The good earth!!!

The garden continues to yield abundantly this week. The pole beans have begun to produce in bulk. We harvested 21 lbs of it. 38lbs of tomatoes were harvested as well. The summer squash plants are still going strong, with 23lbs of squash harvested. The summer is coming to an end and the squirrels are now back in force. Last summer they did quite a bit of damage to my tomatoes but this year, they seem to be focusing on the Calabash plant.

Home to PA this Weekend!

In celebration of the Beijing Olympics, I have decided to go home to PA this weekend and watch the opening ceremony with my parents. On Friday, we ate a delicious dinner composing mostly of our own garden's produce along with abundant quantities of fish that we caught from nearby lakes and reservoirs. Right before dinner, I took a quick trip through the garden and picked up 12 lbs of tomatoes, 2 lbs of summer squash, 1 lb of beans, 1 green apple, and a green calabash!!! In the tour of my garden, I noticed a few things worth mentioning. The apple tree has sent out many new branches, these will need to be pruned off early next spring. We must do this so that the tree will put all of it's energy towards the development of 2 to 4 very strong leader branches. The single green apple that I harvested had been too much for it's young branch to take. The weak branch was broken by the heft of it's own fruit!

The bio-intensive tomato bed has reached it's period of peak production. The tiny 16 square feet bed is supporting a huge canopy of tomato vines 6 feet high and spread out far beyond the initial area of the garden bed. The bloom of plant mass hides hundreds of tomatoes in various stages of ripening. My father told me that the DAILY output of this system is around 10 lbs of tomatoes now. Of course, such productivity comes at a cost. That one bed now requires 3 gallons of water a day, triple the amount of water for any other bed.

The process of succession is well underway for the beans. Notice how the European pole beans are growing over the dried vines of the peas? I would expect the succession process to complete itself entirely around early september. I had wanted to plant the pole beans even earlier that we did, so that full succession would happen by mid August. But there were separate factors to consider here. The peas have vastly better biological resistence to Japanese beatles than pole beans. And the point was to allow for the main growth phase of the pole beans to occur AFTER the natural life cycle of the Japanese beatles(ending in early August). Thus, we were able to avoid the worst depredations of those pests at the cost of lower food production from the beans.

The summer squash vines has expanded well beyond it's original bed to take over the neighboring bed that had been reserved for the onions and garlic. The garlic still lives, but the red onions are entirely gone. Our peppers suffered the same fate. The squash plants have an extreme level of genetic diversity. The squashes harvested look vastly different from each other. Some of them are the elongated golden vegetables found in supermarkets. But quite a few of them are in various shades of green, yellow, or streaks of both. The shapes vary from common ellipsoids to round spheres to strangely contorted forms. The skin ranges from smooth to hairy to bumpy to downright spiky. Some squashes are so different from each other that they look like vegetables from different species than offspring from the same plant.

The calabash plants have done extremely well this year. I see 9 small calabash fruits growing on the vine in addition to the large one that I had harvested. This plant's flowers seems to be especially potent at attracting butterflies. The single calabash plant had 4 butterflies perching upon it. Of course I can't say enough good things about this vegetable. Eaten as small green fruits, the calabash is a wonderful source of vitamins and fiber. When allowed to fully mature, the fruit's pulp can be dried and used as a substitute for flour. When allowed to season under the sun, the calabash fruit hardens into a natural container that can be fashioned into bottles, cups, bowls, and plates ( and penis gourds for New Guinean Highlanders :P).

A Massive Harvest!!!

My little suburban garden has exceeded all expectations of late. The Summer squash continues to produce in large quantities. We have been harvesting all sorts of tomatoes(cherry, brandywine, beefsteak, early girl) of late. It is absolutely incredible how many tomatoes we're harvesting given that we only cultivated 16 sq feet of soil with these plants. This week we have harvested 52lbs of summer squash, 58lbs of tomatoes, and 1 lb of pole beans.