End of August Garden Bounty

It's been a relatively lazy weekend around here, and fortunately I have one more day to savor before back to work, which --as you may have guessed-- has been pretty busy for me the past two weeks. I've got a brief respite before another wave hits me full force again. So, as a small personal reward, I basically allowed myself a relatively slackerly Saturday and Sunday (though I did get caught up with laundry, no small feat there).

Thus the leisurely tone for tonight's post ... since Fernymoss has to work tomorrow, we did a bit of grilling to honor the weekend's official wrap up of Summer (though we're still hoping for plenty more warm weather to come for at least a while). So, in that spirit, this will be a basic "look and see what I saw" tour around the back.

I'm sure no one noticed the first shot did they? 'Sun Showers' is back in bloom again, after a brief rest, and wow, it's as eye popping as always! I'm really not regretting having forked over the big bucks for this plant now ... it's been a steady and profuse bloomer most of the summer... how could anyone quibble with walking out back and seeing a few of these screaming Heeeyyyyy look at me! You know when you're looking at such a fiery flower and realize that the coolest color in the entire bloom is hot pink, you're dealing with truly over the top Hibiscus! We absolutely love it, and will be taking meticulous care of this and 'Erin Rachel' this winter... they both deserve the pampering....
This shot is just one of the several (at least) progeny of Punkinstein, who is still trying to conquer the entire garden, and we keep putting him back on the ground ... that is, until he sneaks out of bounds again. We haven't been able to inspect the total sprawl of this plant for pumpkins, but we're sure they're in there hiding somewhere... while he was shooting this one, Fernymoss also discovered a much smaller one set on not far away from this one, which is the largest we've yet found. We're getting excited about them hanging on all the rest of the season so we don't have to buy any this year, but again, time will tell....
Let's venture down into the corn patch ... here you can see one of the many Zinnias we have planted in various spots around the veggie garden, and more importantly, a few ears of corn nearly ready to be picked just behind it. I think that this Zinnia, one of the 'Cactus Bloom' varieties we had mixed in with what we planted, is a particularly pretty one, but then I'm slanted to the fire colors, so take that as you will. Anyway, this shot serves two purposes: to illustrate a bit more detail of the corn patch and also to show a bit of brightness amongst all that green....
Today was our first harvest of the corn, and we picked 6 ears, of which we kept 3 and gave 3 to our neighbor behind us ... but what she's really looking forward to is when we have more ripe tomatoes, uh huh! Well, so are we, so I'm hoping that some of the myriad green ones out there start ripening a bit more quickly, but then again, given the weirdness of this summer, we're lucky they're still growing so well! As long as we can keep the warmth up in September, I think we should be in luck, because I have photos that remind me that in past years, I've had a bumper crop of tomatoes into September, so again ... patience is still difficult at times....
Finally, here we have an arrangement of just what we brought in from the back garden today. We're a bit disappointed in the onions, because though most of the tops had died back, they just aren't very big, but they'll certainly get used all the same, and some chopped onion may well go into the burgers I am planning for tomorrow's grill fest (along with my usual, trusty companion, A-1 Sauce). Obviously, these are the 3 ears of corn we picked and consumed within about 2 hours ... as well as some of the tomatoes we got today. These need about one more day to ripen inside, and then BLTs are going to be on the menu, and I finally got the bread, bacon and lettuce today ... one of those summertime pleasures I've yet to experience this year, and we're both looking forward to it!

On tonight's menu: Marinated Pork Tenderloin (with El Rey hot sauce, A-1 and Dijon Mustard), along with sweet corn of course, and some sliced fresh tomatoes I picked a few days ago. Aside from the pork, everything else came from the garden .. finally! In years past, we would have had such a meal weeks earlier, but given that none of the veggies got planted until almost late June (Memorial Day in May is usually my cut off for planting), I think we're heading into a bit more of the feast part of the cycle. Except for those pathetic peppers of ours. We had a work meeting the other day, and I asked one of the women there (who has a huge veggie garden out in the country) how her peppers were doing. She replied (just like everyone else I've asked) that hers were the worst in years, and she wondered if she'd get any at all. I don't know what it has been (erratic weather? that's a good scapegoat) this year, but no one I know has had any success with them. Ours are starting to perk up a bit now that the worst of the blast furnace heat has abated a bit, but I have no expectations that we'll see anything significant. More likely, they'll get their second wind right before frost and put on tons of tiny, useless ones not worth harvesting. That is, unless we have some minor miracle combination of warmth, cool nights and frequent rains, I've just about written them off. Next year I may just elect to plant them all in pots and try that again (I used to have great success with that when I first lived here and had very limited space). How disappointing ... I used to be reputed for making the greatest fresh garden salsa, but again, this year, that's unlikely to happen, alas.

There are good garden years, bad garden years, and then there are the downright bafflingly odd ones, and this year seems to represent a good exemplar of the latter. But tonight, we dined well from the garden, so we give thanks for what the earth has given us so far, and look forward to more for at least a little while!

Photos taken August 31, 2008, Hibiscus and Veggie arrangement by IVG, Pumpkin, Corn and Zinnia shots by Fernymoss.

Corn Patch Confidential

Though I was cooped up again today working furiously (I'm having a busy time again for a while), Fernymoss had the day off, and since the heat has finally abated a bit, he indulged the demands of the Urban Oasis by taking the camera out to see what was going on as he weeded a bit.... I've been wanting to get an update on the corn posted, so I specifically asked that he get some shots of it (he likely would have even without my request), as well as Punkenstein, (as Boran2 dubbed our runaway pumpkin patch) ... other than that, I left it up to him to just have fun and shoot whatever else he found of interest.

He came back with a great batch of photos you'll be seeing in future posts, including some of the first blooms of Hibiscus moscheutos 'Blue River,' which unfortunately now needs to be staked up again after the storms that moved through late last night, when some oddly intense thunderstorms just popped up after midnight, from which we got a fair amount of wind, rain and unfortunately, the first damaging hail of the summer. In that regard, though I'd like to whine about it, we've been very lucky so far so I'll refrain ... so in some of these photos you'll see the evidence of its damage.
But! The corn is standing high, tasseling and putting on its first ears despite it all! This first shot shows the basic corn patch at the northern end of the veggie garden where we usually plant tomatoes and peppers, but this year we have them situated elsewhere. If we're successful with it this year, we'll probably plant more corn at the other end of the garden next year (currently squatter space for Punkenstein). You'd think that two guys who have gardened for years (in of all places, Iowa!) would be old pros at corn ... well then, you'd be mistaken, as this is the first year we've tried sweet corn! Aside from planting Broom Corn (a really cool plant) the second year here, which we loved, but it terrified our neighbor by growing over 9 feet tall, so somehow we convinced ourselves we just didn't have the room for it. It's true that in our earlier years, we planted far more tomatoes and peppers than we do now, so there wasn't room, but now that we've cut back significantly on those crops, we have a decent space for it. And, despite being planted literally in mud in June (we remember all that rain oh so well), it has done very well for us so far this summer, even with getting knocked down several times in recent storms. Though it's going to be a while before we can harvest some, I take consolation in the fact that the local growers' crop is just now starting to hit the stores and roadside vendors, so we're a bit behind, but not hopelessly so.
This shot obviously needs little introduction, but it's great to see that although it just started tasseling out last week, there are already quite a few ears set on out in the patch. We are a bit apprehensive that we may get raided by neighborhood raccoons (they're out there!), but we're hoping for the best and if all they steal is an ear or two, we could live with that ... as long as we have several good meals out of the bargain. For me, it's been fun to grow corn again, something I've not done since I was a child and teen and lived at home with my gardener dad. So now that we're in a situation where we can plant it, we should probably stick with it ... after all, even when the edible ears are gone, we'll have some home grown, organic Halloween decorations from the garden, along with the pumpkins (we hope)!
Now to the interesting part of this post! Here's an interesting (as yet unidentified) beetle Fernymoss caught lurking in the corn (along with other critters as well). In this shot, he's looking head on, and when you really zoom in on this photo, he's got a rather unpleasant mug with some fearsome pincers on display. If any erstwhile readers can ID this guy, let us know in the comments. We're just hoping it's not a bad critter for the corn, attracted by a crop that doesn't usually grow here....
Here we have the same beetle, though at this point he apparently decided he had enough posing for the camera, and prepared to take his leave ... yes, yet another "bug butt" shot from the garden! We found it amusing that this beetle's ahem, posterior looks remarkably like a clearly defined bullseye ... we have no idea what that's all about but it is striking, n'est-ce pas?

Fortunately, milder weather is forecast for later this week, so maybe finally (if work cooperates) this weekend, I can get in a few weeding sessions to try to tame some of the worst stuff that has been thriving since we've been in this most recent rainy period.... I'm already starting to think that this year has been an odd spring to summer. We started out with incessant rain in late May through June, with the flooding thrown in, all of which kept us from getting these veggies in when they should have been planted ... basically we lost that whole month in the garden due to rain, flooding and mud. Still, I remain optimistic that we'll pull out a respectable showing and harvest after all is said and done.

Those who know me well would find that optimism a bit surprising, because I'm usually more pessimistic about certain things, but the garden always seems to offer me plentiful reasons to switch to the 'glass half full' attitude, something I think must be a near pathological instinct of confirmed gardener DNA. That's the only way I can rationalize this inherent contradiction with regard to my general world view. I suppose one could characterize that as a humanizing quality of gardening, but whatever one might call it, it definitely promotes a more positive outlook. Something that's sorely missing in the current zeitgeist of the nation, but with any luck, that may be poised to change for the better....