Its July 26, 2020 and our garden is making great progress! It is amazing how much changes in just a few weeks! The weather has been hot and stormy but we have definitely needed to water on those hot, muggy days!
Let’s check on the garden!
The patty pan squash (also known as sunburst squash or golden scallopini) continues to blossom. We have picked the squash when it is small because it is much more tender and sweet. When the patty pans grow too large, the outer skin becomes rather tough and sometimes bitter, although if your squash becomes bitter, it may not have received enough water! Just simply water more and the bitterness tends to go away.
In the picture here, the squash is nearly ready to be picked although it can definitely be picked and cooked! Our favorite way to prepare them is after washing, slice into rounds and place in skillet with oil or butter and sliced onion, sea salt and fresh cracked pepper and saute until tender. Delicious!
In the picture below are our cucumbers (rather sparse growing this year) and the patty pan squash. As you can see, our dill has been growing great! We have seen strange beetle-type bugs on our dill that we keep removing. The dill fronds are great for picking and drying or freezing or even just adding to fresh potatoes and salads!
The beets and carrots are growing well as are the beans! I love this time of year when all the hard work can finally be seen!
Our parsley is growing fabulously well and is great to pick to add to salads, soups or casseroles or even drying to preserve over the winter! The sage smells wonderful and is ready to be used as well. Our other herbs either did not come up or we mistakenly picked them as weeds! We have planted more cucumbers and beans in the open spots and the chamomile is growing like a weed!!
Our fellow gardeners have beautiful looking gardens too!
The carrots are a bit small, but we have been picking a few to thin out the rows!
The beets look great! Once they pop out of the ground like this, I always pick them! They make delicious beet pickles, beet soup (borscht) or even just cooked up and served with butter! We absolutely love beets, no matter how we prepare them!
The zucchini are producing well and we have been eating them as often as we like! We like turning them into zucchini “noodles” (just spiralized or grated in long thin strands and tossed in a skillet with olive oil or butter, sea salt and pepper and a splash of water and cooked until tender), baking with them or tossing zucchini into dishes like soup, meatballs or spaghetti sauce! They can even be made into jams and relishes! Yum!
The smaller the zucchini, generally the more tender it is. Once zucchini is left to grow rather large (like I sometimes leave them to grow or they go unnoticed for a while), the skin tends to get tough and the seeds then need to be removed before using, but they still taste great! Even if the zucchini gets hit with hail, they can still be used, just remove those patches!
If your plant smells bitter, like ours did this year, just water a little extra. Like lettuce, if left too long without water, that bitterness tends to be tasted in the veggies! We have had to water our squash extra this year simply because it has been so hot!
Potatoes. Some are still flowering, some have finished flowering. They are ready to be dug! Without removing the plant, just move the dirt that has been mounded around the plant and dig around for potatoes! We cover it back up again and let more grow!
Is this not just the prettiest parsley!?! It smells divine, tastes fresh and is ready to be used!
Sage. I love the smell of sage — reminds me of Thanksgiving dinner! It is also ready to be picked and tossed into chicken dishes, soups and roasted chicken or even dried to be used later!
And that is our garden update. Some vegetables we are eating and enjoying and some still need to grow some more. The garden always has weeds to be picked and we usually pick them at least twice a week (sometimes more) to stay on top of them! There is nothing worse than a garden full of weeds!!
Stay tuned for more updates on our lovely garden! Share with us how yours has been growing!
enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours