Garden Update - July Harvest!

FYI, a post about our fantastic, week-long Cannon-family vacation to St. George for the 4th of July will be coming shortly. We are waiting on some pictures from other family members that we should have soon and will include in our post.

For now, I want to share with my fellow green thumbs an update on the Cannon Family Garden 2010! One of my favorite things as a kid was to come back from our annual summer vacation and then run down and check on our garden. It was always such a treat to see how much the plants had grown and matured in that week; I was always so thrilled at the progression!

The first thing I noticed was our corn: It looks healthy, hearty, and thick-in-the-stalk! My corn stalks have always been pencil-thin due to lack of sun, but the corn in our new plot gets a full on 7 hours of Summer sun and it shows! It will probably still take some work to get full, beefy ears, but they will no doubt be much better this time around than in any previous year.

I next noticed that our vines--canteloupe and cucumber--had decided to get a move on and actually start vining after weeks of laying around doing nothing. We even had two nice-sized cucumbers on one vine (but none on the other, and no melons to speak of).

Then, much to my surprise, I saw two little green tomatoes on our pathetic excuse for a tomato plant. Seriously, every time I look at it I think it looks like a tomato plant from some end-of-the-world movie where one scraggly, sad-looking tomato plant is the survivors' only source of food and represents humanity's fragile hope for survival. Well, just like in the movies, it came through. We'll see if it can turn them red for us before it completely gives up.

I then ventured to the South garden and found our bean plants heavy-laden with long, plump green beans. Thanks be to our friend (and my fellow gardening enthusiast), Jen, for making sure those beans got watered while we were away (they are in a bit of a sprinkler shadow). There were so many beans that Corbin and I went out to pick them so that the plants could stand up on their own and stop shadowing their neighboring beets and carrots.

Our beets contracted some disease and I ended up cutting off all of the leaves after taking this photo. It doesn't appear to be powdery mildew like last year, but there's still some of that hanging around in our Box Elder tree. Hopefully the beans won't contract it, whatever it is. We'll see how the beets mature without any leaves. I'm not holding my breath for a harvest there. Sad.

One of my four potato plants in the South garden was on its way out before we left, and it was about as dead as dead when I returned. I decided I would dig around to see if I could find any potatoes large enough to eat. To my surprise and great satisfaction I found my very first home grown potato under about 6" of dirt. For joy! I don't know why, but successfully growing a potato filled me with sunshine. I pulled up the plant and dug around for any other potatoes and found five more, but one had rotted. We're going to use them for hashbrowns later this week. After some reflection, I think that maybe it was just the end of this plant's life cycle, so the top died to let me know the taters were ready below. I guess that Yukon Golds just mature faster than the Reds or Russets around here.

Our peas are still kicking (unlike last year when we returned from our summer vacation and they'd been thoroughly roasted) and I picked and ate a first finger-sized carrot. We also have a Banana Squash baby on the vine that we hope will grow to be as big and tasty as our one last year. Our lettuce just keeps on trucking; man, it seems like if you can get that stuff over the hump it just won't quit. It also seems to be less and less bitter the later in the season it gets. Hooray for that!