As I start to get the vegetable garden space ready for 2021, my thoughts return to last year's crop. By the end of July, although it hadn't rained much for a couple of weeks, there was enough residual moisture in the soil to enable the vegetables to grow a lot since July 6 when the last photos were shot.
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| Bean rows, July 28, 2020 |
The beans look very healthy as they fill out between the rows, shading the weeds that have been growing there. The weeds between the plants still need pulling, of course. A little every day except when they're wet. Weekly cultivation also helps. At the bottom of the picture are the dry beans: rows of Black Coco, Light Red Kidney, and Kenearly. Black Coco often are grown as shell beans, but I like them in stews and chili. The kidney beans are strictly for chili, while the Kenearly, a selection of Maine Yellow Eye, do well for traditional oven-baked beans.
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| More beans, with chard, kale, cabbage, broccoli, and greens |
The beans at the left in the photo just above are bush snap beans, which I've begun harvesting, mainly for freezing. Mostly Provider beans, but I was also trialing some Burpee "Big Kahuna" beans. Swiss chard is next, with kale behind it; in the next row is red cabbage, with parsley and lettuce (going to seed) behind it; the next row has broccoli, which I've already been harvesting for meals and also the freezer; behind it is a row of Asian greens; and behind it at the upper right are the beans shown in the last picture, but from a different angle.
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| Cucumbers, tomatoes and beans, July 28, 2020 |
And here is the last of the photos from July 28. At the bottom are some tomatoes, in cages or attached to stakes; in the picture are Sungolds, Cherokee Purple, and Better Boy. The cuke variety is General Lee, the slicing cucumber that does the best in this soil and climate, as I learned after many trials and errors over the past forty years. And behind them are the beans that were shown in the first picture. This was my first year with Better Boy. Usually I've stayed away from the Burpee tomatoes because I found, during the first ten years of gardening (1980-1990) that although Burpee tomatoes usually grew well, they didn't have much taste. Heirlooms are much tastier, but they produce fewer tomatoes per plant and are more susceptible to diseases like early and late blight. In fact, growing tomatoes here is difficult: as a rule summers are cool and damp, and of course tomatoes like heat and low humidity. But I was unable to grow tomatoes out from seed this year, so I had to make do with what was available at a nursery; and by the time I got there in mid-May, about all they had left were Better Boy. As usual, they grew strongly, produced many tomatoes per plant, and their taste was bland. I guess some people like bland tomatoes, but not I. Anyway, I ate a fair number of grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches last summer, and even made some sauce with them, anyway. The Sungolds have been a staple of this garden for thirty years. They are deliciously tart cherry tomatoes best eaten as snacks, either right off the vine or from a bowl of them indoors for a few days. Very prolific, disease resistant, they have only two drawbacks: they have tough skins, and yet they're prone to cracking after a good rainstorm.
At this time of the year the rains are apt to hold off, so I had my fingers crossed and kept an eye on the water level in my rain barrels, which I'd been using for the past two weeks to make up for the low rainfall. Using well water for the garden isn't a good idea at this time of year; all of it is needed in the house. So I depend on rain barrels in mid-summer.
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