Garden Guest & Eight Ball Squash

We had a wee guest in the garden this morning. Apparently sunning itself on the red leaf lettuce, the little green frog seemed wide awake, yet unafraid of the camera.

Wonder if it likes to eat aphids? We know there are lots of frogs in the neighborhood because we hear their great chorus every evening. But we don't know much about them.... yet.

Yesterday, Robin harvested our first eight ball summer squash, almost perfectly round, but more the size of a softball than an eight ball. She says she's going to halve and stuff it, top it with Parmesan cheese, and bake it for our dinner tomorrow. We've never seen this type of squash before now. They are a hybrid zucchini, supposedly mild in flavor and firm of flesh

We're also getting a lot of yellow zucchinis off our two plants.

We cleared out some of our lettuce and all of the beets and spinach to make space for fall planting. Today, we planted four winter crops: two types of lettuce, kale and beets.

Harvesting Our Summer Squash!

A week or so ago, we ate our first zucchini. Today, three more were ripe and ready to eat.

Robin made a delicious stir fry using one green and one yellow squash from today's harvest. Here's her recipe:

2 medium summer squash, sliced
2T olive oil
1T butter (for flavor)
1/2 ring turkey kielbasa, sliced
1 tomato, chopped
left over couscous
a pinch of dried currants
1/4 c roasted slivered almonds
cracked pepper to taste

Stir-fry the kielbasa until slightly browned and set aside. Heat olive oil and butter in skillet. Stir-fry squash until easily pierced with a fork. Add tomato and stir for about 1 minute. Add other ingredients and kielbasa. Stir to mix and serve immediately.

4th of July Garden Update

Our strawberries are looking lush.

First yield!!! More on the way!

Squash competing with tomatoes for light.

Looks like we'll have a bumper crop in a month or so.

Now we understand why everybody has zucchini to give away.

Red leaf lettuce is producing more than we can eat

and more than we can give away.

Neighbors, please come and get it!

Robin says it's downright beautiful.

This trough is beautiful too,

marigolds setting off the burgundy and emerald green colors

of the romaine heads.

Kale seems to be growing nicely.

We don't have experience cooking with kale

or know when/how to harvest it... yet!

Gunny sack potatoes doing well.

Almost time to add more dirt... again.

Last time, bag will be totally unrolled.

By the way, when watering tonight, all the troughs took water. We hope this is evidence that the wicking process is finally working. The squash/tomato trough took the most water, a liberal amount. It figures because they'd probably have deeper root systems.

Horse Trough Gardening - Progress Report

Lettuce

We planted romaine and red-leaf romaine lettuce on May 2nd from organic starts purchased at Browne Lumber/Nursery in Friday Harbor. In two weeks we began harvesting it and have been having dinner salads ever since. It's still going strong. We've given away bags full to neighbors and friends. Above is how it looks today. (The foreground is radishes and carrots.)

Radishes

Lots of luck with our radishes! We planted them from seed sometime around May 15th, thinned about 100 of them out on June 8th, leaving about 60 plants, all of which are looking and tasting quite delicious! Again, we have enough to give many away. We'll plant more when we've harvested all of these.

Carrots

The only problem with planting carrots and radishes together in the same row is that when we pull up the radishes it's almost impossible not to put out several young carrot plants whose delicate tops are intertwined with the radish tops.

Green Peppers

Fun to see these starting to develop! The powdery mildew problem seems under control, with removal of heavily affected leaves and spraying the others (see here).

Summer Squash

Despite our cool spring (and temps only today reaching 70 degrees for the first time), the squash is flowering nicely, portending an adequate crop. We're a bit concerned that the spacing may be too crowded. Time will tell.

Beets

Our beets continue to look promising, even though we've been harvesting the tops from time to time. (See delicious recipe here.) On a few of them, we're just starting to see the top of the beet. They grow tall and might be better placed at the rear of the trough, moving the radishes to the front next year.

The Whole Schamole!

This is how the garden looks from the lower (Southwest) corner, looking up at the troughs. We're mighty pleased with the whole system so far. Our only concern is that the water reservoir in the bottom of the troughs does not seem to be wicking upward, because we never need to add water to the reservoir. We do top-water a little each evening, although it doesn't seem to require much water. We wonder if it will begin to wick more as the temperatures increase this summer.

Speaking of summer, happy solstice to all!