The garden is out of control. Some lack of control is good, such as the beans growing up over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. We can’t eat them as fast as we have to pick them. The same is true for the zucchini. But there are bad aspects to having no control. We had a huge storm over the weekend that snapped one of our biggest pepper plants. I put a bamboo pole next to it, but never got around to tying it up. The squash bugs are everywhere. I find and kill at least 10 adults every day, and now the babies are hatching. I had to kill several hundred this week already, and it only getting worse. We even have a million aphids on the Brussels sprouts. I think I may end up going nuclear on some of them.

But we did harvest a whole bunch of stuff this week.
6 bell peppers
20 banana peppers
10 anaheim peppers
10 peperoncini peppers
2 poblano peppers
100 cherry tomatoes
20 roma tomatoes
20 yukon gold potatoes
12 cups of purple beans

Although it’s only been 5 days since the last post, it seems like a lot has changed. We’rein the mode now where we can pick things almost every day. It’ll be interesting to see what happens while we’re off doing the Spudman triathlon next weekend in Idaho.

Harvested this week:
4 cups purple bush beans (they turn green when you cook them)
5 yukon gold potatoes
5 red potatoes
3 purple potatoes
1 eggplant
12 roma tomatoes
30 cherry tomatoes
8 zucchini
3 poblano peppers
20 banana peppers
2 cascabella peppers
8 jalapeno peppers
6 green bell peppers
2 big jim peppers
2 anaheim peppers
2 kohlrabi

Wow. When we left for Seattle on Thursday, I didn’t expect things to change so drastically while we were gone. But that’s exactly what happened. Each bean plant grew at least 2 feet. Each squash plant grew even more than that. One of the Ichiban Eggplants came out of nowhere. The zucchini season is in full swing. There are all sorts of things needing to be picked. The crew has started work on the new deck. This is going to be another great week!

This must be full throttle. Everything is growing fast, producing fruit, and looking great. We picked another 36 cups of peas this week, a few Roma tomatoes, some cherry tomatoes, peppers of all sorts, etc. The corn is growing fast and strong. The tomatillos are doing so well, they’re practically out of control.

The only negative piece of news is the arrival of squash bugs. So far they’re hanging out in strange places, like in the tomatoes and peas, but it won’t be long till we start seeing their eggs on the underside of the squash leaves. We have a lot of squash this year, so checking each leaf takes a lot of time. I’m sure I won’t find every egg, but for now everything looks clean.

Today we picked a large bowl of peas, a couple roma tomatoes, some banana peppers, and a couple kohlrabi. While I was taking the weekly photographs of the garden, the tomatoes disappeared into Nate’s and Lisa’s stomachs, as did one of the banana peppers. Charmaine and Julie ate peas as fast as they could, but there was still some evidence that they existed by the time I got back inside.

There’s nothing quite like freshly picked vegetables.