July is here in Virginia, and with it some bizarre storms and ridiculous heat waves. Nevertheless, our garden marches on in all its splendor, and we’re pretty excited about how far it’s progressed since its humble beginnings. First of all, most of our plants are bigger than the weeds now, which in my mind goes a long way toward pretending the weeds don’t exist. But there’s some promising signs that late July/early August might be a pretty bountiful harvest, so I wanted to share what we have going on.
We got a great crop of green beans and peas earlier, which we blanched and put in the freezer for colder times. As you may have guessed from the recipes lately, we’ve also ended up with about 6 times as many zucchini as any human being can handle. Now that the heat has broken for a few days, my hope is to keep making zucchini bread with a lot of it, and keep eating the rest in the most delicious zucchini dishes we can come up with.
On the horizon are a whole bunch of tomatoes, some Chinese eggplants, butternut squash, sugar baby watermelon, and hopefully some peppers. We have two heirloom varieties of tomatoes that I’m pretty excited about: a classic San Marzano, roma style tomato, and a round and beefy variety called Thessoloniki.
Check out what we’ve got! How’s your garden going?
Our first of the sugar baby heirlooms we planted
a little butternut squash hiding in the shadows
Still lots and lots of chard, because I don’t have a lot of recipes for it yet…
Chinese eggplant!
Some tiny bell peppers, not looking very ambitious… we’ll see!
Tomatillos, looking extremely ambitious. All of those husks will fill up with fruit.
Some gorgeous San Marzano tomatoes on their way toward ripeness
Thessoloniki tomatoes… the big ones are about the size of golf balls at the moment.