First Cucumber!

We harvested our first cucumber on June 1! Older daughter, M, made the cut.

A little bit bent due to the lack of rain, but rainy season is coming.
The ants are all over my zucchini flowers, but they still seem to be producing lots of zucchini.
My husband put up the netting for the mini pumpkins (Jack Be Little) in front of the classroom.
And kabocha female flowers are starting to bloom. They are also being eaten to bits by evil orange bugs.
And, we all know how I like cosmos...

In other Vegetable News...

Wait, you mean there are other vegetables? From reading this blog, you would probably think there was nothing but tomatoes...

But, no, we do have other vegetables. Lettuce is going strong at the moment, but a few are showing signs of bolting. This is one set of lettuce. Also a few late broccoli (which I think are ready to flower even though they are barely an inch in diameter) and some soramame (big beans?) which are being attacked by aphids (I have a close up photo of the aphid problems I will post soon, isn't it nice to have something to look forward to?) Our compost bin is on the left and the small mini tomato patch from yesterday's post behind.

These are other other lettuces and behind them, baby okra. And my husband is thinning! No really! Stop presses! It is a rare event indeed. I was watch a Desperate Housewives episode where Lynette and Tom go to a marriage counselor and she is upset that he is always good cop, forcing her to be bad cop. Well, that's what I sometimes feel like in the garden. When infanticide is called for, I'm the one who has to do the deed. Anyway, here he is, I made him thin his okra and cucumbers himself. These were okra seedlings from the garden store. Salad okra, green and red. I also have some seedlings I started, but haven't planted out yet.
Zucchini is going strong. I planted Black Beauty and Lebanese varieties, and so far the BB seems to be growing faster than the L.

These are the pumpkin seedlings my students planted. Jack o'Lantern on the left and Howden on the right.

Kabocha on the left, then Jack be Little, and Cinderella pumpkins. A few artichokes at the top and bottom. I planted two artichokes near the big tomatoes yesterday, and big pumpkins at the bottom of the embankment this morning. Jack Be Little mini-pumpkins are going to be on a trellis in front of my classroom.

And here are mystery pumpkins which were growing out of the mini-tomato plot. They are the most healthy of all our pumpkins, but we have no idea what kind they are. Last year we had Howden, Cinderella, standard kabocha, and a oval shaped gourd that didn't look or taste very good, but was strong enough to beat back weeds on the embankment. If these are any of the first three, we want to keep them, but if they are the steam roller gourd, we don't. Hmmmm....

Here are baby corn at the bottom of the embankment. We are going to try three sisters this year with corn, vine beans, and pumpkin.We had lovely spinach, but Mr. Must-sow-all-the-seeds-in-the-packs planted them all at the same time and despite my most valiant efforts (spinach for every meal, including breakfast) most of it ended up going to seed.
Cucumbers... Mr-I-won't-kill-a-baby-seedling has an undisclosed number of these hoarded up in curious places around the garden. Oh well, when they are at their peak, we won't be here. If he wants to give himself the cucumber crud again, it is is his choice.
Carrots. He planted them in rows at least this time, but see what I mean about the thinning? I think I will have to give in and be designated murderer again.
Beans...

Onions, peas and potatoes. Just a few potatoes, because M hates potatoes and L is allergic. Well, I said, "Just a few potatoes, okay, honey?" See how he listens to me... I love potatoes, but cooking anything with potatoes means cooking an alternative for the girls. I don't love cooking. But I see a lot of potato cooking in my future. Maybe we should consider a third child. Pregnancy gives me major potato cravings.

The girls check out the potatoes. Do you think Daddy is going try to make us eat all of these??? You're lucky, you're allergic!

Big Day in Gifu!

Yesterday was the day! The big event of the year! And I almost missed it...luckily, I married someone with a much better memory than myself. For some reason, I thought I planted tomatoes at the beginning of April last year, but no, my husband was right, it was March 1! Luckily, he kept nagging me to check, and I had recorded it on my blog. Yesterday was a perfect sunny, warm, not windy day for planting tomatoes.

This year, I convinced my husband to label all the tomatoes he planted. Last year, I labelled the ones I planted, but he didn't label his. He has a good memory, but last year he forgot which was which and this year we planted 112 of 18 different varieties, so there is no way anyone would remember.

M missed the tomato planting, but was home in time to do the artichokes (our new experimental vegetable for 2010, Cal Green Globe). Here she is sprinkling rice husks on top.
And next the first photo of our babies. 112 tomatoes and 8 zucchini in this photo.

Small tomato varieties include: jelly bean (red and yellow), sugar lump, black plum, chadwick's cherry, gold currant, sweet orange II, reisentraube. The last 5 are from seeds left over from last year, so we don't know if they will come up.

We also planted a grape tomato herein known as "jiichan (grandpa) tomato." This was our first attempt at tomato seed saving. Last year was a terrible year for tomatoes in Gifu. Most of ours didn't survive the summer and those that did, didn't produce very well. However, my father-in-law had one kind of grape tomato (he doesn't remember what kind he bought) that not only survived, but thrived and produced bushels of tomatoes. Okay, I admit, I don't know how much a bushel is, but he gave us two supermarket bags full a week from August until the end of November. They were very tasty, and were known in our house as "jiichan tomato".

Regular tomato varieties include: Cherokee Purple, Costoluto Genovese, Mortgage Lifter (I admit I got this one for the name), Money Maker (this was my favorite last year, but I only had 2 seeds, 1 plant, 2 tomatoes, but they were SOO good). Also seeds left over from last year: Black Krim, Marmande Super, Big Rainbow, Evergreen and Brandywine.

Two types of zucchini, Black Beauty (same as last year), and a new type for us, Lebanese Light Green.

And here they are in our itty bitty green house. After this we also planted cucumbers and artichokes, so the greenhouse is ready to burst. We want to get a bigger one, but have no good place to put it.

in other garden news...

I'm sorry I am just not able to update the blog as regularly as before. I am trying to exercise more, and the time has to come from some where. I would prefer to cut out household chores, or breaking up fights between the girls, or cooking. However, blogging is where the time ends up coming from.
The okra is reaching for the stars. It is getting to the point where it is very hard to harvest. Too bad we don't have any tall people in this family.
We get about 10 pods a day, which is really more than enough okra for a family of 4! Luckily, I had an okra-loving friend visit on Monday and gave her a whole big bag so we had two okra free days. It's good stuff, but I am starting to run out of fresh and exciting okra ideas. Simmered okra, okra gomae, curried okra, okra pesto spaghetti, help?
The baby trees on the embankment are coming along nicely despite the occasional pumpkin vine attack.
Tomatoes in planters survived, barely, but are sad and pathetic. We get maybe two cherry tomatoes a week. All the ones in the ground rotted in the July rains.
Even sadder and more pathetic, but trying!
We have baby kinkans on our kinkan tree. They look like marble sized oranges and are eaten whole (except the seeds). We hope to have kinkans to harvest this winter!
Edamame plants are doing well.
Fall cucumbers are planted. The second generation of cucumbers have more or less fizzled out and we are going through cucumber withdrawal with only 2 or 3 a week. Okra just isn't the same...
And finally, cosmos on the embankment! Finally, after sowing seeds seeds and more seeds three plants have come up and two are doing really well.

pumpkins

We picked our first kabocha ever!
And our second kabocha ever! We must have two of everything in this household!
We took a peek under the upside down cinderella pumpkin and found that ants were nesting on the bottom. Yucko!
So we flipped it over, though we had to pull out some roots it had put down.
And now we have two right side up cinderella pumpkins. The stems still are not woody, so I guess they are not ready to harvest yet. It is really hard to tell. Speaking of harvest...
Here is this afternoon's harvest. Including our first two second generation cucumbers. The large tomatoes are evergreen, that's as red as they get.

too much of a good thing

Yesterday's cucumber harvest.
Today's cucumber harvest. Do you see a pattern? How many cucumbers can one family eat? We are about to find out. This is only the beginning. Any good disappearing cucumber recipes out there?
We are also drowning in biwa (loquat) at the moment. The garden next door has a loquat tree, half of which can only be accessed from our yard, so they told us to take all we want. I wish we had a bigger refrigerator. Between cucumbers and loquat we are running out of room for milk and tofu.
The loquat tree, post harvest. Our yard is to the right of the fence.

vegetables

I am starting new tomato plants from side shoots whenever they escape my notice long enough to get big. I just stick them in fine sand from the sandbox, put them in a mostly shady spot, water them regularly and they grow strong enough roots to transplant within a few weeks. I am planting these new tomatolings in pots because...
though I am still in denial, I am pretty sure my tomatoes have fusarium wilt. Horrors! I have had to pull several plants and several more are looking peaked. This is a Black Krim. I cut off one of the leaf stems today and the inside is not yet affected, but I think it is probably inevitable.
A close up of the stem. Not good, right?
The cucumbers are booming. My husband removed all the baby cucumbers and gave the vines a good trim last week. It is looking like we will be drowning in cucumbers in a few days. The green beans in the foreground are also producing nicely. They have become a new target of the evil orange bugs, but so far are going strong.
The watermelon almost succumbed to aphids in the beginning, but after consistent spraying with diluted dishsoap seems to be making a recovery.
The three remaining zucchini plants are also still producing despite their white bumpy stem disease (I think that is the scientific name for it!)

May 31 and June 2

Our neighbors downriver have their embankment covered in these cheerful yellow flowers in May/June. I pilfered a few from their drainage ditch where they (the flowers, not the neighbors) were trying to grow out of concrete and planted them on our embankment. Only one survived. So much for my grand plans of fields of yellow next spring. My next plan of attack is tol wait until the neighbor's flowers go to seed and pilfer seeds while walking the dog and hope to get more going on our part of the embankment that way.
My husband's pretty purple flowering Indian tree is starting to flower. It seems to like its new spot by the strawberries.
My husband spent two days out weed-whacking the embankment
and the empty lot next door. He took these two photos of his hard work. The weeds were only about waist high this time, and he says it was much easier than when they are taller than he is like last year.
I gathered a bunch of the cut weeds today to fill in the ditch next to the pumpkin patch so that my pumpkin vines won't be underwater. Unfortunately, the weeds had gone to seed so I may have a lot of weeds growing out of the ditch... One pumpkin, the cinderella, is making moves towards the embankment and we will have to take down the netting soon.

My first pumpkin bud on the Cinderella pumpkin. I am trying not to get my hopes up because last year all my female flowers rotted before blooming for two months before I finally got blossoms to pollinate. My husband took a great photo of our current enemy #1. Evil!!! I kill 20-30 a day, but it isn't really making a dent. They, on the other hand, are making huge dents in our pumpkins and cucumbers, and some nibbles on the zucchini and watermelon leaves, too.
at the base of the embankment. Pumpkins on the left, on the right, broccoli (mostly gone) in front, green beans in the middle, and cucumbers along the fence.
A fuzzy shot of today's cucumber harvest. I am starting to get worried. 9 a day...that's 63/week and this is only a week after our first cucumber. My husband also has 2 more generations coming up. The zucchini is started to scare me, too. None yesterday, but it looks like 2 today, maybe 3 tomorrow....