The Spice of Life

We are growing something like ten different kinds of tomatoes.  These normal red round guys above are Park Early Hybrids and Rutgers.  I actually can't tell them apart.

Here's our really yummy yellow tomatoes.  Good slicers.

These are the Mortgage Lifters, an heirloom pink beefsteak tomato.  Apparently they are called that because the guy who developed the seed paid off his house by selling them.

Cherokee Purples, a classic.

This is a yellow/orange beef tomato.  I bought one of these tomatoes from a Farmer's Market last year mainly to get the seeds.  This is the largest tomato my garden has ever produced.  I have the LEGO dude and sunglasses just to show the scale of this monster.

These are Paul Robeson Hybrid tomatoes.  They are very dark, black-type fruit from Siberia.

These are Tomande tomatoes.  Don't know much about them, other than they were on sale.  They're kinda orange.

Cherry tomatoes here.   Left to right, these are Chocolate Cherries, Ildis, and Supersweets.  The Supersweets are from volunteer plants.  There's like 4 of them in different parts of the garden.

So those are the types of tomatoes in the Givler Garden.

Pumping Out Tomatoes

With work taking up a huge amount of time right now, I am having to be very strategic about how I spend my free time.  I enjoy the blogging, but it's not a pressing concern, while spending time with the family is at the top of the list, and gardening is in the #2 slot.  The garden is needy, and it is pumping out tomatoes like crazy.  The picture above was from about 30 minutes of picking I did yesterday.

This was the Sunday tomato harvest.

This was the rest of the Sunday picking.  See the cabbage...Angelia fixed her delicious creamy cabbage yesterday and used it all up.

This was a harvest from last week.  Zucchini the size of baseball bats.  It's hard to catch them when they are younger and more delicious, although these guys will taste just fine sauteed with onions.  

I'll have another post soon about the different varieties of tomatoes that I'm harvesting.  What's your favorite kind of tomato?

Long Time No Garden

A little over a week ago, a co-worker had to take a leave of absence, and I was the back-up for the role he filled.  This resulted in me instantaneously becoming the camp director of a resident camp that will see about 1,000 campers over the space of 5 weeks.  Just to keep things interesting, I stepped in as camp director 6 days before the dreaded "National Visitation."  Essentially, an inspection of the summer camp by our accrediting organization.  


So, the picture above is the last harvest before I left for camp on Sunday, June 24.  Angelia volunteered to water the garden, which she did like a champ for the past week.  While I was gone, a huge thunderstorm hit, knocking down the sunflowers and one of the bean teepees.  Angelia and the boys were out there the next day, hacking up broken plants and resetting the teepee.  They also took out the mustard greens.  When I got home, the garden looked good.  Here's some images from Saturday, June 30...

Most of the green 'maters above were knocked down by the storm.  I do not pick green tomatoes on purpose.

At the top of this picture are my prize lemon (or yellow) cucumbers.  They taste almost the same as regular cukes, but their round shape and smaller size makes it easier to eat them raw, like an apple.  I also picked two very early eggplant, just below the lemon cukes.

Here's the complete harvest from Saturday.  Well, almost complete.  I did "sell" maybe 2 dozen tomatoes, some squash, carrots, kohl rabi, cucumbers, and herbs on Saturday.  I use that term "sell" loosely, because what I charged was about 3 times cheaper than grocery store prices.  

Saturday was incredibly hot, over 100 degrees, but the garden needed some work...mainly tying up vigorous tomato plants, but also ripping out plants that had gone to seed...Chinese Cabbage, lettuce...and planting in the space they vacated.  I put in pumpkins and another small section of summer squash.

Sunday was another harvest.  One of the largest tomatoes ever out of the garden is this Cherokee Purple.  The top is greenish but the bottom is this pretty pink-purple color.

Here's the Sunday harvest.  We had another storm on Saturday night, with an actual tornado touching down in the county where we live, so there's a few more green tomatoes.

There are some pluses to summer camp.  Being away from the garden means that the growth is dramatic when you get home.  It's also berry season at camp.  The other day after we passed inspection, I took a walk and found these sweet red raspberries.  There's blackberries all over the place, but the raspberries are a real treat.  I wonder how they would do transplanted...Hmm....