I ended up staying there two and a half hours, which made me late for a good-bye party. But I was on a roll!
I picked one watermelon which may or may not be ripe. I'll know later. About a month ago I picked one that wasn't even pink inside. The limits of my patience were really tested with this watermelon...its one of the reasons I had a garden in the first place.
And then I picked tomatoes. Gobs and gobs of tomatoes. You should see the ones I didn't bring home; my harvest would have doubled in size. Many were unusable because in my stupidity lack of judgement, I failed to properly stake my plants, and tomatoes were growing all over the ground. And it seems if they're on the ground, something has burrowed into the fruit, making mushy, icky, nasty spots. And then there were the ones that were so ripe that they cracked or were rotten, still hanging on the vine.
What you can't see are the tomatoes I picked on Sunday. There are just as many as this on my back deck. Plus I've given some away, and made salsa. My God! What did I expect with 50 tomato plants!?!
After the tomatoes, I picked some eggplants, squash, and peppers. I must say that it was really hard to see some of the ripe stuff because my garden is a hot mess. There are weeds taking over everything, and since this is an organic garden, I can't use weed killer. My brilliant idea of using newspaper under mulch to keep the weeds at bay didn't succeed. At least not long term.
The basil was almost ready to bloom so I knew I had to get that picked. The problem is cleaning all that basil. Plus I have so much more that needs to be gathered. I'm gonna have enough pesto for the neighborhood!
Finally, I decided to dig up half of my potatoes. The plants have almost all died so they're good to go. It wouldn't hurt to leave them in the ground another week I suppose, but I'm nosy and impatient. Digging up potatoes is like digging for buried treasure. Seriously!
20 lbs of potatoes
I weighed one of those containers of tomatoes (the styrofoam one) and that alone weighed 25 lbs. There are hundreds of tomatoes still on the vines, still green. I may, at some point, have to abandon them due to tomato overload.
Last week I picked all of my onions. Here they are drying on my back deck.
I can't seem to do anything in reasonable quantities. Maybe I'm a little obsessive? There are more on some chairs that aren't in the picture. (she said, sheepishly)
If you've been reading about my garden from the beginning, you may remember Peggy. She was my crabby garden neighbor. I feel I must take back what I said about her because last Sunday, when my son and I were picking stuff, Peggy told me that there were strangers in my garden helping themselves to some produce. Interlopers!! She told them that it wasn't very nice to help themselves and that had I put a lot of time and effort into that garden and she was sure that I wouldn't appreciate stealing. Wow. I guess I was wrong about her. Of course, I thanked her. I guess she's not so bad... and really, most people aren't. Meanwhile, my cabbages are gone, and my cauliflower, which was labelled as cabbage, has rotted right there in the garden. It smells terrible!
Happy?
Tomorrow's the big day here at our house. My oldest heads off to college. Sniff. We've packed up her car, packed up my car and have additional stuff to be packed into a pick-up truck. I hope I've prepared her well for whatever she faces. Maybe all parents feel this way, but I think that I didn't do as much as I should have. I could have been a better parent in a lot of ways. Hindsight is always 20/20 I guess. But she has a really good head on her shoulders; she's a smart girl with a lot of common sense. I really don't worry about her - I know she'll be fine. I'll just miss her...
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