Monday night, before the rain had even stopped, I was out in the garden harvesting tomatoes. I knew that with so much rain, so quickly, any tomato that was even remotely near ripe would be split by morning if I didn’t get it off the vine. The year’s first Beefmaster and Brandwine were ripe, and I didn’t want to lose these massive and beautiful fruits, ironically, to too much moisture in a drought.

I picked all the tomatoes I could, with a few squash and cukes for good measure. It baffles me that the squash are still standing, but several readers have written that they’ve seen the same pattern in their gardens. Lots of Japanese beetles, not many squash bugs. Amazing. If this is an effect of the polar vortex, I’ll take one every winter!

As calculated by my kountry rain gauge, I got just shy of two inches of rain from the storm. Pretty amazing for about an hour’s worth of rain.

You’d be forgiven for thinking the name of this blog should be Bugs, Birds and Buck Mountain. Posting has been heavy on the natural history lately, I suppose because I want to keep a record of the creatures that share this land with me. That, and baby birds are just cool.

But fear not—there is still some farming happening at Bonafide Farm, and as it’s been months since the last vegetable garden update that’s what we’ll do today.

I will be the first to admit that I am not in love with this garden this year, for several reasons. First, when I planted it in April I was pretty sure I would be moving away from the farm at the end of summer and didn’t think too seriously about where I put things. Second, the overwintered greens took up a vast amount of valuable real estate, and though I enjoyed them as we emerged from winter we had a long, cool spring and I didn’t get to pull them out to use their space for something else until just now, when it’s really too hot and dry to get much going. Finally, my veg garden is just too small, and plants are packed too tightly for all of them to get the sunlight they need to thrive. I hate working around them when they are so thick, always worrying about brushing against a wheel bug or hidden wasp nest.

I haven’t yet expanded the garden because that requires another goat rope of getting huge posts, pounding them in, digging in chicken wire around the perimeter, etc., not to mention beginning to improve the soil by shoveling tractor buckets of compost, all of which is doable but after having spent four painful months and thousands of dollars on a rotator cuff injury this winter I am leery of straining my still-fragile shoulder.

So, the garden is what it is. It’s not the most organized or pretty but it’s putting out vegetables and flowers and that’s all I suppose it really has to do. There have been some surprises this season. The most notable is that my squash, which usually falls victim to squash bugs around the time it’s ready to harvest, is chugging along just fine. It’s in the photo above, to the right of the massive cucumber installation. I don’t know if the polar vortex is behind this lower squash bug population this year, or if it has to do with moving the squash to a new location in the garden. I do know that for the first time ever I am using an “organic” pyrethrin dust, which I applied when the plants were young and every so often now. I don’t think that’s entirely the reason, though, as it’s a contact insecticide, not really a repellant, and I just haven’t seen much evidence of squash bugs or their eggs. Of course I may be totally jinxing myself by even writing this. The irony is I planted the squash in amongst other things, anticipating that it would be dead by now and the other plants could take over. But that’s not how it’s turning out, and I suppose I shouldn’t be complaining about something living instead of dying!

Again I am overrun with cucumbers. I think it’s because when you buy little two-leafed cuke seedlings they come about eight to a pot so it’s easy to overplant. Nobody needs this many cucumbers. But again, like with the squash, I expected these plants to have fallen to the cucumber beetles by now and they haven’t. The chickens are getting a lot of cucumbers.

The tomatoes are all now mostly taller than I, and I am trying a new technique with them in that I did not pinch off any suckers. All my life I was of the “pinch the suckers” school of tomato growing, but this year I thought I’d let them go and see what happened. What happened was massive plants that I tried to tie up last night, which required full-body hugging the plants as I collected each vine near the post. I guess tomatoes need love too. Even planted on generous 36″ centers, the plants are growing together making harvest hard. But I did pick my first big tomatoes last night, with “Early Girl” for the win, and others are right behind. That’s “Brandywine” above, nice and big. The plants are gorgeous and healthy, with just the tiniest bit of manageable fungus-related yellowing near the base.

I have a few rows of cutting flowers—zinnias and cosmos, and some volunteer gladiolus that I tried to dig out this spring but obviously I didn’t manage to get all the bulbs. There are lots of surprises that germinated from years’ past and I just let go, such as random green beans, unidentified greens, the sunflowers above, and a very mysterious white squash rambling through the cosmos. Like I said, kind of a mess.

But here we are, mid-July, and this is what I have to work with. The summer is going so fast that I know it will be only a few more weeks before everything goes round the bend and starts its late-summer decline.

And the nice thing about gardening is that each year you get a do-over. Maybe this fall I will get the garden expanded and then have fresh land to cultivate next year. I really want to put in a ton of perennial fruits and vegetables that need space to mature, such as berry bushes, asparagus, rhubarb, and strawberries, so that’s a good incentive to get out the dreaded t-post driver.

This is the first harvest of summer 2014—a few squash and zucchini that managed to outrun the oncoming squash bugs, some hot peppers, basil and other herbs, and five Sun Sugar tomatoes. Tomatoes before the fourth of July—not bad considering our long, cold spring.

The zinnias are just coming on, and I bet tomorrow I will see the first cosmos bloom. It is great to be back in the cutting flower business. From now until frost there will be homegrown bouquets all around my house.

Such bounty calls for a celebration with fire. As I didn’t do much for the Solstice this past weekend, I fired up the grill to cook a first harvest/Solstice feast as thunder bounced around the mountains. I just got the grill a few weeks ago, a gift from my mom, and it’s been a steep learning curve to understand this entirely new way of cooking. It’s a good challenge, and one I needed as my culinary selfeducation had grown stagnant. It feels wonderful to push myself, to make mistakes, have “eureka” moments and accidental epiphanies, and at the end of it all, if I’m lucky, dinner.

And what a dinner it was. Garlic shrimp, my veg, some corn slathered with butter and seasonings and wrapped back up in its husk to grill. A simple, perfect salsa made with my five pretty gold tomatoes, basil, salt, pepper and olive oil. These squash were on a whole other level from the pallid supermarket varieties I grilled last week. Call me a tree-hugging hippie, but I can taste a difference when I eat something I planted in April as a two-leafed seedling, nurtured and protected, and finally harvested within twenty minutes of consuming. Vegetables taste alive, almost meat-like in their nutrition and vitality. They go straight to my brain.

And, nothing is wasted.

The garden tour continues with a pepper patch, in the foreground below, some dahlias, and giant volunteer pumpkin. I couldn’t figure out where all the pumpkins were coming from, as I’ve never successfully grown any in my garden. And then I remembered that all last winter I split my Halloween pumpkins open and fed them to the chickens as they were penned in the garden. A ha!

It was a tough call, but I just ripped out all the volunteer pumpkins. I’d love to grow them, but I just don’t have the space. It’s only June and the vines were already overtaking the garden, shading plants I actually am trying to cultivate (like the dahlias). So out they came.

You can also see my squash experiment, above, growing up a post. Ever since I’ve had this garden I’ve battled squash bugs, which have always killed my vines about the time they set their first fruit. This year I said no more squash—too much a waste of resources and space for something that’s bound to die and also cheap to buy in the grocery. Then I came across something that suggested growing squash vertically, as the squash bugs multiply more rapidly when hiding under leaves near the ground. So I used these volunteer squash plants as guinea pigs, tying them up the posts with strips of plastic bag and trimming off the leaves closest to the ground. Despite seeing (and killing) just a handful of squash bugs, the vine below has already succumbed to something. Le sigh. The vegetable that most people can’t give away fast enough eludes me. I think I will do a post-mortem and cut open the stem looking for squash vine borers.

My little “Glass Gem” corn patch is doing well. The stalks have about doubled in the days since taking this photo. The several inches of rain we’ve had in the last week are working wonders in the gardens. More caged dahlias, too, just budding out. The trick of starting them in pots in April has really worked—they are many weeks ahead of where they were last year when started in the ground.

One of my new favorite plants, borage, below. I don’t know why, but I am so drawn to this plant that it’s kind of nuts. It has wide, fuzzy leaves that taste just like cucumber. 

That was exciting enough for me, but then I planted it out and it pulled this trick—blooming with one of the most lovely flowers I’ve seen. There’s something magical about this plant for me. I am just waiting to learn from it.

A better shot of my new dahlia cages. They seem to be working extremely well—we’ll see how they do when the plants get five feet tall!

Since taking these photos, I ripped out the old spinach, took out the volunteer pumpkins, weeded, and mulched the entire garden with rotted straw. All the recent rain at the start of the growing season, and more on the way, helps put us in good shape heading in to summer. Up next, a tomato-only tour.