The Mid-July Garden

It’s that time of year in the garden where everything is starting to take off like crazy and the onslaught of vegetables is becoming more and more imminent.  The proverbial “calm before the storm.” I don’t have a lot to say right now, but I do have a few things to show you.

Our corn started to tassel earlier this week, and now the tassels are abundant and the corn is starting to silk.

The calendar shows this early corn should be ready in about two weeks, with the next batch maturing only a week after that.  We’ll see shortly how our venture in to sweet corn turns out!

The pumpkins started flowering a couple days ago (and I actually got up early enough to get a good photo).  If you’re following my Facebook page, this is the photo I posted earlier today for “summer” in the July photo challenge I’m doing.  We’ve been planting a pumpkin patch for 7 years now, so the first bright pumpkin blossoms mean summer to us!

From the number of flowers on our green beans it looks like we’re going to have a good crop this summer.  Who’s ready to learn to can beans?  In just a few weeks I’ll get to show you how!

The tomatoes have set fruit.  The amount doesn’t look too overwhelming right now, but they’re still flowering.  Hopefully we’ll end up with an abundant crop.  Last year we canned right around 150 pounds of tomatoes, mostly as stewed tomatoes.  We’re not going to have nearly that volume this year (thankfully) because we planted fewer plants this summer.  However, I found an awesome spaghetti sauce recipe right at the end of the season last year and I really want to make more of that!

Don’t be startled by the white splotches on my tomato plants… that’s fungicide I’ve been spraying as a preventive measure against blight.

Aside from that, the cucumbers are starting to vine and there are lots of little peppers on all my pepper plants.  My herbs are all doing great, and I’m on a mission this year to keep the herbs pruned so they don’t bolt, go to seed, and die off before I get to use them.  My husband fertilized the corn and garden yesterday and we’re getting a nice rain this morning, so we should see even more prolific growth in the coming days.

Soon I’ll have actual vegetables to show you, not just plants… and I’ll have more vegetables to eat than just lettuce and kale!