Hi garden friends. A find day for ducks, don’t you think?

Supposedly, the bulk of the rain will move out of the area this evening with tomorrow morning being relatively clear. Assuming that forecast to be true, the garden will be open from 8-11 with Fred as your leader. For harvest, we likely still have peas and perhaps some onions. I had some sugar snap peas for dinner Wednesday night and oh my, were they delicious! And they’re so easy to steam, either in the microwave for a couple of minutes or on your stovetop. Or eat them raw—equally wonderful! The strawberries are starting to peter out, but there may still be some to nibble on. We’ve been “stealing” some new potatoes that are mostly growing on top of the ground under the leaves, and may have more of those tomorrow. And pretty soon, the garlic should be ready to harvest. Summer crops, apart from the tomatoes, are coming in nicely. We’ve got beautiful beans, cowpeas, squash, peppers and cucumbers coming up, with okra, watermelons and cantaloupes planted last Saturday. And a special note to Paul and Brendan: a variety of sunflowers have been planted amongst the melons! And for anyone else that enjoys flowers (which is probably all of us!), I noticed some zinnias starting to bud out this week!

One of the main tasks tomorrow is to get tomato plants tied up. We had done some initial tying, but as the plants have grown (and now been beaten down by the rain), we need to do more work to provide them with some support. I saw a few tomatoes Tuesday night and I imagine there are more hiding amongst the leaves. We have typically used twine to tie up tomato plants, but if you have old T-shirts you’re anxious to get rid of, feel free to cut them into strips and bring the strips with you for this purpose. I would suggest cutting straight across the bottom a couple of inches wide so that you end up with circular strips; we can then cut these to whatever length we need. They’re nice and soft to tie around the maters.

There may still be a little planting to do, but we’re largely in maintenance mode now with weeding and refreshing paths with chips. I think we can safely say that we won’t need to water tomorrow! J One other important job for tomorrow is to continue plucking off the potato beetles and checking the underside of leaves for their eggs. They’ve really done a number on the eggplant, eating some plants’ leaves complete off. If we can do a good job of hand-picking them, then following up with another treatment of neem oil (safe for organic gardens), I think the eggplant will recover nicely.

Hope you can make the garden a part of your Saturday morning!

Sandra