Green Groceries

The garden is making lots of greenery, but so far, aside from the two-inch cucumbers climbing the fences and the two-inch green tomatoes, there isn’t much productivity yet.

What you can’t see here is how well the beans (heirloom goose beans, turkey gizzard, Christmas limas, etc) are doing.

After the shoots were up about a foot, I stuck “pea brush” in the row–rangy branch tops from a maple I cut last fall and heaped the brush out of the way near the garden. The bean vine tendrils wrap themselves with amazing speed around whatever support they can find, and they are up to the tips of the twigs and twining around the tomato cages, too. This will turn into a jumbled mess when the tops get heavy with beans (he said optimistically) but by then, aesthetics won’t matter. It’ll be all about getting in the harvest.

Tomatoes this year, heirloom Rutgers, German Johnson (not doing so well, won’t plant these again) and especially Mortgage Lifter. They could all blight between now and fruit ripening, but if they all mature the flowers they’ve set, we’ll be making salsa, juice and ketchup plus the whole tomatoes plus onions and peppers in quarts.