My kitchen garden - brand new - is doing great. I’ve got kale, cavalo nero, spring greens, onions, spring onions, shallots, garlic, lettuce, beetroot, french beans, peas, broad beans, fennel, carrots, potatoes. Swede going in this weekend. Loads of herbs all doing well. But, for the life of me, I can’t stop my coriander from bolting. WHY!
I’m getting about half a pint of raspberries per day right now.
It does that.
If you want to have leaf stage cilantro/coriander all season, you have to keep replanting it. There are strains that bolt more slowly than others, but there aren’t any that I know of that won’t bolt at all.
(The same, by the way, is true of lettuce.)
After several years of not feeling up to doing any gardening, I decided to give it a try again this year. I got off to a late start, but last month I got my pots out of the storage space and set them up on my deck, then went to Lowes and bought two Beefsteak tomato plants, two banana peppers and a purple bell pepper (because I thought it would make an interesting addition to what I can get at the store). I also picked up a basil and sage plant and some lettuce and radish seeds for the windowsill pots.
A month later everything is doing well. I had to put in stakes for the tomatoes, and all the plants are flowering and there’s a bell pepper forming. The sage plant is looking a bit ill, but th basil is ready to be trimmed for cooking. I haven’t tried to check on the radishes, but the leaf lettuce will be contributing to the next salad I fix.
Oh - I should observe that, despite the weather, as usual the weeds seem to be having no problem! 
The peppers and tomatoes are coming in. One of my potatoes looks ready for new potatoes.
I probably should have paid more attention to the labels for my zucchinis. I planted 8-ball zucchinis which are round. Those are coming in, too. I just have no idea when they’ll be ripe.
Generally you don’t want to eat ripe zucchini; they’d be seedy and woody. You want to eat young zucchini. How young depends on the recipe. If you want them to grate for zucchini bread, you want them older than if you want to saute them. For the latter, any size big enough that you want to bother with them will do. Little ones should be tender and delicious.
Just gave away some boring green hostas on freecycle. I love giving away plants! People are so thankful, and I feel better not just throwing them out.
Gardeners are so generous. Which is good because we spend a lot on our gardens. It’s nice when you can some for free.
We planted 8-ball zucchini a few years ago, and they were very good. We’ve harvested 15 regular ones so far. Two of the volunteers are regular zucchini, which never happened before. The other two are either butternut or spaghetti squash, they are not far enough along to tell yet. I’m now sorting the recipes by how many zucchinis they take.
We’ve harvested about 10 pounds of peas and the string beans are starting. Lots of little green tomatoes.
I just picked the first 2 cherry tomatoes from our front yard volunteer plant.
They are mostly orange. I washed them.
Do I store in fridge once dry or in a brown paper bag?
I’m trying to remember back to what my Mom used to do, but the was in the 80s.
I feel like the brown paper bag was for green tomatoes.
We’ve been keeping cherry and other tomatoes in the kitchen, uncovered and non-refrigerated. They seem to keep just as well that way, and may be more flavorful than refrigerated ones.
Big-time eggplant and pepper harvests are underway here. I got a surprise last night eating peppers sauteed and added to pasta. This is another variety that sometimes produces a hot pepper along with non-spicy sweet ones. Not an unpleasant surprise, but startling.
Thank you. I’ll do that.
Don’t refrigerate tomatoes. They should be stored at or above 50ºF, or it’ll damage the flavor.
(If you’ve got leftover tomatoes that have been cut open but that you’re not going to eat within a couple of hours, those you have to refrigerate.)
The brown paper bag was to encourage faster ripening; it concentrates the ethylene gas they’re emitting. If you don’t want faster ripening, then don’t bag them, keep them out in the open. If they’re so ripe that the next stage is rot, and you’re not ready to eat them, then go ahead and refrigerate them; the loss of flavor will only be worse if they rot.
(Ditto the non-refrigeration for eggplant, while I’m at it, except for the ripening business – you want your tomatoes ripe, but you don’t want your eggplant ripe; ripe eggplant are seedy and bitter. Refrigerating them is also likely to make them bitter, though. Cooked eggplant is fine to refrigerate.)
The asparagus crowns I planted earlier this summer, are now sprouting tiny ferns!
So exciting!
Question from an eggplant novice (second year) - how do I know when they’re ripe? I mean, it sounds stupid (OK, is stupid) - but there aren’t any obvious changes to look for.
Last year was a terrible summer weatherwise, but this one is going well, so it’s the first time I’ve really had this problem.
j
Again, you don’t want them ripe, unless you’re growing them for seed (in which case you won’t eat them. Peppers and tomatoes you get to save seed and eat the fruit too. Not eggplant). You just want them at whatever size you want to eat them at. If they’re too tiny, they’re a nuisance to deal with; and some recipes are a lot easier to make with bigger ones.
If you’ve got “Asian” type long thin ones, most varieties are good harvested at about between 6 and 12 inches long; some varieties are only good toward the smaller end of that, some are good somewhat larger. If you’ve got what many people around here think of as standard eggplant, the more-or-less bell shaped larger ones: some varieties are still good at well over a pound, others are better picked at a pound or somewhat under – but they’re also delicious, maybe more so, if you harvest them smaller. If you’ve got one of the ones tht don’t really fit in either category – it probably depends on just what you’ve got.
You want them big enough to bother, not mature enough to be seedy and bitter. (Unless, of course, you’re growing one of the varieties that’s supposed to be bitter, which recipes from some parts of the world call for.) The skin should still be glossy. Don’t jam your thumb into them to test the resilience unless you’re going to eat them right away – they’ll develop a thumb shaped bruise if you do and you’ll have to cut that part out.
– now you’re even more confused, aren’t you? Sorry – look at the line by my username! If you know the name of the variety you’re growing, I might be able to be more precise. Maybe.
I often pick and eat eggplants before their maximum size, and the juveniles seem just as or more flavorful than the “mature” ones.
The main thing is to pick them before the skin starts yellowing, which indicates they’re starting to decline in quality.
My favorites to grow are the elongated Asian-type eggplants. More productive than the Italian varieties and easier to slice and prepare. ‘Millionaire’ and ‘Poamoho Dark Long’ are good ones.
We keep ours (we have a volunteer cherry tomato jungle) in bowls on the kitchen table, with a note in each one giving the date we picked them. You do get some lossage, but not much. We use lots, but the rest we run through a KitchenAid mixer to extract what our grandson calls tomato poop. We blend it in with eggplant and zucchini (we picked #105 before we left for a trip) to make a sauce we can freeze.
We also have gotten 15 pounds of peas and probably 20 pounds of green beans, though I haven’t added them up lately.
Can I ask advice about cauliflowers, specifically romanesco? I planted them back in spring and they’ve grown fabulous leaves, but still no sign of an ‘actual’ cauliflower. What/when can I expect something?
(And @Jackmannii)
Thanks guys! That was exactly what I needed to know. So: I don’t have an eggplant crisis, but I do have an eggplant urgency. Imam bayildi for lunch as a matter of priority.
For the record, like last year I am growing Black Beauty (classic shape) Bonica (classic last year but long this year- go figure) and Long Purple (uh… long). All part of an evaluation process. The way things are shaping up I think I’ll opt for bonica as an early variety and long purple as late. Let’s see what they taste like.
j