April 2021

November 2020

October 2020

September 2020

August 2020

Um, yeah, those are not Black Krim tomatoes. Yellow Pear, as advertised, tho.

last harvest

Hard freeze last night, so I picked the last of the tomatoes and basil. Today arranged the tomatoes by ripeness and ended up with a weird half-assed ombré.

weekend update

Moar tomatoes!

weekend update

“Tomato Chive and Dill, Attorneys at Law, how may I direct your call?”

first Robesons!

weekend update

A month later and everything is bonkers! Agastache in the east bed!



Arugula!



Tomatoes!



... mmmmmmmm ... tomatoes.

Caprese salad

Per Andy's request, with Robesons (finally ripened!) and basil from the garden.

weekend update

Backyard: Raised bed: The tomatoes are doing well, got a few Sungolds starting to ripen up. (Full disclosure, I picked 2 ripe ones already last weekend.) Basil is going like whoa, including a couple of Thai basil plants I picked up at Big Orange (to replace the dearly departed Persian basil). Thyme is back, chives are still chugging along.





Yard: Sigh. Dog decided her new spot to dig up and lay in was along the edge where the grass plugs went in. I've done 2 more Office Arugula Giveaways since the first one this season. The arugula is starting to flower, and gets more stemmy/less leafy as a result. I think I need to scalp it, in hopes of getting some more new growth. Sorry, bees!





Front yard: Front door bed and pot: Good news, one of the Ann Folkard geraniums seems to have resurrected itself (barely)! Neither came up in the spring, so I thought they'd both died. Bad news, one of the new Ruby Port columbines was doing fine, then just up and croaked (??? wtf?)



Front door pot is doing OK, even though the coleus is kind of buried. Impatiens could put out some dang flowers, already.

Sidewalk bed: The primroses and flame flowers I got at the Garden Fair are doing well! I also ordered three blue honeywort plants from Annie's Annuals. They describe them as “insanely easy to grow.” I've been watering them pretty regularly, and they seem to be doing OK — I saw the first bud this week!

2016 arugula harvest #1

Thanks to the ever-fabulous Bev (who gifted me some of her perennial arugula plants), and to my laziness (letting the arugula go to seed), we have a nice colony in the yard. We've been enjoying arugula for about a month now, but there's no way we're going to be able to keep up, and it's starting to go to flower. Last year, once in June and once in July, I brought garbage bags full of arugula in to the office (I didn't blog about it then). I decided to bring back the Office Arugula Giveaway, in an attempt to not get so buried by it this year.

Step 1: Get up early and spend 15 minutes scalping arugula. Pick out as much other stuff as you can. (Seriously, there were a ton of snails in there.)







Step 2: Bring giant bag of arugula to the office and send out a mass email begging people to come'n'get it.





Step 3: Repeat until frost.

roasted tomatoes

Picked enough tomatoes to fill a half-sheet pan for roasting. Here they are before going into the oven. Yum!

a bad year for tomatoes

So the tomatoes pretty much all crapped out this year. All I got was about 2 dozen Sungolds. Peppers also wussed out. Got 2 tiny jalapeños. Boo. Not warm enough.



The perennial arugula from the ever-fabulous Bev volunteered across the walk into the "yard," though. So there's that.

last tomatoes

Here's a little animation of the last of the Robesons as they ripened and got used.