Mad Cat Garden | Jan 2022

Our 2021 garden was pretty awesome. It was expanded from previous years and we grew new and interesting things. It lasted well into the fall with gourds and flowers. But unfortunately I didn’t really chronicle much of last year. I want to make sure to change that in 2022. Starting in January, there’s not too much going on right now. The most exciting thing was the recent snow storm.

We actually had two storms in Jan. The first one was light and fluffy snow with almost no wind and it stuck to every branch. The next snow was wet and heavy and several feet deep.

I was pretty worried about our favorite herbs in the front beds during the second storm. But they seem to have come out unharmed. Except perhaps the curry. I was shocked it was still alive anyway. Do any of my readers have any experience with curry plants? I’d love some advice.

Did you have snow or other extreme weather in your area for the first month of the year?

I look forward to a whole new year in the garden!

Mad Cat Garden | July 2021

July in the garden fiiiiinaly saw us getting to harvest some good veggies!! We got tomatoes, peppers, blueberries, ground cherries, tomatillos, and more! At the end of the month we are deep into tomatoes season and so happy to be there. Bc we seed forage, some of the veggies we grew are a surprise! I think these weird round peppers we grew are actually jalepanos, but they are like xmas baubles!

Every morning, me and the cats look out on this view to start the day.

A non edible plant that grows naturally in our yard/garden are these “deadly” nightshade. Such a beautiful plant! But do not eat!!

Someone else has been enjoying the tomatoes as well!! By the jaw marks, I think this is a possum!! Whomever it is, they come around each night and take one bite out of all the low hanging tomatoes.

How is your garden growing?

Mad Cat Garden | June 2021

Yes, you read that right!! Here is a look at the JUNE garden! June was a big month in the garden and I wanted to make sure to highlight it. There are not a huge amount of pics, but even so, it’ll be good to look back to this month from future years. 2021 has been a strange year for the garden. Everything took a looong time to get started. June was the month that things really started going off.

Our blueberries put out it’s first small fruit in the beginning of June, but we didn’t get any ripe ones until the end of the month. Even then, it was only a few.

The peppers were growing but tomatoes were still very small with no fruit. The raspberries are taking over!! June saw us eating a lot of raspberries!! The lettuces were already bolting but we were able to eat some before they were gone completely. Why do earwigs love to live in the lettuce crevices? This is the first year we grew tomatillos and they were already quite big by June. We got our first really fruit early in July.

We have not mastered lettuce and it always bolts early and we only get to eat some leaves.

The herbs were growing well at this time. We were trying to grow pumpkins but weren’t having any luck.

We did get some squashes started this month, including the birdhouse gourds you see above. Unfortunately after these beautiful and delicate flowers, the gourds all withered on the vine. This year has been not at all what we expected, but we have learned a lot!

Are you growing a garden this year? How did your garden look in June?

Mad Cat Garden | May 2021

May was the month that the star of our garden shined the brightest. We got this orange thyme when we made our first front yard bed and it’s been going strong ever since! We love it for it’s bushy nature and bright clean scent. We don’t cook with it, but just let it do it’s thing every year. But when it flowers is always a special moment.

This year we planted a fancy milkweed, tomatoes, tomatillos, and some pumpkins around the orange thyme. Another perennial that is planted in this bed is coming up as well. I’m not sure what plant it is, but it has purple flowers when it blooms and the bees love it.

We planted a mini pumpkin bed this year, but the pumpkins aren’t doing well. We had hoped to have a pumpkin patch in the front yard, but I think we will have to try again next year.

The bed on the other side, we planted some herbs including curry! It smells amazing! We put a pepper in there, but we stilll have ots of room for other plants.

Our other front bed has mint coming up all over! The rosemary from last year lived and is thriving, we planted a bunch of other herbs and flowers there, but only a few have come up so far.

What was your May garden doing? Ours is definitely a little stunted from the weird weather. When writing this (in early June), we’ve also had a lot of rain and some plants seem a bit drowned. We will see what the summer months bring!

Mad Cat Garden | April 2021

It was a big month in the garden with lots of plants growing a little bit. So the progress wasn’t spectacular to look at. I took this opportunity to look at the front beds a bit.

The two photos above are of the front bed which are flowers, not food, but came back quite well this year. This bed is all bulbs and it’s a great surprise each year what decides to come up and how many come up each year. This year we had bright tulips, hostas, daffs, and pink and purple hyacinths.

My montauk daisies came up again this year, which is always a surprise as well.

Our front beds started coming up with a lovely butterfly attracting bush and a few mint volunteers. The orange thyme always thrives in our big bed. The rosemary survived this year! We planted a bunch of herb seeds in the beginning of April but none came up.

Sadly by the end of the month our front flower bed was completely destroyed. We got a new roof and the beds were trampled!! The hostas and irises were ok, so I was happy about that!!

How was your garden month in April?

Mad Cat Garden | March 2021

March is always the month that the garden really kicks off. We planted seeds this month and really tried to use the green house to it’s full potential. My husband has been making seed pots reusing newspaper. We also use found or donated pots. We have some kale and chard that had wintered over.

We also bought a few lettuces and chards to get our garden going.

Flowers and strawberries also wintered over in the green house. Both are already blooming!

Peas are the seeds that have come up the most but we also started pumpkins, radishes, tomatoes, peppers and more.

During the start of the month, almost everything was in the green house, but as the month wore on, we started moving plants out to the yard/garden.

We didn’t turn our beds in March, bc we were letting any bees, moths, pollinators, or other bugs stay sleeping under the ground as the weather is still chilly. The bluebs started budding, and the pear trees have leaves.

While a lot happened in March, it was still a month of waiting in the garden. Hopefully the weather will break and we can do a lot more in April.

What is happening in your garden this month? Was it gearing up or winding down?

Mad Cat Garden | February 2021

In January and February it was very hard to think about or even imagine working in the garden. For most of that time, our yard was covered in snow.

But as Feb wound down, we started thinking forward to Spring and we even got the seeds out to get started.

This is the first year that they garden was extremely dormant for the three most wintery months. We will see what that means for Spring, if anything. Perhaps it is just the natural cycle of things.

What was happening in your garden in February?

Mad Cat Garden | December 2020

Every month for the last few years, I have looked back at the pics I took of the garden the previous, and gone over them in this column. And this month, I don’t have any. I have no pics of our garden from dec 2020.

Crazy.

I could have simply skipped this series this month, but that just didn’t feel right. This year was such a great year in our garden in many ways and this has given me an opportunity to look back over 2020 and our garden.

In January, the photos look bright and sunny! There was chard and a radish still growing in the garden. There was also snow that month, so it wasn’t all off to a sunny start. It was sad to remember our jackfruit trees and see them as small babies, thriving. Jan felt full of potential, but too early for lots of growth.

The groundhog predicted an early spring and much of the family was out observing the garden in Feb. We worked on the compost, and saw out onion of two years still surviving the winter. Inside the jackfruit was growing and we were rearranging the house to keep them and other seedlings in the sunny spots.

In March, especially towards the end saw so much change and growth in the garden. Inside seedlings and sprouts were going strong and we were quickly running out of space! Luckily by the end of the month we moved a few things outside! We got lettuces and other leafy greens to plant outside as well. The blueberries were budding, the onion growing, and all over the garden, plants were starting to peak out of the earth. Around the neighborhood, we also started seeing other people prepping their own gardens!

In April, there were peppers, peas and other plants jumping up under the grow lights inside. Lettuces, kale, cauliflower, and more were started in the outside beds. Herbs we planted the month before were taking off in our front beds. We were also trying new experiments with beds. We took a shelving unit that came with the house when we bought it, and had been living in the basement for years, got new life as a 5th backyard bed.

In May, more herbs, more new beds, tomatoes, raspberry bushes, flowers and a pile of dirt!

In June our radishes had already gone to seed, brussels were brusseling, lettuces and kale were huge. Peppers were starting and we were branching out with new veggies, like edemame. Summer was here and the garden seemed small but was starting to feel quite lush. Blueberries were popping up and we were already fighting the birds to get a few for ourselves. And out onion was huge!

In July the lettuces had bolted, we had basil, mint lavender, the blueberries were getting ripe and eaten before we could taste them. We had shishitos, tomatoes, and greens to eat. But the garden was still in a blooming stage. By this time in 2019, we were over flowing with fruit and veg. This year this the garden seems a bit stunted.

In August flowers were blooming, raspberries were berrying, and we were harvesting zucchini, a new veg for our garden. We were eating from the garden a lot at this point. this was the height of the garden, but we were still surprised that the garden wasn’t as lush as the previous year.

By September, the garden was winding down and I was writing about the joy of using up our last veg and eating the end of our favorite summer meals. We had also finally put up our green house and were starting to populate it.

In October the morning glories we re still going strong and we were pursuing our new new favorite pastime of seed saving. This was the month we saved the most seeds. We saved out own seeds and we also went foraging for seeds. We hope to use a lot of the seeds we saved in the spring and summer of 2021.

In November we had packed the greenhouse almost full and we were cleaning out the beds. We still had our brussels which never fully matured and we never picked. We were still eating lettuce and kale from the greenhouse.

And now, in December, the beds are bare. All the plants that hibernate in the winter are doing so. We moved as many flowers as we could into the greenhouse but it’s getting harder to keep it warm on below freezing nights. We thrifted a space heater and has it helped add some warmth on the coldest nights. We are starting now, to think about the new growing season. Our grower friends are buying seeds and we are all making plans for 2021.

What was your garden like in 2020? Did it thrive or was it sparse? Was it what you expected or was it surprising? What are you plans for 2021?

Herbs

One of my goals in 2020 is to read more. See other books I've read or listened to here.

I got this magazine style how to book at the Bradley Beach Library Sale this summer. Herbs: How to Select, Grow and Enjoy by Norma Jean Lathrop was written in the 80s but is still relivent today!

Interesting and informative, Herbs gives you a solid base of knowledge to grow herbs on any scale.

I really enjoyed this book even though it is not, like a riveting read. This instructive manual, had sections for how to choose, propagate, transfer, plant, and use a wide variety of herbs. Some you may know and some you may not be familiar with. This books includes a long list of different herbs, their uses and properties. It also contained a section of profiles of gardeners around the world. I really liked hearing about the different people’s gardens and how they felt about them. I also liked that there is a section on some of the magical and medicinal uses of herbs. I really enjoy that almost every book on herbs mention their magical properties. I read Magical Herbalism earlier this year and liked how these were connected. I would highly recommend this book to those looking to start their journey growing herbs, those who are interested in gardening in general, and those who like gardening books.

Are you a gardener who likes reading? Or a reader who likes gardening?

This book was mentioned in my November Wrap Up.

More about books here:
BookTube
Goodreads

Mad Cat Garden | November 2020

November was a mostly quiet month in the garden. In the beginning of the month we harvested a very few last items. Later, we pulled up most of the beds, cleaned them and get them ready for winter. We transplanted a lot of plants, veggies and flowers, and put them in the green house.

We are still struggling with how to best utilize space in the garden. When we are urban foraging, we keep our eyes out for shelving and other items that we might use. As of Nov, it’s pretty full! We will need to make some room for seeds and seedlings in just a few months.

An empty garden bed is like a glass of water. Are they sad and empty? or are they brimming with potential for the next planting season?

We never ate our brussels sprouts. Mostly bc the whiteflies got there first and were pretty wild this year. The frost did eventually get to the kale seen here.

In the beginning of the month we picked a lot of green tomatoes. I had many ideas for them but ended up trying to pickle them. Can you re-pickle pickles? I feel that they didn’t pickle as much as I had hopped and I’m not sure how to selvedge them.

What did your garden look like in November? Was it a Wintery month for you, where you broke down your garden? or are you gearing up to a great growing season?

Video | Seed Saving ASMR | Dropping, Sorting, Rubbing, Scratching ASMR | Garden ASMR

Hi, I’m Mo.
Thanks for joining me today! I post videos on Mondays and Fridays.
We are collecting a lot of seeds for next year’s garden. They make great ASMR! It’s thrill to dip your hands in them or roll them around. The make some good pip pip pip sounds, scratching, dropping and rubbing sounds! This lo fi garden ASMR and I hope you like it!

Do you save seeds from your garden? What other garden items would make good asmr?

Cats in this video: none :(

Original music by audionightlight. https://soundcloud.com/anlight/tracks

Blog: http://www.madcatquilts.com/blog
Instagram: http://instagram.com/madcat1
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/120401161-ana-mo-shoshin

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Mad Cat Garden | October 2020

It was an interesting month for the Garden. Most of October was dreary, rainy, and sparse in the garden. But there were moments of brightness and sun. For some reason, I didn’t take too many photos this month, so the Oct tour of the garden will be specific.

At the beginning of the month, our morning glories were still going strong and even coming up through every break in our concrete patio. We love the morning glories and want to think of a way to train them better next year.

We have been moving things into the green house, trying to get everything we want to save (or try to save) inside before the first frost. When the sun is out, it’s so nice to peek inside the walls. We have some foraged furniture and shelves inside, but it’s not big so it’s a fun puzzle to try and fit everything.

There was a lot for this month, we lost a lot of our last tomatoes and peppers as they were shook of the bushes.

Our pineapple sage went to flower this month and it was brilliant!! The flowers are beautiful.

Our orange thyme mascot is still doing well and got a little company for October.

What was your garden doing this month?

Video | Garden Walk No. 1 | Late Fall Garden | Cat in the Garden | Walk with Me

Hi, I’m Mo.
I post videos every Friday and Monday. Thanks for joining me today! Walk with me in our raised bed garden. Here is late Fall in our garden. There are still flowers, tomatoes, peppers, kale and lettuces, and much more. But bc the weather is getting cooler, the garden is winding down. I’m not the only one taking a garden walk today! Irving is walking in the garden, too!

What other plant and flowers can you spot in this video?

A word about zero waste and the garden:
We try to live a zero waste lifestyle and this extends to the garden as well! We do buy plants from local markets, but we always reuse the plastic pots they come in. We do occasionally buy bags of soil but we try to buy soil in bulk. When we have plastic soil bags, we reuse them or wash them out and recycle them with other plastic bags. We thrift or forage a lot of our pots and containers, wood and shelves for the garden.

Are you a zero waste gardener? Do you have tips or tricks? Would you like to see a video on how we use or reduce waste in the garden?

Cats in this Video: Irving

Original music by audionightlight. https://soundcloud.com/anlight/tracks

Blog: http://www.madcatquilts.com/blog
Instagram: http://instagram.com/madcat1
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/120401161-ana-mo-shoshin

Please Like, Comment, and Subscribe

Something New | Seed Saving

We had our garden for several years now and this is the second year we have saved seeds. Last year, we saved seeds ideally. “let’s keep the seeds and see what happens…” but this year we are saving with a purpose! Almost with a fervor. So this can still be considered something new.

The first year we saved seeds, we saved pepper seeds almost exclusively. When we planted them at the beginning of this year, a lot of them were viable! We got a pepper crop from our old peppers! How exhilarating! It made us want to collect all sorts of seeds and try to grow them next year. We saved seeds from all our favorite items that we grew this year; tomatoes, peppers, flowers, peas, edamame, and more. My husband is great about researching how is the best way to gather, and save seeds. I usually just pick something, let it dry and get those seeds. what’s the worst that can happen?

Once we exhausted everything in our garden we started looking else where for seeds. Anything we ate, the question came up, can we save the seeds? If we took a walk and saw a fallen flower or plant. Can we save the seed? When we got our holiday pumpkins we thought - we can save the seeds! And when we visited community gardens we searched for fallen fruit and veg to save the seeds!

Now we are seed foragers and plan to grow all sorts of interesting things that we might not have if we hadn’t found the seeds. Ground cherries, why not? Pumpkin patch in the yard, sounds good! It’s been a fun adventure to seek out seeds. It’s zero waste, saving us money and it’s an enjoyable pastime. And it will be a fun adventure to see which seeds are viable next year.

If you garden, do you save seeds each season? Have you had good luck or bad?

Something Nice: Seeds from Strangers

I love to see other people saving seeds. We will be happy to plant these seeds in the Spring!

Mad Cat Garden | September 2020

Although September was still a good garden month, the weather and our harvest definitely took a turn towards Winter. I feel like the last few years, Sept has been one of the more lush months for the garden, but this month, you could see that everything is winding down in the garden. Our tomatoes got extremely scraggly, our herbs bolted and shed leaves, our peppers still produced but the fruit got smaller and smaller.

Even in the beginning of the month our front bed tomatoes were struggling a little. This was our orginal bed and we think that we will refresh the dirt very much before planting it next year to see if fruits and veggies do better than they did this season. The only issue we have with changing up this bed is that this is where our brilliant orange thyme lives. This thyme bush is the pride and joy of our garden and we hope not to disturb it too much.

The rest of our herbs in front beds got leggy and sparse by the beginning of Sept. We are working on taking some cutting and propgating them to see if we can over winter herbs in the green house. Overall, I’m excited to have this bed be all kitchen herbs again next year, but I hope to find a way to utilize them more in cooking.

Our back yard beds were pretty full at the start of the month and fell off as the month progressed. Our flower bed did well and we are excited to devote a bigger bed to this next year. Our zucchini was still thriving in the start of the month but by the end, it’s only producing flowers. We have not eaten any of these flowers yet, only the fruit. Does anyone have a great recipe for squash blossoms to share?

We’re finalizing (I won’t say perfecting) our water system. We hope to forage at least one more water barrel.

Our raspberries produced more in Sept. Or maybe the squirrels just ate less? Either way, it’s a delight to wander out into the garden in the morning as pick a few berries to eat throughout the day.
Our bussels sprouts, which we planted in the spring, are still around, the brussels themselves never got very big and I’m not sure if we should have picked them ages ago? We still haven’t, so we’ll see how that goes, or if we ever do pick them. Both they and the kale have quite a storm of white flies when you brush by them, but they don’t seem to harm much.

We’ve been working on the green house, figuring out projects for storage, heating, and comfort. We have moved a few plants inside and are making plans for what will overwinter there. We are also diligently collecting sand, every time we go to the beach, to line the floor with. My husband’s idea, he’s not sure that it will benefit the GH but it sure looks cool.

Even though the garden slowed down considerably, we are still eating from it almost every day. We had our first soup of the fall and were able to use some items. We have still be getting tomatoes, but more and more of them have to ripen off the vine. We planted a few late lettuces and chard which we hope to enjoy soon. The garden is not at it’s peak, but it’s not done yet.

What was you garden like in September? Is it lush or slowing down? Do you have a green house? If so, how do you utilize yours?

Zero Waste Recipe | Our Favorite Summer Meal 2019: (Almost Vegan) Potato Poblano Tacos

Yep, you read that right. We made these tacos a ton last summer! in 2019 our poblano crop was HUGE! The pepper bushes were huge (several feet wide and tall), the peppers were huge, and our taco consumption matched that. But we only got about 6 poblanos this year!

As a final nod to summer, I wanted to have this meal at least once! As usual, I don’t have a recipe for this meal, so this variation is a little different than last year. I didn’t really measure anything, so I will just mark what I used. Scale up or down depending on how many you want to feed. I also only had regular sour cream which keeps this meal form being totally vegan.

Ingredients:
potato (1/2 a baking potato)
sweet potato (1/2 a Japanese sweet potato)
poblano peppers (3 smallish peppers)
garlic (about 4 cloves)
fresh corn (1 ear)
olive oil
tomatoes (a handful of mini ones)
red onion (about a quarter of a small onion)
sour cream
lime
tortillas

Equipment:
knife
pot
frying pan
spatula

Cut potatoes and sweet potatoes into bit sized cubes, boil or steam until for tender. Fine dice garlic, rough dice peppers, tomatoes, and red onion and cook corn off cob, while potatoes are cooking. Add cooked potatoes and garlic into a frying pan with olive oil and fry until potatoes get brown and a bit crispy. After potatoes are crisped, add peppers and cook until tender. Add corn and cook mixture for 2-3 min more. Set aside veg mixture to cool slightly. While potato mix is cooking and cooling combine red onion and tomatoes in a bowl. These are toppings and add a little juice to the tacos so the tacos are not too dry. Place potatoes mix in a bowl for easy assembly. In the same frying pan (no need to clean it, just bush out any chunks), heat the tortillas thru. Assemble tacos with potato mix, tomato mix, sour cream and lime. Eat and enjoy!

Some notes:
- The only reason this is not a completely vegan meal is bc we only had sour cream. Feel free to use vegan cream, cashew crema, or yogurt, to omit all together.
- These tacos are inspired by ones we used to eat often in Brooklyn. The potatoes and poblanos are essential but everything else can be changed. We had corn, so we used that this time. The sweet potatoes were tasty, but it can easily be made without. Add what you have or what you’ve grown. We usually have this with picked red onions, but I hadn’t made any this time. Add black beans, whatever you like.
- This meal would be good over rice, or as a burrito, or as a burrito bowl.

Making your own tortillas and sour cream would have made this a more zero waste meal. I used up the last of some store bought tortillas, but making them myself would have been better. We reused the plastic bag that these came in. The sour cream is also not zero waste as it comes in plastic. When we eat all the cream, we will clean and reuse the container for seed sprouting in the Spring. The peppers and tomatoes came from our garden. The sweet potatoes, corn, and onion were all from a local farmers market. Eating as local as possible helps this meal be more zero waste.

Did you have a favorite meal this Summer or last?

The Joy Of Using Up

The other day I realized that we are almost out of tomato season. It happened quicker this year than last year. But each time we pick tomatoes there are less then the last harvest, more are unripe or rotten before we can get to them and each bush produces less. No more tomatoes and cheese, no more salsa and fresh sauce, no more tomatoes garnishing our salads and pastas. It made me sad.

But then, the weather took a cold spell and I saw a potato. Mmmm, I thought, we haven’t had potato soup in forever!

Part of being as zero waste as possible is eating with the seasons, eating what’s available when it is ripe and fresh. One might think that this is restricting, but really, it’s only the joy of using up. All winter we eat great and hearty winter veg and in the summer, those are set aside to have fresh light summer fruits and vegetables. A perfect balance and nothing is given up.

Mad Cat Garden | August

Another month, flown by! Summer garden is almost gone! We never had much luck with sunflowers, but in August we got a really nice one from our wildflower bed. The squirrels loved it too and once the head of the flower got heavy enough to bend, the squirrels ate every seed.

We had similar luck with our few beautiful strawberries. None were had by us, but birds and squirrels reaped the benefit. We have gotten our strawbs to a good place. They much prefer pots, we find, but are sending out shoots and runners so we must come up way to encourage them to grow new plants.

Something else the squirrels love eating are our raspberries. Our bush has quadrupled in size this summer, but we haven’t seen a single ripe berry.

We have two water barrels that were both gifted to us, and this summer we have used their content as well as rainfall to water the garden almost exclusively. It’s a nice feeling not to turn on the hose. I’m sure this is having an effect of some of our plants, but being a new gardener, I’m not sure what it is. Our tomatoes and peppers are producing well, but by the end of Aug are looking a little scraggly. This could have something to do with the water situation.

This is a year of experimentation and we have done so much. Peppers from saved seeds, some in pots, some not, lettuce, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, zucchini, chard (the squirrels ate it all before it could grow more than a few inches), soy beans, onions, potatoes, wildflowers, new things for us to grow, or new methods of growing. A lot of things we are letting go to seed, in order to observe, or save. Many things have worked and we will try again next year. Some we plan to plant again asap for our fall garden. A new crop of radishes are planted, some using seeds from earlier this year. I want to try ginger and garlic in the fall.

Our yard looks crazier and crazier, especially when it’s not mowed, but it is a paradise of growth, a maze of meals. And we wouldn’t want it any other way. The greenhouse makes it all the more intese, but we haven’t even finished or starting using it. It will prolong our season, I’m sure.

Our first home grown zucchini looked like a duck. We’ve eaten a lot since them in Aug. We have tomatoes every other day or so. Our favorite way is fresh cut with mozz cheese and vinegar or in simple sauces, or fresh over pasta with garlic and olive oil. We eat a lot of peppers, pepperonchini, shishitos, poblanos (although our crop this year is nowhere near as prolific as 2019). Our new favorite method to enjoy is blistered with a horseradish cream dipping sauce. We’ve had edemame, pananella salad, zucchini parm.

Due to social distancing we have not given away as much as last year, not shared as much. So we have had to come up with new ways to eat or preserve veggies. We are not great at it yet, but hope to get better.

We have had a very mild Summer here and I’m interested to see what September will be like.

What have been your biggest crops this year? What are you favorite garden meals? Have you been able to share with friends and family?

Mad Cat Garden | July 2020

The month of July went by so fast, it seems like I only got garden pics from the very beginning. I’m sure, if you live in the northern hemisphere, you can imagine how July and the height of Summer is like tho. Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes.

In our two main back beds, the tomatoes were still ripening in the beginning of the month, but by the end we had tons of tomatoes. Our peas were totally done. Our peppers were peppering away. We grew almost all our peppers from seed that we saved from last year, so we were excited to have such a good crop. By the end of July, the lettuces were all but gone. we picked the remainder and hope to get another batch for our fall garden going soon. Cauliflower had long gone to seed. For some reason our potato vine died, but there seem to be a few potatoes under the earth.

More tomatoes and peppers in our middle bed. Most of what we planted this year was experimental. Some worked well, others did not. It’ll be interesting to sow a Fall garden this year, for more experimentation.

The last veg bed was planted latest and has a random assortment. Arugula, tomatoes, zucchini, endive, lettuce. The endive is thriving all thru July, but it’s so bitter we can’t eat it. Someone is eating the zuccs but it’s not us. The tomatoes in this patch are inexplicably blush colored.

The herb bed in the front is booming and everything is bolting now in the heat. In late July I chopped all the basil down to hopefully get a second crop out of it. So far, so good.We planted soy beans, which are beautiful! But we can’t tell if they are ready to pick yet. We have a bunny friend who visits here and has eaten the low hanging tomatoes. We’ve started laying out any split or over ripe or fallen fruit from the back as an offering.

In the beginning of the month we still had blueberries. The birds quickly ate all of them. By the end of July, the bushes were bare.

Most of these were ripened, picked, eaten and the branches thinned by the end of the month.

One of the few store bought peppers, pepperoncini, was prolific so far in July.

Lovely lavender from a local seller.

We grew all our shishitos from seed this year. Why are they so hard to find for sale? Blistered up, with lemon and course salt, they are one of our favorite meals. I recently served them with a horseradish and mayo dipping sauce and they were divine. Tomatoes are another staple Summer dish and we eat a lot of them!

How has your garden been this month? are you eating a lot from your growing?