Share and Tell: New Camera Pictures

Just wanted to share some pretty pictures I took with my new camera.

These are on one of the volunteer tomato bushes.  I love the colors.

Same plant, different bunch.

Sungold cherry tomatoes in the shade

Super fantastic tomatoes, right before they were picked

Another super fantastic

I've always thought skippers were cute.

This bumble bee was so big the flower could barely hold her up.

I am still figuring out how to use the camera, but I think these pictures are pretty good for point and shoot photography by a non-photographer like me.  I like my new camera.

My Husband Gave Me a Camera for My Birthday Yesterday, Woo Hoo!

I had to go right out and try it today for taking pictures of the garden.  The light was all coming from the back of the garden as it is most of the time when I go.  I usually can't make it to the garden until after work.  One of these days I should try to take pictures in the morning.  Despite the lighting challenges, the pictures turned out pretty good.  The only concern I have is with files size we will see how this goes.  The new camera is 16 mega pixels.

Okay, so Blogger automatically adjusts the picture and file size. You don't get to see the crisp image that I took, but it makes things simple for posting.  This is what the plot looks like now.  The onions are all gone, the radishes, carrots, spinach, and lettuce are all long gone with a few exceptions.  The cucumbers are filling in the empty spaces and, as you can see, the tomatoes are getting out of control.  I swear that I have trimmed them back ruthlessly several times, but it doesn't seem to make any difference to the size of the plant.  It has made them set fewer new fruit, Which is probably good because those fruit would all be out on the long branches and break them over or tip the plant over. The neighbor on the right is letting the tomatillos grow wild and they are reaching over the fence.  They are hiding my few carrots from prying eyes, though.

The marigolds in the front are really looking great.  The other yellow ones are still looking wimpy.

Here is an up close picture.  Sure beats the iPhone picture, doesn't it?

This post is really just a test to see how the pictures look, but I did take many more pictures, which I hope to post tomorrow.

I Had to Get Out the 5 Gallon Pot to Make Sauce This Time

I made the hugest batch of pasta sauce I have ever made. 

The amount of tomatoes that I peeled and deseeded would not fit into my largest cooking pot.  That was even before I got halfway through all of the ripe tomatoes I had.  I poured it into the large pot that we use for beer making and kept on peeling and deseeding until all the ripe tomatoes were in there.  I also added my sauce starter recipe: garlic, onions, celery and carrots all diced and cooked in olive oil until they are very soft. I seasoned it with red peppers, black pepper, salt and loads of herbs.  After cooking it down by half so that the sauce is nice and thick, it filled seven quart jars with about a pint extra.  I put it into clean jars with good tight lids in the refrigerator until I can either borrow a pressure canner, or get some containers to freeze it all.  I might just have room in the freezer for all of it.  I would rather can it, but I read the food safety recommendations for pasta sauce and pressure canning is recommended.  I read that you can just water bath process canned tomatoes, so I will be making canned tomatoes out of the rest of the tomatoes, I think.  I just hope I can come up with enough jars.  The heirloom tomatoes are starting to make lots of fruit now, too.  The only bushes that are starting to lag a bit are the Roma tomato bushes on the porch. I fed them some fertilizer, but I think they are just suffering for being confined to a pot and being allowed to get too dry a few times. The really exciting news is that I picked five rather large eggplants two days ago, and already there are a couple more that are definitely large enough to pick.

Look at these beauties. I am going to cook them up tonight.  I need to get some Parmesan cheese or maybe lasagna fixings.  They go great in anything really, once you fry them up.  I fried a bunch of sliced eggplant up for pizza topping last time we had homemade pizza night at our house.  My aunt loved them.

Here is a blurry shot just so you can see relative size to my hand.

I ordered two crocheted cotton market bags from Amie at www.etsy.com/shop/amieq to put my produce from my garden in.  They got here so fast and are such great bags, I can't say enough.  They are very sturdily made and I have no fear about sticking them in the wash when they get dirty.  They hold up to the tens of pounds of tomatoes, cucumbers and onions that I have been transporting in them.  I will also use them when I go grocery shopping.  I love them. You can also see some tomatillos here that I picked this week.  I broiled them and processed them with some broiled Anaheim chilies and jalapenos.  They weren't bad.  I wish I had more of them.

Here you can see that someone climbed up into my garden, grabbed some tomatoes, ate them right there and then and threw the tops right down in the front of the garden so I could make sure and see that they were there.  Since I took this picture, I have not seen any evidence of trespass, or vandalism.  I wonder what this person was thinking.

Well, I should get back to work figuring out what to do with all of the sauce.  I will let you know how the tomato canning goes.  

I also made a trip over to the in laws garden.  Wow, it is looking really good.  The corn is getting close to being ready and they are still picking loads of green beans.  Actually they are getting even more green beans now because the pole beans are now coming on.  The pumpkins, squash and melons are doing great.  They have one pumpkin that is getting so big, it is threatening to shadow out everything else.  They have several watermelons that will definitely get ripe, not to mention cantaloupe.  I am allergic to cantaloupe, but they look really delicious.  Oh, I almost forgot to mention the piles of cucumbers that they are harvesting.  It is so cool to see. Next time I go I will have to take some pictures for you.

Peas, Cherry Tomatoes and Early Girls, Oh My! Community Garden Update

The community garden plot has really  changed in the three weeks since I last posted.  I didn't take pictures of everything, but the things that are really different were captured at twilight the a few days ago.  The pictures are either a bit dark or the flash went of, which looks kind of spooky.

My Aunt made us a sign for the garden on her laser etcher:

I love it.  I hope the bees can read, because I mean it, they are very welcome. Actually, they are cordially invited for as much nectar and pollen as they can hold.  As are the lady bugs for all the aphids they can stuff in their own and their children's mouths.

Here is one of the lovely ladies, now.  Suddenly, I remember the scene from A Bug's Life when the male lady bug gets very upset about someone assuming he is a girl just because he is a lady beetle.  Sorry.  I mean handsome man.

The carrots are really growing.  We thinned them out a bit more this weekend and were pleasantly surprised to find some very tasty carrots at the end of the stalks we grabbed onto.

These are some rainbow carrots we pulled up.  Some went directly into my cousin's mouth, so this is not all of them, but you get the idea.  They are colorful and delicious.

Here are some of our plain, boring old orange carrots.  The one with three legs is not really boring.  My aunt was reminded by this carrot to tell me about a contest that happens in some small village in England where locals bring in vegetables that look like naughty bits to a church to be judged.  I can't, for the life of me, think why this carrot reminded her of this story.  Hm.  Anyway.

This is a close up of the rainbow carrot stalks. You can tell which ones are most likely to be purple without actually pulling them up.  The other ones can be orange, yellow or even white.

The cucumbers are looking very nice.  It has been very warm here over the last couple weeks.  There are actually some small cucumbers starting to grow on the largest vines already.  I planted a few more hills of cucumbers to fill in the empty space up front, however only one survived the heavy bird predation. We now have a huge open area in front where the cucumber mounds are empty and the spinach and lettuce are pulled up.  The lettuce was going to seed, so it had to come up as well.

Somehow I missed taking a picture of the potatoes that have come up and started growing very nicely, but the hilling for those will take up some of the empty space.

We have been harvesting cherry tomatoes from the garden for two weeks, almost.  They are very  sweet and delicious.

This is my Aunt's hand with some of the first young cherry tomatoes.  The first ones were the tiniest.

We have been harvesting peas everyday the last few days.  The kids can't stay out  of them, and devour them raw and crunchy before we even get them into the fridge.  This last time I picked more than Molly could eat and this is what we have:

The peppers are Anaheim chilies and there are the first two ripe early girl tomatoes in the bowl as well.  My husband ate two of these chilies and said they weren't that hot right before the tears started coming out of his eyes.  He usually has a pretty high tolerance for spicy hotness, so I didn't eat one. These peppers are off that plant that looks kind of weird and sickly and the peppers are all half black. I wonder if that is why they are so hot.

Here is a picture of the first pea harvest before we went to my aunt and uncles house for barbecue stakes.  We snacked on raw peas and cherry tomatoes that night with dinner.

Here is a small purple bush bean.  I have some bad news about these beans.  I think the community garden went two days without watering last week.  I usually check on it everyday and water if it looks like it hasn't been done, but last week when I got there after skipping a day, it looked really dry and half of the bush beans' leaves had fallen off.  They look really sad now.  I hope they pull out of it.

This is a picture from last week of the scarlet runner beans.  There is now at least one small bean developing on one of these plants.  I remember from last time I grew these that it took a while for the flowers to start setting, but once they did there were beans everywhere.  I hope that happens now.

The early girl tomato is really laden with fruits and they are just starting to turn red.  I picked the first two yesterday.  They were small, but some of these green ones are huge.

This is the super fantastic which is really getting loads of tomatoes on it.  They are not very big yet, but they are getting bigger every day.

It really is a bushy mess inside its cage, but I just haven't trimmed it back yet.

Here are a couple of the Roma tomatoes.  We are going to get a lot of these a bit later.  This plant, if you don't remember, was quite a bit smaller and a little behind the others.

In this picture you can see three small pepper plants.  The front largest one is the new garden salsa pepper I planted a couple of weeks ago the other two are Cheyenne and jalapeno that are finally recovering from being chewed on by my cat, Cooper.  The Jalapeno actually is starting to set fruit.

This is the heirloom tomato I planted at the same time as the new peppers, the Bradley pink tomato.

This tiny pepper plant is a Thai hot pepper.  It already has little peppers on it.  I am a little scared to try these.  The one is back is the jalapeno that was pilfered from earlier in the year with small new fruit showing up every day.

The coordinator of the community garden asked me last week if it was okay if he gave my number to a photographer for our local paper, The Wenatchee World, who had mentioned he might want to get our picture with our garden for a story in the paper.  We haven't heard from anyone yet, but that would be kind of cool.  I don't really like having my picture taken, unless I am wearing a costume, but I am proud of the garden my Aunt and I have been able to grow so far this year.  It looks pretty nice with the custom laser etched plant stakes and sign and the huge tomato plants.  Our tomatoes are, by far, the largest, greenest and most fruitingest tomatoes in the whole community garden, so far.  I am sure some of the other people's will catch up. There are some that look very nice.  I am not putting down any other gardeners gardens at all.  Most of the gardens are very nicely done, but our tomatoes are the best, so far.  One person actually asked me if we were sneaking in fertilizer.  I won't lie and say we never considered the idea, but we haven't added anything but seeds and water to our plot.  It was nicely composted and tilled when we got there this spring.  I think the difference has been that we have been supplimenting the automatic sprinklers with our own almost nightly waterings and keeping the weeds pulled pretty well.  Have a good week, until I have something new to post.

Ever Heard of Plummer's Tan?

Very funny story:  My husband was watching me dress after a bath last night and asked me, "what did you do today?"  I said, "I weeded the garden most of the day and went to my aunties shop along with some shopping and about four hours at work.  Why?" He just laughed and pointed at my backside.  I checked it out in the mirror. I won't post a picture, so I can keep this blog G-rated, but you can imagine where a plumber might get a tan if he worked outside.  It looks hilarious.  We both had a great laugh about it.  I did spend a long time bent over in the garden picking out weeds.

This will be a post exclusively about the community garden plot. I haven't taken any new pictures of the patio plants yet.  Soon.
Here is what the garden looked like when I got there yesterday:

You can hardly see the weeds from this far back, but the close up shots will show you what I am talking about.  I will have some after pictures at the bottom.

This is the onion rainbow that got washed out early in the season.  Things are growing okay now, but not as well as the other side:

See how big these onions are already.

The rainbow carrots are coming back nicely since the big washout, however.

These are the Danver Short carrots and a volunteer sunflower.  We have had several sprout, but this is the only one I didn't pull up.  My aunt and I both had our suspicions that some of the weeds might be sunflowers.  We were right.

Here are the lettuce and the spinach.  The spinach is going to seed already.  I guess I will have to pull it out soon.

Here is a close up of a spinach flower bud.

The cucumbers that sprouted from seeds are looking very nice.

Here is a side by side comparison between the ones we purchased as starts and the one that we planted from seed.  The starts are starting to grow, but they are still kind of yellow and weird. (This seed started cucumber died just moments after this photo was taken.  The hose dragged across it when I was watering.  RIP cucumber.   I will replant this hill.)

This areal photograph of the cucumber patch and the one above should show you the weed problem I was talking about earlier.  These weeds are creeping succulents that pull apart instead of pulling up.  It is very hard to get rid of them.

The Anaheim chili is still looking sort of yellow.  I hope it is okay.  There are a few peppers on it now.  I hope no one picks them like they did the jalapenos. Check out those weeds.  How embarrassing.

This is the large jalapeno plant.  It had a few peppers on it, but, alas, they were harvested by persons non grata.  The plant was a little traumatized, I think, by the experience.  The branches the peppers were on were ripped off.

This pretty little green fly that was on the sunflower and I just could not resist taking its picture.

The Super Fantastic tomato bush is looking super fantastic, if I do say so my self.  There are a couple small green tomatoes on it now.

The scarlet runner beans are blooming already.  They are so beautiful. This is one reason why I love this variety of pole bean.  Another is the delicious large flat green beans you get. These beautiful blooms keep coming the whole growing season long. If you look closely you can see a cute little bee and a stink bug on the flower in the middle.

This is a view down the fence.  Some of the scarlet runners have nearly reached the top of the fence with there spindly creepers.  They will fill out and cover the fence in deep green leaves and red blossoms.

The peas are still hanging in there, even though it is way to hot for them.  They are starting to bloom.  They should be harvested by the time the pumpkins need the space.  I just replanted the pumpkin hill today after the other did not sprout.

There are a few flower buds on the bush bean,s as well. They are looking pretty nice.

A closer picture. This is a yellow wax been and the one behind is a purple one.  Remember that we planted  a tricolor mixture.  Some are just plain green.

Here are some of the dozens of small green fruit on the early girl tomato bush.  I can't wait to pick these when they are ripe.

Some more beautiful tomatoes.

The cherry tomatoes are really going to town.  Check out all these green tomatoes and flowers.  I have not gotten any ripe ones yet, though.

More sungold cherry tomatoes.

This picture shows you how the small roma tomato bush has really grown and is going to catch up with the cherry tomato bush in no time.  It is flowering, but does not have any tomatoes on it yet.

Here are the two small pepper plants that my cat chewed on before they were planted out here.  They are still very stunted. 

This is the garden after I weeded.  Notice the piles of weeds on the front stones.

You can really notice a difference in this picture.

And this one.

Look, ma, no weeds!

 Well that is all about the community garden plot for now.  I am contemplating adding a few more things to fill in the large open areas in the middle front. Maybe a few more cucumbers. Definitely something will need to go in the spinach spot when I pull that out.  Maybe beets.  My aunt and I are thinking about adding a few potato plants.  I do have some seed potatoes from my mothers garden last year, both red and gold.  Also the size of the pepper plants really makes me think we could fit a few more. I will take a look at the store and see if I can find any small plants that would fit in between.  I will post next about the patio container garden.  Things are going great out there, too.