August In The Garden

August 12, 2008 - I took a walk in the garden just now, camera in hand, to see what I could take pictures of. Turns out there was quite a bit going on out there!

The cherry tomatoes need picking every day. The yellow ones really pop out at you when you're out hunting for them. My mom calls them garden candy...

And we have our first peppers coming along. We haven't eaten any yet because there aren't that many and I would really like to see how big they'll get and if they'll turn red. But it's a huge temptation to bit into one of these beautiful guys -

And then there's one lonely chili pepper (that I've seen anyway, there may be some more buried in the jungle of tomatoes) -

I think this little bed is just beautiful. In the back is collard greens, in the middle is basil (green and purple), and in front is celery. It's so pretty you'd almost forget they're all for eating!

Our first eggplant! Actually there's a couple growing now, but this is the biggest -

The broccoli is still putting out little heads of broccoli, but if we don't get to them in time they flower like this. We still eat the flowers and they're pretty tasty too -

The saddest news in the garden is that our cucumber season is quickly drawing to an end. We definitely enjoyed them thoroughly this year - we ate them plain as snacks, on sandwiches, in a variety of salads, mixed with yogurt, and in risotto. It was also the only vegetable from the garden that Axel enjoyed eating. There was one brief moment where I thought I was sick of them, but then when I went out to the garden and found that they were no longer popping up everywhere, I was devastated. They're just the perfect little crunchy accompaniment to anything and everything. And I'm sad to see them go. Some of the plants have completely withered up and died (hard to believe it could be a lack of water in this super wet summer...), and others are still producing little, semi deformed cukes, like the one below (looks dangerous doesn't it?) But the cucumber bounty has defintely ended.

Fortunately we have other things to keep our spirits up, like this slowly growing melon. Can't wait til it's time to cut into one of those.

What else... OH! We got our first Araucana egg!!! They are known for laying colorful eggs and our first one is green! I can't tell you how excited we are that our little baby chicks, that we raised from a week or so old, are now laying eggs! It's too cool.

As you can see, this egg is much smaller than the ones our bigger laying hens are producing. Not sure if this is as big as they get or if the hen is just getting warmed up, I guess we'll find out soon enough.

When we bought our babies, we got two different types - Araucanas and Plymouth Barred Rocks. The Araucanas look like this -

The Barred Rocks, on the other hand, haven't started laying yet. These are them below, and you can see that they clearly have more important things to do, like hang around on fences all morning. But it will be interesting to see what their eggs look like.

That's it for the garden pics. But for some fun - Joe and I took Axel to a rock wall the other day for some climbing. Joe and Axel are quite good - me, not so much, but I DID do it, and I have the pictures to prove it:

House update - we took our drawings to the building inspector and got really good feedback. There are just a few things that we need to put together to bring him and then we should be all set.

AND we have decided to take this apartment that we were looking at. We should be able to move in by the end of the month, so stay tuned for that. It's pretty rustic, so there should be some fun blog entries about that too. :)