It's time for another peek into the vegetable garden! The fall vegetables are picking up their pace while the summer ones are rapidly screeching to a halt among the rains that have been making Spring Hill, Tennessee seem much more like the Pacific Northwest. I saw the sun yesterday for about 15-20 minutes and used that time to scope out the garden and its current state of disrepair. I'll post more on the work that needs to be done another time as the list making is just beginning but for now have a look at the vegetable garden. Don't forget to check out other blogs for their vegetable garden updates at In the Garden!
By far the greenest of the greens are the radishes. I've never actually eaten radish greens before and recently have come across some radish green soup recipes that look interesting. I picked a nice sized radish this morning perfect for slicing and dropping in a salad.
A few beets are coming along. I'm a little disappointed that more have not emerged but I may have time to add some more seed if I plan on adding some frost protection later.
The beans are well on their way to producing a healthy final crop. Hopefully we'll get to freeze the green beans to preserve them over the winter. We don't have a pressure canner which is necessary to can beans and other low acid foods.
Some of the last of the summer crops still producing are the peppers. The peppers have had no problems this year with bugs, animals, or disease. These peppers are the same as the purple peppers from my last vegetable garden update but have been left to develop a little longer to change their color to red. I like a little variety in pepper appearance from the same old green peppers.
Of course we can't forget the herbs! My wife's favorite has to be cilantro and it is coming up everywhere in one 3'x4' raised bed. I let our spring crop of cilantro go to seed then sprinkled the seed in this bed and just let it go. Once the cooler temperatures and consistent rains came the cilantro started to sprout. There are 4-5 small seedling that have emerged with quite a few more cotyledons appearing every day. We may have more cilantro than we can handle.I have one more vegetable to show you, the pumpkin. We actually have about 4 on the vine but their growth is going to be severely limited due to the squash vine borer. If there was one bug I could eliminate from my garden for all time it would have to be the squash vine borer. Every summer squash and zucchini crop this year was destroyed by the borers and now they moved on to the pumpkins. At least we'll end up with a few nice decorative pumpkins this year even if they aren't large enough to make the Jack-O-Lantern for Halloween. That will give us a good excuse to visit a pumpkin farm with the kids.
