The volunteer tomatoes in a flowerbed turned out to be the black/purple cherry tomatoes I liked so well last year. They have been coming in for two weeks now and are simply delicious. We do need rain, however.
Eva Luna, I have a self-renewing garlic patch, I just pull them up when the leaves start to yellow. They always leave some offsets in the ground (small cloves with hard shells) that come up the next season. Easy-peasy.
Everything is “coming on”. Picked the first 2 “pickle” cucumbers (they don’t get very big). A couple handfuls of the Sunrise orange cherry tomatoes have been snarfed down (they are smaller this year than last year… hopefully as the season goes on the get actually cherry mater sized vs grape). Picked 3 green peppers a bit early but still hand sized. The celery is going crazy. The cabbages are ready to be picked*. The oregano and sage are doing nicely and I’m ready to start harvesting, drying and grinding them up.
Then there is the cracked red pepper plant. The peppers are huge, already turning red and much, much hotter than what I thought they would be. Those will be dehydrated and then sent out to The Shop where Mistermage and his BFF can grind them up.
The mint came back wonderfully in all its various flavors. When someone mows around the box and hits the rebels outside of it the yard smells great!
About the only things not doing anything but growing are the brussel sprouts (I don’t see a single nubbin on them) and the broccoli. The broccoli I can understand: it got planted behind a catnip bush that grew to hedge size… it will be moved out of the veggie box next spring 
But the brussel sprouts not doing anything is really disappointing. I’ll give them another month and if no nubbins start showing up I will just harvest their leaves, dehydrate them and either use them as squares in soups or grind them up for a seasoning salt.
*I know I will make soup out of at least 2 of them and then I think I will either plain cook and freeze the rest or maybe shred and dehydrate some for soups and stews in the winter.
All the veggies are flourishing and the flowers on the median strip are finally settling in and looking quite nice.
For some reason this year seems to be a bumper season for purslane: anybody else finding purslane in every possible scrap of soil?
I’ve got purslane, prostrate spurge, and wild violets colonizing some of the spots on the median-strip patch that are still a little bare, and I’m letting them stay because they provide some green background, interesting low-growth texture, and soil retention. Will this be okay, or am I enabling the Weed Apocalypse? If I keep an eye on them and hand-weed so they don’t overwhelm the plants that are there by invitation, can I get away with it or are they being horribly aggressive and destructive underground and nothing but total eradication will check them?
Yep, although maybe it’s because we also have a CSA that explained to us what it was, and we just never noticed it before and pulled it as a weed.
Why don’t you just eat it? The CSA folks say it’s chuck-full of nutrients, and it’s pretty tasty in a salad, or I’m discovering all sorts of recipes for it that I want to try. Oddly enough, most of them are in a Moroccan cookbookthat we really need to delve into further.
I do, but what I want to know is if it’s okay to leave some of the ones I don’t eat (along with some wild violets and prostrate spurge, which sounds like something your urologist might be worried about but in fact is a member of the Euphorbia family) as volunteer ground cover on bare spots in the flower garden.
Can these weeds be tolerated in limited amounts with strict supervision and ruthless pruning, or are they terroristically attacking my prized flowers and robbing them of nutrients and strangling their roots or something?
In other news, I agree with Filbert that this is a bumper year for slugs as well as purslane. As in, I’m actually seeing some small slugs on my lettuce plants, and most years I never see a slug at all.
tl;dr the thread, but the BIG THING I’m doing is
sprouting LUPINES! 
They are rampant everywhere in our neighborhood EXCEPT in my big fat yard, which is now totally wild with “weeds.” Which do bloom.
So I am adding my seedlings (in long window pots, now) into the mix. I hope to weather the little tiny things over the winter in the garage.
Any tips are welcome.
Amo in Maine-O
Well dammit. If the slugs weren’t bad enough, I’ve now got blight as well. A greenhouse full of tomatoes slowly turning brown and rotten 
I got the greenhouse because it’s supposed to be lower risk for blight, and my outdoor tomatoes kept getting it while neighbours’ indoor ones didn’t, and now my indoor ones have got it while all the outdoor ones are (currently) fine.
Yet again, I’m glad I don’t have to live on what I grow.
I had good luck with lupines direct-sown from seed in the previous fall, although as per expectation they didn’t bloom till the second year. The way I heard it, lupines don’t like having their roots disturbed, so they don’t take well to transplanting. What they like best is good drainage and acidic soil.
I second the idea of eating purslane. It makes a nice crunchy addition to salads (mild flavor with just a hint of citrus). For awhile the garden outside my hospital’s ER was overrun with purslane and I was tempted to harvest a couple big bags of it, but thought it would look weird (and besides, I wasn’t sure what ER patients might have dumped there in the past).
I grew a specialty variety of purslane from seed this year and hope it reseeds for succeeding years.
In other news, the Night Of The Tomato has arrived (bumper crop being shared with co-workers), and the first Rosa Bianca eggplant should be harvestable within a week or so (very tender and tasty variety with thin, edible skin).
Our tomatoes are beginning to ripen and expect to get enough to can.
Blueberries did remarkably well this year. The later season varieties are starting to ripen but estimate maybe another week until ready for harvest.
The lack of rainfall this summer has impacted the garden, but one benefit has been the absence of powdery mildew on the squash plants which frequently decimates them about this time of year.
Been harvesting steadily, a dozen or so pickling cukes every week, and in the last few weeks, the first tomatoes. Here’s today’s effort.
I’ve done a terrible job with supports this year, apart from the cukes, which are going OK; the peppers are all fallen over with the weight of their fruit, and the San Marzano roma tom pulled itself, AND its big heavy mesh cage over. Right on top of the peppers! I get sick of tying/pinching out too early in the season. Maybe next year I’ll go with all determinates again.
The squirrels have been at my watermelons, and even though the vines are struggling gamely on, setting a dozen apple-sized fruit, I don’t think we have enough growing days left to get them ripe. Yes, even in California! I wonder if you can eat baby melons like squash? I don’t think I’ll pickle it, as I still have melon rind pickles in the fridge from last summer, they weren’t real popular round here.
Got my first tomato’s this week. Had a awesome salad Thursday with garden grown lettuce, cherry tomatoes, sugar peas, cucumberr, and spinach a friend gave me outta her garden. Sweet corn is still a couple weeks away. Finally getting rain this week has helped beyond words.
:: bump ::
You folks sure have been quiet! How did things go during harvest season?
Between the CSA and the garden, we were totally inundated with tomatoes, and eggplants did surprisingly well, too. It was the first time I’d grown them, and I didn’t realize how tall the plants get. They kind of overshadowed the peppers, etc. which didn’t do as well as I’d hoped. I made and canned salsa, tomato sauce, and oven-roasted what seemed like endless trays of cherry tomatoes with garlic cloves and herbs in olive oil, which got packed into quart Ziploc baggies and frozen more or less according to this recipe. Ideas are welcome for what to do with them once they are defrosted in midwinter! I’m thinking pizza, maybe with goat cheese?
The cucumbers were insane, especially the Armenian ones. I don’t think I’ll bother next year with the tiny French cucumbers, which had been intended for cornichons - we didn’t really have enough of them ripen at any one time for that to make sense.
We had half a dozen tiny melons - I wish we’d had more, because they were delicious, but it was still worthwhile for a single plant.
So in the next week or so, we’ll probably do a major winter cleanup and pull the remains of the pepper and eggplant and basil plants, etc. and heavily prune the tomatoes. And I’m debating what to do after that - sow a cover crop? try my hand at overwintering a few things? see if I can get in a last bit of spinach or lettuce? cover everything with a pile of mulch and compost and leave it at that? some combination of the above?
I’m leaning toward a combination of the above - my gardening friends are recommending red clover as a cover crop, perhaps intermixed with oats. I do have a bit of garlic to plant for next year, and am strongly considering acquiring some more, because garlic is a vegetable in our house.
Any tips on things I can plant now and get something before the hard frost hits? Spinach maybe? A root crop like onions or carrots to overwinter? Or is it too late to start those? Any thoughts? I’m in zone 5.
My hops are not quite ripening up. Dang it. I got inspired and planted real late (too late?) in the season. The rains have come to the Pacific Northwest. I won’t say it’s early, but jeez louise I was hoping that the rainy season wouldn’t start until the end of October. My hop cones look like little pine cones, and they are starting to brown on the tips, which means harvest time in the next few days. But, the hop cones don’t have big lupin deposits, and just starting to smell hoppy rather than grassy. I may get lucky and have them ripe enough to avoid a “grassy flavor” and rather add some hop aroma/taste. Next year, they should really go gangbusters but, alas, that’s a year out.
We had pretty good harvest of cucumbers, tomatoes, and herbs. managed to get in about 20 asparagus shoots (we planted a few years ago and hopefully *next *year will have a real harvest
My garden went completely to hell this summer. I am really glad I am not dependent on it for my food otherwise we’d starve this winter. Yay, grocery stores!
Next day off that isn’t pouring rain I’m going to try and see if any of the root vegetables survived but I’m not terribly hopeful.
Also have a giant pokeweed growing in one corner. I suppose I could eat that, but processing that stuff is a pain in the backside. If the choice was between poke and starving I’d process the poke but honestly buying frozen spinach is just damn much easier!
I have a few Pumpkins left in the garden but that’s it. We are having a hard freeze tonight so the game is afoot anyway. I’m overwintering a couple hardy tomato plants so we will see…
Well, finally waded into the wreck of a garden today.
First thing off I couldn’t help but notice that someone had driven a TRUCK through it! Seriously, someone drove a freakin’ truck through the backyard, leaving tracks! Crushed at least three onions where they were under the ground. [insert swearing]
Found some yellow chard and a purple carrot before I got tired of slogging through weeds and mud. Both of which wound up in tonight’s soup. Mmmmmm…
Well, guess I got something out of the garden this year…