I can't believe I typed vegetable wrong and didn't notice !

Well I hear ya...I have 3 cherry tom plants going that must be sporting a hundred or more fruit each.

My beefsteak has 11 fruit and I pinched the remaining flowers off yesterday. Even protecting or bringing them in I am not sure I have enough season for them to mature.

Surprisingly, my peas have shown a new vigour and are in bloom again. My girls will be happy lol.

My only problem is finding the critter that is cutting holes in my strawberry plants. They are off ground in containers and only green aphids are found on the underside of munched leafs.

Maybe tomorrow will be a malathion, i mean marathon, day LOL

Beans, beans, beans and more beans? Does anybody want some yellow bush beans.. and zucchini??

Every year I plant 2 row (about 35 ft each) of yellow bush beans and every year I say "Next year I'm only planting one." Ya right!

So far I've picked close to 50 lbs and there's still no end to them. I've been blanching and freezing and last night I pickled 15 quarts. The plants are so heavy with beans they are actually pulling out the strings & stakes because the ground is so wet.... and the grasshoppers are eating them too (yes, the BEANS and the leaves) but it's not bothering me too much because I have oh so many.

And cauliflower, wow cauliflower. In the end of July I was about to pull my plants because none had even formed a button - and now they are huge!!! Does anyone have any good recipes that use cauliflower??

BTW, for all you zucchini lovers, last year I found a wonderful zucchini pickle recipe. SInce its raining again and I won't be able to pick more beans tonight (yay!) I might make some of these. :)

http://www.thewednesdaychef.com/the_wednesday_chef/2008/08/zuni-cafes-zucc.html

Like Lance's, my peas have decided to flower a second time. These are by far the best peas I've ever grown. This week might be the end of them though because it's supposed to be hot & dry.

The single zucchini plant that germinated is pumping out as many zukes as we can eat. Pole beans are producing as much as we can eat, freeze and give away. Lettuce finally bolted with only 2 heads left in the garden. Cukes are suffering in the heat and look pretty shabby. They did well until now.

I picked my first 3 vine ripened tomatoes today. Really need to prune the plant now.

Vegetable.

Veg-ah-table.

Okay, saying it out loud the way you've spelled it today sounds kinda cool! I like it. That's how I'm going to speak it from now on!

We've been eating green arrow peas for a week now, amazing that with this heat the pods have stayed long and filled out nice.

Just finished a beauty crop of radishes last week. Must have planted about 40 mid July when I pulled out dying tomato plants, and reseeded with carrots and the radishes. Only two had white wormy marks on them, the rest were tender and juicy, no woodiness, and had bulbed up perfectly, compared to the ones I'd seeded in the spring that took forever, and then only half bulbed and the other were duds. Same seed packet.

Swiss chard keeps producing, I add the baby leaves to the butterhead lettuce I grew under a shade cloth (old drapery sheer). Inner heads were sweet, I'm thinking because I shaded them and kept them well watered.

I hope to get a cherry tomato soon - maybe by the end of August.

And just starting to pull finger sized carrots, good but not as sweet as the ones harvested after a few light frosts, so I always hold back a row.

My garlic lost all it's leaves from hail, so I dug it up a week or 10 days ago, small cloves, and the wrappers had split. I'd bought these off kijiji from a girl who'd bought her home from an elderly woman who grew garlic she'd brought over from Russia (her story anyways), so every year they'd sprouted in her garden, she dig some up and sell them. They taste good, though the 'meat' of the garlic seems a bit translucent - does that seem right? Each bulb has 4 cloves.

Giving up on the canteloupe, I see nothing but flowers and leaves. Pepper plant, just starting blooms this month so probably no time to give me a red pepper.

Tristar strawberries producing well - I'm happy with those, only problem is the odd plant gets anemic looking, while it's neighbor plant is not. Weird.

SCG, are those holes in your leaves about the size of a hole punch? Those could be those bees that do no harm other than the cosmetic. And use the leaf to wrap up their egg and bury it.

NCG and Northspruce. My peas have reflowered and given me another batch of peas that should be ready by tomorrow or so. Isn't that common for peas? Mine did last year also.

Kioni I'm curious why your tomato plants were dying. You obviously can grow many things. Yes, my hardneck garlic is more translucent that I'm used to. Great flavour though.

I didn't know there were bees that did that with leaves. Interesting :)

Thirsty I wish I had your bean and zucchini problems :)

There's an Indian dish called Aloo Gobi that you may want to try if you like that type of thing. I tried the recipe from Michael Smith and didn't care for it, but other family members said it was O.K. but they would tweak the recipe next time.

Those are leaf cutter bees! Even though they make little holes in leaves, they are still a beneficial insect.

NAF, I have never seen my peas re-flower because they always get killed by the heat. This is pretty exciting.

Yeah kioni. I actually seen a bee cut one. They are sure fast and funny how they return to the same leaf. Also interesting how the aphids are only on the punched leafs.

You would have to see my pea plants to appreciate it. They about 3ft tall and the bottom 2ft is completely dead. I only have 4 plants and got about 8 peas so my girls cherish each one lol.

I have soooo many flowers on everything right now I hope I have time to see fruit.

NAF: tomato plants were dying because their stems were so badly scarred from the (4) severe hailstorms they'd received this summer. The scarred areas were turning black, and it was mid July and their new sucker growth was so tiny I didn't think they give me a tomato anyways (most were beefsteaks). Just for an experiment, I kept a fairly healthy big beef and Cherokee purple to see if it were to be worthwhile. Both have just experienced fruit set this week, and as you'll see in the link below, my chances of winning the lottery are higher than getting a tomato off either of those plants. I guess if I won the lottery I could have a dome constructed over my garden so I don't have to experience the disappointment of those storms again!

Same with my cherry tomato plants. Ten days after the hailstorm one plant started to put out a sucker near the top of it's 18" stick, so I ripped them out and planted a 10 inch tall 'backup'. Figured I might as well start over with a healthier plant.

You can remove new flower trusses off of your beefsteak tomato plants. You could even cull the smaller greenies off (hard to do, I know!) because this should help direct the plants energy into finishing off the larger ones. My 79 year old gardening friend only allows her beefsteaks to carry 10 fruit per plant! She believes that's better than only getting 6 or 7 tomatoes she can use for sauces, and a bunch of immature an unripe green ones she can't use. Then again, I see there's recipes for green tomato relishes, so there's an idea for those greenies.

This pictorial was originally posted on the tomato forum.

Happy harvesting!

Here is a link that might be useful: Big Beef tomato timeline

I just discovered this afternoon that I have leaf cutter bees!

The more beneficial insects in my yard the better :)

I didn't even realize I had perfectly round holes in my rose leaves. I hadn't examined them for a few days. So cool.

NAF watch for them you will be amazed how fast they work..they only hit my strawberries...something else cutting from the outside in is hitting my roses....but not bad yet...then again I let the slugs be until one day I noticed they almost decimated half my garden.....ug

SCG

The crazy wind the past few days has resulted in about 75% of my onions falling over, as well as a hand of sunflowers :(

I guess they've just been bumped to the top of the list now.

I harvested my carrots today................................LOL

What variety are those carrots, CLBlakey?

When did you sow, and how many hours of sun per day?

I just picked up a one pound bag of sweet carrots grown by the local Hutterites, already washed, for $3. Seemed cheap until 2 adolescent boys discovered and ate in one sitting! Since they could do that daily, let's see, $3 X 30 days in a month = $90 a month to keep the growing lads in carrots?! Yikes!

If I pulled and washed one pound of carrots from the garden, I could give away to friends/family cheerily for free, but no way could I sell for a measlie $3!

I hope my crop comes through for me!

I have no idea what kind they are I planted them in May in my experimental bale garden. I will be making big changes to it next year. Filling in the box around it for moisture retention and adding some manure to help with the decomposition. The top 4-5 inches kept drying out but deeper it was just fine. They are cute though might be enough to feed a toadstool gnome.

I've been picking beans lately and have frozen 10 bags as well as made 6 jars of pickles for my daughter. We've also eaten an awful lot of them. Last year i bought green bean seeds called "Nickle". They're a filet bean and really prolific. Of course, that's what i planted this year as well!

I hear you about the pole beans. They have never been so plentiful as this year. And more importantly, have never been producing so early in the season.

Tomatoes on the other hand, were less than 50%. They had a weird fungus that shriveled the leaves leaving me with no idea how to address. The plants remained stunted in half the cases producing only a few fruit.

Beans were good, and the carrots had an extra sweet taste to them which was nice. It was just a very late year for everything, at least in my neck of the woods.