Summer in review

As the tomatoes start to dwindle from the Farmer's Market, ours finally begin to appear. It seems the combination of lots of rain and near total neglect has been good for them - we've got a huge crop that looks like it's going to ripen all at once. Hopefully they'll ripen. If not, we'll be eating a lot of fried green tomatoes.

Our eggplant has also blessed us with some beautiful, deep purple specimens that will get sauteed up with some tomatoes and pasta this week.

The garden has fed us well in some aspects, but hasn't been quite what we were hoping. It's been a good learning experience though, in terms of figuring out when to plant, and how to better amend our soil. I have high hopes for our batch of Fall crops.

We started out the summer with a bumper crop of cucumbers, from which I made 4 pints of dill pickle chips and numerous cucumber sandwiches. This English tea time staple is one of my favorite summer treats, and should be enjoyed specifically like this:

• Butter two pieces of white or light wheat bread
• Thinly slice a cucumber (skin on) to cover one slice of bread.
• Layer thin slices of a sharp cheese (Nature's Way's Raw Carephilly is awesome!) over the cucumbers.
• Place the second piece of bread on top of the cheese.
• Slice your sandwich diagonally into quarters. Yum.

Of course, this is kind a moot point as cucumbers are out of season, but whatever.

We also had a promising start with our squash and zucchini at the beginning of the season. Our plants grew huge and had sprouted a few little veggies and was full of lots of pretty blooms. Then slowly, the plants started to rot from the bottom up, and then within a week were reduced to a sad little pile. I pulled them up as soon as I realized they were not going to make it, but wasn't smart enough to try to find a diagnosis right away. Now I'm afraid they had
Phytophtora Crown Rot, which can apparently hang out in the soil for years. Fabulous. Not sure how to amend that situation yet - any ideas?

Our first eggplants

Cucumbers at early season

Squash, pre-meltdown