Growing UP

How to vertically grow Cukes, Pole Beans and Tomatoes

Growing vertically is one of my favorite ways to save space in an urban garden - and it is attractive - which is definitely something to consider when your space is limited, and your garden is your urban oasis and/or sacred space in a concrete jungle.  I love my visually pleasing walls of green plants, and I'll explain here how you can have them too.

Late July Garden

Our tomatoes runneth over.

Summer Squash refrigerator pickles

Ingredients

 So my friend Dave calls up with a quandry.   He's just inherited an overflow of squash from a neighbor's CSA.   He wants to know if they can be pickled.   They can, says I, put its hot as balls and canned pickles often come out squishy.   What's to be done?   Well....refrigerator pickles.

Crudite season

It has been so ridiculously hot the last couple of days that even though some veggies are ready, I have been on strike from any recipe containing the words fry, boil, steam, grill or even cook.

Plus, with helping take care of Dawn (who broke her collarbone) I'm too lazy to even prepare a salad (and the lettuce is mostly done anyway).

Instead, I'm just eating raw veggies.  So far we've got tender new dragon beans (purple and yellow beans above), fresh-pulled purple carrots and a farmer's market cucumber.   Just add  Spicy Trader Joe's Hummus, tabouli, a loaf of olive bread from the Brookline farmer's market to make the meal seem more, well, meal-like.    There is plenty of time for slaving over the stove in September and October...now I'm going hunter-gatherer style until the thermometer goes back down below 90.

Wordless Friday

A day when I let the picture tell a story...


Idea borrowed from onegreentomato.wordpress.com

Carrot harvest

The Harvest begins....

Waiting for tomatoes...

Has it happened?    We've actually reached a point of real waiting.    It's all about to happen....tiny little purple eggplants, tons of blossoms on the bed of beans, carrot patch starting to yield good-size carrots, green peppers as big as my fist, green tomatoes hanging off of every plant.   The peas are done, the lettuce is bitter, the herbs are all starting to flower.  We laid down drip hose and almost a bale of hay.  Pulled weeds and planted beans where the lettuce used to go.   Maybe in a week, the vegetable floodgates will open.   But now, this summer, unemployed, I actually got to a point where the garden is fully tended.   OMG.

Cold peanut noodles and the July Garden - stir-fry season

Cold noodles + garden veggies in homemade peanut sauce on a hot day

Well, I have about a million blog posts I intend to write, but for now a short one will have to do.   It's July, it's hot as balls up here in the northeast, and things are moving at their usual unpredictable schedule.   The tomatoes just grew out of their cages, but so far everything is green, green green.  Green tomatoes, tiny green peppers, green peas, dark green kale, bluish-green broccoli (still no heads), neon-green cabbage.   The hot weather stuff is still coming:  in what I think is a first for this year, no eggplants, beans or cukes yet.   We are late.