It’s Sunday morning again, the time when I wander out into the garden in my bathrobe and see how the garden has changed from the previous week. If I wanted to be brutally honest, this week I should have photographed lots of weeds, since I’ve been neglecting my garden something horribly. In this coming week I need to be doing some serious weeding. But I did get to eat some things from the garden this week, and wrote about how to cook spagetti squash as a summer squash for Weekend Herb Blogging. I even gave away a few cucumbers, peppers, and spagetti squash to some neighbors and friends, so that’s a good week in the garden in spite of the weeds.


I finally succumbed to temptation and bought a fantastic new camera, which is 100% more complicated than my other camera, and which I’m barely learning how to use. Some of these pictures are experiments with the new camera and some are taken with my old one. I have to confess that the obsession with the new camera is part of the reason for the garden being neglected so seriously this week.

The one thing I did do in the garden was trimming the herbs, which were overgrown and starting to go to seed. This is my oregano plant, which was twice this size before I trimmed it. That piece of gray concrete is a sidewalk which extends a tiny ways into my garden.
Here’s how the sage and rosemary plants looked after they were trimmed. The sage had lots of flowers, but they had to go!

The sad saga of the basil continues. I’ve become convinced that it’s snails that are eating my basil and (organic gardeners cover your ears) I’ve decided I’m going to resort to poisoning them since every one of the 30 little basil plants that I started from seed have been systematically devoured. All I had left were six larger plants which had also been seriously eaten, so at the Salt Lake Farmer’s Market I bought four new basil plants, and after I planted them I put a ring of snail killer around all the basil. I’ll be watching closely to see whether any more damage occurs. (By the way, the nice guy selling the basil told me that earwigs won’t eat basil, so one possible culprit eliminated.)

This is a volunteer tomato plant. Usually I pull these out, but this one seems to be a Brandywine (heirloom tomato) and it already has quite a few flowers. It’s in a spot in the garden where there’s some room, and happily situated itself right by my other two Brandywine plants, so I’m going to let it grow and see what happens.

My Better Boy tomatoes have completely overgrown their cages, so this week I’m going to trim them back quite a bit.
The west side of my house where it’s partly shady hasn’t turned out to be the best place to grow arugula or swiss chard. I’ll try something else there next year. The arugula did grow well, but it’s fairly bitter tasting, and the swiss chard isn’t growing as well as it did in the garden where there’s more sun. However, I do have enough swiss chard to start cutting it. I’ve only cooked chard as a green, with olive oil and lemon juice. Any ideas for cooking this?

The Blushing Beauty peppers finally have a few peppers starting to turn orangish. The plants aren’t getting very big, but they have quite a few peppers on them.

I picked these three lovely peppers, gave away two of them, and today I’m going to make something from the third one.

Last, but not least, my tomatoes are slowly starting to ripen, and about half my plants have a few ripe tomatoes peeking out. This is a sight that makes a gardeners heart jump with joy.

And the best news of the whole garden update, I ate my first garden tomato of the year. This may not be the best looking tomato you’ve ever seen, but it was sweet and delicious. It’s a Celebrity tomato, one of my favorite all around tomatoes, and a variety that I try to grow every year.

That’s all the garden news for this week. If you want to see the progress of my garden from nine weeks ago, here are the links to the other garden updates.

first garden update
Garden Update #2
Garden Update #3
Garden Update #4
Garden Update #5
Garden Update #6
Garden Update #7
Garden Update #8 (Rand’s Garden)

Don’t forget to check back later tonight for the Weekend Herb Blogging Recap. I’m hosting this week, and there are lots and lots of new participants! It’s not too late to send me your entry (kalynskitchen AT comcast DOT net) as long as I get it by 3:00 today, Utah time. Check out the rules for Weekend Herb Blogging if you need more information. There are about 14 people signed up to be guest hosts right now, and next weekend the host is one of my very good blog friends who lives in New York City and likes to take photos of the city. Any guesses?

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