chard harvest and cucumber snacks

The garden continues to give. Our first chard harvest:


A crisp, healthy, cucumber snack with a sprinkling of lemon juice, salt and pepper:

oregano flower bouquets

When herbs are ready to reproduce, they send out flowers. As I pruned the massive oregano plant, I cut off all of the tiny purple flowers so that the plant would continue to grow.


The bees were swarming around the flowers and werent' thrilled about me taking the flowers away.

full bed in august

Here are a few pictures from early August. The raised bed is looking full and healthy. The bluish dinosaur kale looks great:

Here are some good-sized dragon carrots that were planted months ago:


But now the kale has been attacked by aphids so it is time to remove the kale plants and trim back the tomatoes and oregano plants.

a week at smith farm in central maine

I just returned from a 3 week visit to the east coast. I spent one week working on my friend's farm in Troy, Maine. It was inspiring to see the diversity of delicious vegetables produced on the farm. I assisted with harvesting, weeding, cultivating with a horse-powered cultivator, washing, bundling, selling etc. Farming is hard work, but spending time there motivated me to keep working hard on my modest backyard garden.

On the farm, we woke up each morning at 5:30 to harvest vegetables in the cool morning air. Here are some carrots, chard and chinese cabbage:


Here is the cart full of the morning's harvest:

The garlic is hung up to cure on the rafters of the barn:

Here is the horse with the cultivator attached. One person steers the horse with the reins, the other steers the cultivator with the handles. The cultivator has metal blades that dig up the ground, ripping up the weeds between the rows of vegetables.

We spread out the bounty on the tables at the farmers' market:

a pile of pits

Over the past year, occasionally I would save the seeds and pits from fruit that I ate....cherries, apricots, peaches etc. In April, I dumped all of the pits into a 1x1 square foot plot in the backyard just to see what would happen.

In early May, they started to sprout.

Now the mystery fruit has grown quite a bit. At first I thought they were cherry trees based on the size of the sprout, but now they are looking more like melon...who knows?

more cucumbers

Going out of town so I thought I'd check under the big cucumber leaves to see if there were any cucumbers hiding below. Found these four, the biggest yet!

harvesting dinosaur kale

We planted dinosaur kale in mid-May. It's my favorite kind of kale...those bumpy, dark green leaves:


I have begun harvesting the biggest leaves. This gives the smaller leaves more room and sunlight.


I chop them up and cook them down with olive oil, red onion, garlic, salt and pepper. They really cook down a lot so you need a lot of kale to make a dish. Healthy and delicious, although I think I put in a bit too much salt this time...