Garden Tour on August 10, 2010

Let's start with the best looking part of the garden. Here's the cucumber tower with Garafal Oro romano pole beans and Petaluma Goldrush pole beans in the background. The first cucumber is nearly large enough to harvest.

Seen from another angle. Note the ever-present morning fog shrouding the top of the hills in the background and turning the whole sky gray.

The zucchini plants are still growing and producing nicely. I cut out some of the first leaves to be infected with powdery mildew yesterday. It's time to start the Neem treatments.

The Crane melon plants are spreading out and the first male blossoms are opening. The female blossoms are still just tiny buds. I'm doubtful about ever getting enough heat this year to set any fruit and actually get it to ripen.

Here's a surprise popping up in the bean foliage, a volunteer fava bean, apparently healthy and happy.

The Marina di Chioggia squash are stretching out, filling their corner of the garden and just starting to climb the fence. I spotted the first open female blossom the other day.

Moving across the way, the poppies finally finished and made way for 4 Romanesco Broccoli plants. The lettuce made way for a couple of Savoy Cabbage plants. On the left in the foreground the Hollow Pipe of Malines cutting celery is happy, it doesn't seem to mind the cool weather.

Here's the holdover Pimento de Padron plants from last year. I decided not to pull them out because...

They are producing peppers and doing a better job of it than the new plants.

Thai Tender amaranth, hating the summer cold. They are runts. Amaranth usually grows like a weed in the summer and provides a bounty of sweet greens. Not this year.

But the Diamante celery root is finding the cool weather agreeable.

And so is the Golden Chard.

It's got multiple crowns on each plant.

Here's the four scraggly looking Piracicaba broccoli plants that just won't quit. The one on the left is twice as tall as the other plants and puts out longer stemmed shoots.

Two new Couve Tronchuda (Portuguese Cabbage) plants. This is a primitive type of cabbage that doesn't form a tight head so the leaves can be harvested individually over the season.

Here's the new Pimento de Padron plants with a scarcity of peppers and almost no flowers. By this time of year I should be harvesting so many little green peppers that I should be getting tired of picking and cooking them. I've been giving the plants some major doses of TLC lately and I'm seeing some tiny little new flower buds starting to show....  Most of the rest of the pepper plants in this bed are faring equally poorly, seemingly a combination of fierce competition with a neighboring oak tree for water and food, and the continuing cool weather.

And the tomato plants aren't liking the competition either, especially at this end of the bed closest to the offending oak trees.

Here's the Chocolate Stripes tomato that I showed on the last tour when it was just showing a hint of ripening. Just a few more days....

The Madrid Bell sweet peppers are sizing up ever so slooowly. Ages from ripeness.

Bogyiszloi getting very close to full ripness.

Esplette peppers, coming along.

The misty mornings do have one lovely benefit. Spiderwebs become startlingly apparent.

That spider is making its home in the Viego Arruga Dulce pepper plant. The seeds for this variety were listed under the hot pepper section of the SSE annual yearbook but they are entirely sweet, and delicious.

Across the way, the new planting of Sweetie Baby romaine lettuce is growing like crazy. There's been no heat to bother these babies.

And no heat to make these babies happy. The Diamond eggplant are runty thanks to cool weather and burrowing nibbling voles.

The Malaysian Dark Red eggplant aren't much happier.

And the most maddening consequence of the vole attack is that I pulled out all of the newly planted potatoes and haven't even attempted to sow my winter root veggies. Empty space, a battleground still. I'm going for the nuclear option at the moment, only time will tell if it is working. More later....

Not to end on a sour note, some sweet fragrant Yellow Wonder Strawberries....

Frederick passionfruit....

And a strawberry update. This is the patch of transplanted Mara des Bois plants. Blooming and setting fruit...

Runnering like crazy, here's a rooted runner that's blooming and setting fruit.

This is one method I've devised to foil the rats.

And sweetest of all, at least to the bees, they are determined not to be foiled by the bee guards on the hummer feeders. Now if I could just capture a moment when the hummers are in a feeding frenzy at the feeder, the evening feed is an amazing and amusing sight. I've got to work on getting a shot of that.