Blending together

Summer garden updates sure do run together after a while. Even the newest seedlings aren't quite the miracle they were back in March. One magical thing the summer does have are the harvests:

July 27th

July 29th 

This morning (August 2nd already!)

The first eggplant got used on a pizza that same night. That photo also includes lettuce and arugula, a rare sight since it's usually eaten directly after it's picked. Sometime I should detail what happens with the food, especially since this might not count as a real gardening blog until I post a photo of homemade pickles.

Yesterday and last night were rainy and sometimes windy, and that combined with not visiting the back garden since Tuesday meant I lost out on a few cherry tomatoes.

Poor fallen tomatoes.

Between the unsalvageable fallen tomatoes and a few that had split open on the plants I'm down a whole handful, but the price of good food is eternal vigilance and apparently I'm not always ready to pay.

I also lost my most recent eggplant blossom, which you can make out on the ground in the photo below.

I'm not sure why it fell off, hopefully some of the other nascent flowers will soon bloom to make up for it.

In other news out back I think the older soybean plants are on their way out.

Older plants are on the right, with yellowing leaves and bean pods.

There are quite a few pods that never filled out, and most of the ones that did have been fairly small. Next time they'll go someplace else, even if it's outside of the protected beds. They're one plant the cats and squirrels don't seem to bother once they're big enough.

Some of the latest cucumber out back are coming in oddly shaped, varying thickness along their length. This is a bad picture to show what I mean, but the adolescent cucumber below is sort of gourd shaped, something that hasn't happened to the front cucumbers.

I can't imagine how bored any NSA or CIA operatives would be if they had to trawl through records of my googling: fallen eggplant blossoms, weird cucumber shape, how to tell when edamame is ripe.