Suburban Tomato

The summer is rolling on and my harvests have settled into a pleasant consistency,  with the garden regularly producing  tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, silverbeet and herbs.  As a result I haven’t posted harvest photos every week.  Here are the highlights from the last few:

The chooks are behaving themselves and are continuing to lay.   1-2 eggs a day between the 3 of them which is enough for our needs and I don’t think is too bad given that they are almost 2 years old.

I am regularly harvesting baby carrots.  They are in a particularly shaded portion of the garden – I suspect with more sun they wouldn’t be ‘baby’ any more but the small size suits me (and the kids) fine.

I’m really enjoying eating basil at the moment, and I’ve put in a few new plants so I can continue to harvest as much as I like from the more mature ones.

The cucumbers seem to be producing lots at once and then none for a week, which isn’t so bad as I got to make my first batch of bread and butter pickles.

What is less good is that I have seen signs of rat damage on a few (half eaten one day, gone the next) fruit.

But summer is really all about the tomatoes isn’t it?

After noticing the rats I’ve started picking the tomatoes a little on the green side, which means they are less photogenic, but after a few days no less edible.

In these photos you can see a big Grosse Lisse with a couple of Tigerella on the right, and a basket of smaller varieties: Black Cherry, Broad Ripple Currant, Principe Borghese and an unidentified cherry/apricot sized red tomato on the left.

All the tomato varieties have done at least reasonably well this year, although a few of the plants are now looking a little worse for wear.  We have had a bit of warmer weather this week and the Broad Ripple Currant and Grosse Lisse in particular seem to have suffered.  Black Cherry remains the healthiest plant and the only one which I (well…actually my father) intentionally grew from seed.  The others were either bought as seedlings or are volunteers.

I’ll finish with another basket of summer goodies, this one containing the first of the dried beans (well actually still a little bit green) that became a chorizo and bean stew.  They worked well and the mixture of varieties made for a nice range of textures.  The best though I think were the purple king and I plan to now grow these every year to use dried.

For more harvests head over to Daphne’s.

We were away last week, playing in Phillip Island’s surf.  I love boogie boarding and spent an enjoyable week in the waves (mostly in a wet suit as it hasn’t been particular warm here for the past week or so).  Happily the garden thrived in my absence and has started producing new crops.

I arrived back to find a couple of oversized cucumbers (all Lebanese as that’s what I planted this year) and a couple of proper sized ones.

There were also the first of this season’s tomatoes.  I’m not entirely sure what this variety is as its a volunteer but it bears a remarkable similarity to a variety called Principe Borghese that my parents grow so maybe….

There was also an abundance of beans:

I picked all the Gourmet Delight that were ready but decided to leave the climbers to develop into drying beans.  It will be interesting to see which ones work best.

For more harvests head across to Daphne’s Dandelions where you should find delights from around the world.