomatoes will ripen on my counter and my family and I will be the ones to devour them.

I pulled out the yellow squash plants and one of the lemon squash plants. They seemed to not be doing as well lately. I amended the soil and started some new seeds. Gotta keep the harvest coming!

I won't show the eggs. We are getting insane amounts of eggs. Luckily we gave away around 4 dozen yesterday so my fridge is no longer packed with them. That's happy news.

As always check out Daphne's Dandelions to check out other Harvest Monday pictures.