garden update; first Dreamwidth post

You know, I'm writing an entry in my mind pretty much every time I harvest the garden, which is daily for weeks now. Most of them, of course, don't make it to the point of transcription, but instead fade into the blurry past of other things I meant to tell you about.

Our tomatoes are ready to go head-to-head with Audrey II. The sungold vines are about seven or eight feet, and they ain't done yet. In fact, we're getting about a pint of sungolds a day, and this is still nuthin'. And that's to say nothing of the several other, larger kinds of tomatoes (which this year are not wilting with bacterial leaf speck because I've been spraying them with diluted cider vinegar) - which can add up, altogether, to several pounds a day.

A pint of strawbs a day, too, which must be at least as efficacious as an apple at keeping the doc away. I regularly have that little Kaylee's-eyelashes-fluttering-ecstatically moment when eating them. And about one ear of corn a day, some beans, basil, a handful of husk cherries... o/' "Summertiiiiiiiime, when the living is eeeeeeasy..." o/'

The brassicas are bustin' out all over. The kale is kind of scary - some of them have aspirations to treehood. The romanesco are heading up into little chartreuse fractals, we've had one kind of kohlrabi and another soon to harvest, and even the broccoli - little recalcitrant buggers that they've previously been - are just starting to head up.

Cukes, chard, leeks, scallions, potatoes all doing fine. Beans heading into their second flush. Four kinds of basil - the sweet getting all bushy, also the lemon, which smells magnificent; the Thai and purple basil are merely adorably pretty. Other herbs, not so much. I think that'll be the impetus for me to get a year-round herb garden started, in pots that can keep me company inside through the winter. Peppers and eggplants also likely yielding only a crop of object lessons for next year.

Compost pile rebuilt! I've been wanting this to be done since my first permaculture weekend last fall: acquired many bags of leaves then, and more recently some broken pallets to hold it all. Now it is much more attractive, accessible, capable of holding enough to actually compost rather than just burping methane, and located such that we can use that corner in designing the solar greenhouse. Hell yes, I'm proud.

A few stats: overall, gave away Asian greens to nine other people. Corn topped out at nine feet tall. Harvested 64 heads of garlic - should get us through much of the coming year! Asparagus, horseradish, blueberry bushes, goumi berry bush, pawpaws all well-established; three kinds of raspberries with consecutive seasons now flourishing.

Oh, and we accidentally harvested rye from our yard. No, I'm not kidding. It's part of the cover crop, and we just ignored it on the bed which is laying fallow. Then it dried and C cut some for a decoration, and I started messing with it, and it turned into a big homeschooly piece of tactile play and education with S, and then the next thing I knew we'd teased out about a pound of grain. And of course we're going to use it. We've got this grain mill, in case you hadn't heard...