Onion Harvest

Not a whole lot going on in the garden right now.  We are harvesting tomatoes, an occasional pepper, and the squashes are winding down - still getting a few, but the plants are looking tired.

This past weekend we harvested most of our onions and they are now laid out on our back porch drying.  Here we have before and after pictures:

Fifteen minutes later:

We are harvesting beans now at a furious pace:

And the cosmos are finally blooming:

Everything is quickly turning to late summer with autumn just around the corner.  Much more harvesting to come.

Tangents

A quick update with a few garden related items and a few other items that are not directly garden related.  First, when we visited the garden on Saturday afternoon, we found a painter set up in front of our garden.  She was making a painting of our perennial flower corner, with it's oregano, bee balm, globe thistle, phlox and grasses, with the barn as a backdrop.  We asked if the painter would mind if I took a picture of her painting.  She was fine with it:

Thank you for letting me include your painting and for seeing and appreciating the beauty in our garden.

One of our neighbor gardeners has a new resident inside their fence:

This happens on occasion in the gardens.  Since we are located in a wildlife sanctuary, the groundhogs are protected (as well as being the subjects of a long standing scientific study), and they are pretty much everywhere, including underneath our gardens.  Every so often one of them will dig out an exit hole right in the middle of some poor gardener's plot.  We had one a number of years back just outside our fence.  That is as close as they have come, but of course we could be blessed with our very own groundhog exit hole at any time.

We now have obvious beans coming along.  Soon...

A tangent.  Some of our non-vine morning glories that we planted in flower boxes on our balcony at home.  We also have vines growing on the downstairs porch railings.

This is only garden related in that this has become our new favorite stop on our way home from the garden.  Love Cupcakes  Very wonderful cupcakes and the nicest people, too.  Makes it a bit easier to get over the closing of Stonyfield Cafe, our old favorite "fast-food" stop for garden picnic dinners.

Fighting Back

No excuses.  It has been over 3 weeks since my last post.  Laziness, pure and simple.  I will try to update the goings on over the last month. 

After witnessing the aftermath of the Groundhog invasion last month, we took action to try to prevent further damage.  This included patching some holes in our fence and covering the lettuce and chard with plastic netting to discourage further salad bar visits.

We continued to notice small amounts of critter munching going on, but after a thorough search for holes in the fences, I think we may have put an end to most of the breaches.

 

Our pole beans are progressing.  Starting to see many blossoms and some very tiny beans beginning to form.

We should be harvesting onions within the next week. 

There is some progress on the carrot front.  I actually was able to thin them some last week.

 

We harvested our garlic 2 weeks ago and have been enjoying a house full of the aroma of drying garlic.  Next up - onions.

The Basil is kind of overshadowing the peppers here.

So far, so good with the tomatoes.  They are just starting to ripen.  Soon the tomato deluge!

Removing squash bugs and eggs from the leaves of our yellow crook-neck and zucchini.