Velmozha, Snackeroonie, and The Great Big Sunflower

How is it September already?

   The last few days have brought us sunshine and more reasonable daytime temps (low 20s Celsius).  In the garden, the beans are still behind in their development.   The Burpee's Butterbush squash plants put out female flowers out in earnest this past week and a half; quite a few have set now.  The Sweet Meat squash plants have 4 squash growing, the equivalent of 1 per plant.  I wish the tomatoes were further along with their ripening so I could just pick them, as every day I find more with BER.

Pictures from the end of August:

   The first ripe Velmozha tomato.  This might be the meatiest tomato I've ever grown; there were hardly any seeds inside to save.  I am very curious to see what the others are like once picked.  The flavour was sweet and mild, like most pink hearts.  It wasn't a "knock your socks off" tomato for flavour, but will make great sauce.

 

 

   R. discovered that a number of apples were on the ground beneath the tree yesterday morning.  When he picked them up, he spotted teeth marks in them.  Snackeroonie was back for another visit!  He/she is by almost every night now and has sampled the kale, lettuce, sunflowers, nasturtiums, asters, and a few green tomatoes.  We are going to have to rethink how and where we plant certain crops in the garden going forward.

 

The deer also munched on the lettuce...

 

...and the sunflowers...

...and the jalapeno plant.

 

   This is one of the Russian Mammoth sunflowers I planted (I planted 5 or 6 sunflower seeds this year, but dozens of volunteers came up).  They didn't grow as tall as I expected, but the heads are very large.  This variety produces cheerful whoppers of a sunflower! 

R.'s hand on the sunflower for scale.

 

The garlic bulbils are reaching maturity.   They're in the plant room now, drying down.

The dahlias look so much healthier now that the days aren't as hot.

 

Ajvarski peppers, a sweet (and eventually red) variety.

A "Snacker" cucumber, the first of the season.

Burpee's Butterbush squash (a small butternut variety).  New female flowers are opening every day or so now.  Hoping the plants average 3-4 squash each, like they have in past years.

 

"Unwin's Mix Dahlias" (dahliettas)

   Two days ago, I replaced the bolted lettuce with new lettuce transplants.  The next morning, I discovered they'd been eaten down almost to the soil.  Not by deer, in this case, but by sparrows!  I covered what remained of the transplants with juice jug tops.  That should keep the little buggers away from the transplants until they are able to get established.

 

A busy bee on a beautiful sunflower.

One of our little assistants.

 

 

Kale going to seed.

Marigolds, pansies, lettuce, and thyme.

Dill seed, drying down.

 

One of the Dwarf Audrey's Love tomatoes is beginning to ripen.

 

   Dwarf Speckled Heart.  There are a lot of tomatoes on these plants, some with a perfect heart shape (like those below) and some wrinkled and warped from the harsh conditions this summer.  In any case, I am eager for these to ripen.  Dwarf Speckled Heart is listed as 70-75 DTM on a number of seed sites, and simply as "mid-season" on others.  In our garden, it is taking longer than that to mature.

Some more Velmozha tomatoes starting to ripen.

 

 

With respect to tomatoes, I had more or less written off Cosmonaut Volkov as a variety I would try growing again.  I have two of these plants on the go this summer - one in a bucket and one in a large containers.  I have been underwhelmed with the production (lower than almost anything I have read online about this variety) and it is not as early to ripen as I expected.  I thought, "It's just another medium-sized red tomato, so no great loss".  

   Two small tomatoes began to blush, so I picked them and let finish ripening indoors.  I ate one last night and one this morning.  The flavour has completely changed my mind about growing Cosmonaut Volkov again.  They were delicious; salty, a bit acidic, rich.  Like the sun-warmed tomatoes I would eat fresh from the garden when I was very little.  Now, I can't imagine not growing this again.

   Garlic hanging to cure (pictured is Red Russian).  Even though the garlic was harvested earlier than ever this year (end of July/start of August), judging by the condition it was in, it could have been harvested even earlier.  Parts of the garlic patch were wetter than expected.  As a result, the papers on the bulbs were rotting or broken several layers deep.  This is visible in the picture.  The garlic will be fine to eat, once cured, but it will not store anywhere near as long as it usually does.  To put it mildly, this has not been a good year for the garlic.  Trusting next year's harvest will be back to normal!

 

On with September!  I wonder what the month will bring?

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Welcome Rain

   It has been a hot, dry summer.  In recent weeks, we have resorted to watering the garden from the hose, having used up all the rainwater that was stored.  Thankfully, we are on our third straight day of light rain this week.  It was very much needed, and the rain barrels are now full again.

   We have been enjoying the first few Yellow Prolific squash, snow peas (Green Beauty) and several batches of green beans (Provider and Roma II) from the garden.  Cucumbers are starting to develop and we have more mint than we know what to do with.  I hand pollinated the first Galeux D'Eysines squash on July 22nd.  

 

Yellow Prolific summer squash

Yellow Prolific summer squash

   Trying to keep the tomatoes adequately watered through the last two very dry months has resulted in some blossom end rot, particularly on the Rose de Berne, Moonglow, and Uluru Ochre tomatoes.  Thus far, Fisher's Earliest Paste, Hungarian Heart,  Favorie de Bretagne, Sylvan Gaume, Reinhard's Chocolate Heart, Franchi Red Pear, Principe Borghese, and Petrusha Ogorodnik have seemed resistant to BER.  Almost all the tomato plants have leaf curl to some degree.

   The pictures below were taken between July 22 and 27th.  Click to enlarge.

   Two dahlias have finally bloomed.  The first is off-white with fine, pale purple striping on the petals...

 

...And the second is a large, soft, white and baby-pink bloom.  Beautiful!

   A few cosmos (Rubenza and Sensation Mix) and little volunteer sunflowers have started to bloom.

 

   The strawflowers have begun to bloom, too.  Most are either bright pink, like those pictured below, or a pearly white/soft pink.  They close into tight marbles in cool, overcast weather and at night.

   The bachelor button (Blue Boy), leek, bean (Roma II), single-pea-plant, and single-cabbage bed.  An unintended mish-mash of things!

Herbs, greens, and a begonia.

Dragon's Egg cucumber plants.

The first cucumber of the season!

   Delicata Bush squash.  The plants have pretty silver-green leaves.  I'm not sure why one plant is so much larger than the other.  Ironically, it is the smaller of the two that has most of the set squash.  The larger plant keeps producing mostly male flowers.

   

   It is hard to get a picture of this bed that looks attractive!  Cosmos in the back and Fernleaf dill (a compact variety) in the front. 

 

   The garlic bed.  Several umbels are filling with developing bulbils.  Those are sitting near the top of straightened scapes that are now almost as tall as I am.

Curly Blue kale and cinnamon basil

Franchi Red Pear tomatoes.

Fred's Tie-Dye (dwarf) tomatoes.

   Fisher's Earliest Paste tomatoes.  These look similar to Petrusha Ogorodnik (not pictured), but are earlier and, at this point in time, seem to be more productive.

 

 

   Tomatoes (Hungarian Heart, Reinhard's Chocolate Heart, Sylvan Guame), assorted beans, and Dragon's Egg cucumber.

The crabapple tree is loaded this year.

 

The apples behind the house are coming along well, too.

 

   I picked 5 zucchini and made this season's first batch of relish (Zesty Zucchini relish from the Bernardin canning book) on July 25th. One of the seven pint jars didn't seal, so I am enjoying some of this relish early.