Eating from the Garden

The tomato plants are feeling healthy and vigorous these days, perhaps because they got a good feeding with organic tomato spinklies and are getting regular water. Also, being planted in straight compost helps a lot. If you have poor soil I recommend it.

The main tomato bed is nicely filled in and I'm actually being good about winding the tomatoes around the ladders as they grow, so things are fairly tidy. With the advent of tiny baby tomatoes we closed off access to keep the dogs out (they love tomatoes), but I can still reach in fairly easily to weed and so forth.

The brutes are over here by the strawberries, Brandywine and Roma. They are easily twice the size of the others, but that's partly just genetics (also I've been doing a lot of testing of the irrigation over there so they've gotten a lot of water lately).

Both of them are covered in flowers, and the local bees are working hard to get everything pollinated.

We've been very fortunate because the wild hive a few blocks away has not been hit with Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). That should put paid to the idea that it's because of cellular towers: the hive is about five feet from a cell tower. So we have honey bees and native mason bees and several varieties of bumble bees, some teeny-tiny native bees to help with pollinating.

But that's not all! This week we've been eating fresh nectarines and peaches, too. Thank you, pollinators! Some of them are a bit small and useless, but the good fresh fruits are absolutely amazing. There is really nothing like a tree-ripened peach for that syrupy sweetness.

Other interesting garden stuff: Hair Allium doing its thing:

I totally forgot I planted those until they came up.

And I think it might be time to prune the roses again:

Technorati Tags: fruit, plants, roses, summer, tomatoes, urban farming, vegetables

posted by ayse on 07/03/07