First Harvest of the Season

After hubby and I returned home from seeing Topol in Fiddler on the Roof in Chicago, I toured the garden to see how my plants were doing. I was ecstatic to see that six Sun Sugar tomatoes were ripe and ready to pick! After taking a picture, David and I promptly ate them. Tomatoes don't last long around here, especially the Sun Sugar ones. They are naturally sweet and also great salad tomatoes.

I staked the rest of the heirloom tomato plants now that they were all standing tall and straight (and yes, Michelle, even the tiny ones are doing well)! I'm happy to say I haven't lost a single tomato plant so far.

I am also happy to see that the Beefsteak tomato plants are preparing to fruit--they have blossoms galore! For example, on this one plant, in just this one cluster, I have seven blossoms open and four more preparing to open! All of the original hort sale tomato plants have blossoms, so it won't be long before I will be able to report many more tomatoes.

The zucchini are doing very well also. The plants are huge and green with very large leaves (the stakes you see between the rows are bean plants. Maybe not the best planting idea, but we'll see how it goes). I didn't lose any of these plants, either, and I'm beginning to feel the first tremors of fear that I may be overrun with more zucchini than I can cook, freeze, and give away. I decided to take a peek inside one of the plants to see what the blossom status is. OMG. The core of the plant is nothing BUT blossoms! And this is only the beginning, and only one plant. So prepare yourselves, dear readers, to receive zucchini in the near future.



I also got down on hands and knees--not an easy task, mind you--and weeded the beans and onions. With all the rain we've had, I had a lot of weeds encroaching that needed to be pulled. Luckily many of them came up easily by the roots. Tomorrow I will dig newspaper out of our recycle bin and shred it and mulch between the rows to keep the weeds down. So far, the grass clippings around each plant are doing a really good job of keeping the weeds away from the plant itself, so with the newspaper trick and grass clippings on top of that, I should be in good shape.