Harvest Found in the Dark
I’ve been working on quite a number of things which seem to consume my daylight hours, so I didn’t get to look through the garden till after 10 PM. I have two very small LED lights which I use to navigate my way through the growing micro forest, and locate the treats that fuel my gardening habit.
I’ve finally started getting a good supply of Chablis peppers, and I’m picking them early before they are ripe. I also found a Brandywine or Cherrokee purple tomato that is beginning to ripen, and I won’t know which it is until the color fills in. These two crops are just beginning to reward me for my hard work tending to their needs, and sprinkling them with nutrient enriched water. I’m still finding more Red Alert cherry tomatoes then I can eat, which always makes a happy gardener while giving away the surplus.
The lettuce just keeps growing as if it’s some sort of magical plant. I give away large zip lock bags full of it one day, and the next day the plants seem undisturbed and taller then ever. I’ve gotten so much lettuce that I’ve been eating it almost daily on my lunch break. Why should I pay $5-$10 for fast food that is no good for me when I can have a free salad that is homegrown, healthy and most of all tastes better ?
The zucchini plants continue to recover from the early summer ground hog onslaught, now that some of these animals have… err… moved on. The small plants which bore the brunt of the attack are beginning to grow very fast, and the zucchini and cucumber seeds that I planted in mid-july are popping out of the ground almost in victorious celebration. I planted far more seeds then usual, hopping to balance out the ground hog side of the equation. Now that the ground beasts are missing in the math, the equation will hopefully be out of balance in favor of lots of veggies for canning and freezing.
Broccoli
While I was wondering around in the moon light free darkness, I spotted something I would have dreaded as a child: Broccoli that looks edible. These days I’ll be happy to try it out, hopefully smothered with cheese and free of those pesky green worms I always seemed to find in store bought heads. Perhaps if I slice them thinly and fry them in butter with garlic and salt they will taste like broccoli chips.
Cabbage
Here is my most promising cabbage plant to date. It is also the one of the very first seeds to find it’s way into the soil this spring. I had planted a row of mixed cabbage seeds, and this was the only seed to poke it’s way through the soil. As a child, these green leaves would have haunted my dreams like a water sourced monster reaching out to pull me under. The adult however sees this plant as a large bowl of sauerkraut, something I enjoy, and hope to ferment the cabbage from this plant into.
