Zucchini, anyone?
Hot. 91 degrees. Sunny. Scott and Carolyn were up on Saturday, helping us bring up the tomatoes from the garden. It looks like the crazy rains of last week are finally done by awhile, and also looks like the dog days of summer have finally arrived. This next week should be a pretty hot one - low 90’s - although it could be worse.
As you can see, we’ve got a lot of tomatoes, although
nowhere near what we should have considering that we’ve got 125 tomato plants.
The Late Blight has really put a dent in our crop this year, but we’re lucky we have any at all, as many growers in the northeast do not. Our organic copper hydroxide treatments came just in time. If we’d waited another four days, I think we would have lost the entire crop. A lot of our tomatoes look like
the ones at the right, and the plants are weak and have fewer leaves than they should. Late Blight can also affect potatoes, but our potato crop seems to have made it through. At left - about 50 pounds of potatoes. We planted 25 pounds of potato stock this spring, and we’re expecting about a four-fold crop of red and blue adirondack potatoes. These potatoes are fairly starchy - they make amazing red and blue mashed potatoes, but aren’t as good as the Red Norlands for roasting.
I don’t have a picture this week of our zucchini, which comes in several different varieties - mini zucchini, Cocozelle zucchini - but they’re wonderful. Sunday I made omelettes with our eggs, zucchini and local onions and goat cheese, red Andy peppers, and rosemary. Yum. Look for us to be stopping at your house soon, armed with zucchini, which completely overtake our ability to eat them.
The big problem this week is the discovery of a groundhog living in the garden. Here’s his burrow, hidden underneath our lemon verbena. This weekend was the first chance I had to really get in and trim down the flower/herb section, which with all the rain has turned into a small rain forest. When I finally got to the verbena row, here’s what I found. In his younger days, Spotty might have stalked and taken care of this interloper, but with his failing eyesight and hearing, he pretty much is just curious
these days. That leaves it to me. Tonight, there’s a have-a-heart trap out there, with a trail of apples leading to it. We’ll see if it works. Meantime, I’ll leave you with a photo of our garlic, which was dug by Amy and Todd and is now drying in our barn. Thanks also to Lee for coming up, as well as Liz and her kids, and Steve and Julia.
