Mid-summer Gardening work!

Last weekened, we journeyed back to Pennsylvania to work on the Suburban Garden. The time is high summer and the garden is overflowing with food. Since I've been living in NYC for the last 2 years, my father has largely taken over the daily operations of the Suburban Garden. And over that time, the man has grown to love my garden as his own. One can easily tell by the vast amounts of food that he is producing from the land!

Garden beds 1 and 3 has recently been harvested. My father gathered some 70 lbs of potatoes from those 2 beds. So with that in mind, I found time to plant some winter sugar beets and coriander in the newly accessible beds. Meanwhile, my dad was on his knees gathering large handfuls of bush beans. This was hardwork in humid, 90 degree summer weather. But since this is now my 4th year gardening, I've grown to love this act of productive labour.

The tomatoe bed is now a dense bush of vines and tomatoes. All 4 tomato plants are thriving and giving us buckets of tomatoes every day. As we harvested the ripe ones, I couldn't stop eating the cherry tomatoes. They were so sweet and juicy, like bright red grapes, and twice as tasty! As we were picking, I noticed that there were tomatoes in the interior of the bush which were quite inaccessible to us. This is a bit of a design snafu on my part. A good garen design should always have the most productive plants also be the most accessible ones. Next year, I'm going to put in wire mesh cylinders which will separate the 4 tomato plants and allow a person's arm to reach all the way into the middle of a garden bed.

The pepper plants are ready to be harvested and my father took in 4 huge green peppers. Next year, we will grow smaller red peppers and more Habanero peppers.

The Perennial plants are doing great as well. All of our Rasphberry and Blackberry bushes are producing abundently. The Asparagus bushes are thriving with huge, thick shoots. They will be ready for harvest next year. The Apple Trees are doing well, the sickly golden delicious tree that we planted 2 years ago, seems to finally be growing quickly. This year, we got the very first golden apple from that tree!