Garden!Porn -- Mid-summer edition

[apple_pathways]

Everything going on in the world of my garden! There are tiny little golf ball-sized pumpkins, and we should be harvesting yellow squash within a week. The chinese cabbage will take over the world, if I don't eat it all first!


(Click any picture to see a larger version.)

Pride of the pumpkin patch! My best vine so far.	Another view of the pumpkin vines. The trellis is working out great! (Also, you can spy these interesting little tree-like things one of my neighbors grows every year. I cannot remember the name, though!)	My Moon & Stars Watermelon vine. It's a bit behind--no baby watermelons yet!	My Charentais (french canteloupe) melon vine. Again: no melons yet!
This broccoli should not be flowering! Bad, BAD broccoli! (It grows much better as a cool weather crop. I keep trying to tell my mom...)	Cucumbers! There are little baby cukes, but I didn't get a picture of them.	Chinese cabbage! Producing like gangbusters. I had some for dinner last night, and it was yum!	The beans (purple Violettos and Emerite haricot vert) have finally taken hold of the fence, and are reaching for the sky! There are flowers, but no baby beans yet. (In the background: one of my neighbors has apparently claimed his plot of land for both America and Italy, the greedy bastard...)
Another view of the beans, this one with lovely flowers!	Tomatoes! All green and healthy...	...and producing babies!	evilhippo has called chard the "hipster of vegetables", and I can't help but agree!
Just look at these hip, gorgeous bastards!	They'd best not get too cocky, though: woodchucks are the tough, hipster-hating jocks of the garden!	For some reason, there are a lot of empty plots this year. He's some lovely pink weeds growing on one of them.	And I know these are weeds, and therefore I should hate them, but: oh, they are darling little blooms! And the combination of the orange-y coral and the bright blue is just stunning!

In other plant news: Thursday's hail storms in Chicago have severely damaged the Garfield Park Conservatory. My friend actually works there as their director of family programs. It's a beautiful conservatory, with a massive collection of plants. The whole conservatory is devastated, with nearly all of the glass roofs laying in ruins and 80% of the plants damaged. It's closed until further notice.

If you can, please consider donating to help repair the damage! You can do so on their webpage.

Comments

[rachel2205.livejournal.com]

I love that your gardening is SRS BZNZ not just some weedy crap. If a zombie apocalypse does come you have some useful skills there.

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

SRS BZNZ is right! I will freeze/can/preserve as much as I can from the garden, but I wish I knew of a local charity that took donations of fresh produce: I'm bound to have plenty to spare!

And oh, man--you just had to bring up the zombie apocalypse! Now I'll be thinking about it all day. I mean, I'll be useless during the actual fight, but if I should make it through the war? I will be an absolute terror during the re-building of humanity! Can you imagine the spreadsheets? :P

[evilhippo.livejournal.com]

Oh, they all look lovely! I'm so jealous that you've got enough space for viney plants and climbing beans. And you've already got tomatoes. I have a feeling tomatoes are going to be hard-won for my plants this year.

You are going to need to let me know what those little tree things are. I'm curious now.

Boo to the chard-hating thug woodchucks! They should get together with my squirrels and go live somewhere else and let our hippie selves keep our hipster veggies.

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

Yes, the viney plants are my favorite! But the only way I have enough space to grow so many is that I trellis everything! When we first had the garden planted and set-up, my mother joked that we were growing sticks, because that's all the garden really was: my trellises! But now that the plants are getting bigger and filling them out, I'm really glad I've put them in--so much more managable than last year when they just grew on mounds!

I will let you know what the tree things are! I'll also take better pictures once they get bigger. They look really quite out-of-place and prehistoric (but very cool!) once they're grown. I just need to run into my neighbor who grows them so I can ask what they're called!

We definitely need some sort of relocation program for nuisance animals! My poor, poor chard...

[ravelled-ribbon.livejournal.com]

Your garden is so pretty! I am very jealous, all I have is my kitchen windowsill.

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much! I am well accustomed to apartment living, with only a spare windowsill to grow plants on. Very frustrating!

[ladylovelace.livejournal.com]

Every time you post pictures of your garden, I get the urge to go dig a plot in the back yard and start growing stuff.

Then I remember that the dog would just eat it. So I am gardening vicariously through you and might pop up to the Sunday market for some herbs.

I am deeply excited for your Moon & Stars watermelon. It has such a fantastic name!

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

Farmers' markets are the way to go, if you can't grow your own!

I am also very excited for the watermelons! They're named for the large and small yellow speckles that adorn the leaves and fruit:



I just hope they have enough time to ripen on the vine before I have to vacate the lot!

[stick-poker.livejournal.com]

Cor, serious vegetable goodness. Being able to grow melons would be insanely cool.

If I can be nosey, I'm kind of intrigued by the set-up there, or rather the lack of boundaries between plots - is this like a corner of back yard? Or what I would call allotments?

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

Yep, it's exactly what you would call allotments! It's what we call a community garden. The one I garden at is part of a historic park site called Greenmead. (I'd link you to the website, but they have a discouraging lack of information about the garden plots on there!) It's a big field divided up into plots that community members rent out by the season. I'd love to take on another plot next summer, if I can get it--there's a lot I'd like to try growing that I just don't have the space for right now.

I really hope the melons will turn out! If they're not affected by any one of several fungal diseases that plague the site, they might just not have enough time and hot weather to ripen fully before I have to vacate my lot. :(

[stick-poker.livejournal.com]

Ace. I kind of assume all Americans have such huge amounts of land with their houses that they don't need allotments, but even if that wasn't plainly rubbish, there's a lot of other reasons they make sense anyway, especially under the title community gardens. The ones that are left in the UK tend to be in funny interstitial spaces, only still there because they're not valuable enough to be sold off, so they're next to train lines or motorways or on the sides of steep hills. A big flat field like that looks a bit strange to me as a result!

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

Community gardens tend to be much harder to come across and much more pressed for space in the places where they're most needed, i.e. major cities and urban centers. The land is far too valuable, and they end up getting bought out and built over.

Where I live in the 'burbs, it's still very true that America is full of open space! Still, community plots in a great big open field like the one I garden in are most likely a rarity. It's most likely this space's "historic site" status that helps it to stay preserved as it is. (All Europeans and other residents of ancient civilations can feel free to make fun of the fact that this "historic site" is only slightly more than 100 years old!)

Greenmead also hosts a number of events--swap meets and an annual Highland Games, for example--which helps subsidize the cost, too.

Am I boring you yet? :P You just happen to have hit on one of my passions--gardening and community spaces!

[javidan.livejournal.com]

Garden plot looks awesome!
I finally went out to look at my stuff yesterday---and water, lord it's HOT. I'm excited to see my tomatoes look pretty healthy this year...keeping my fingers crossed.

And too bad for the Chicago Conservatory---we just got hail this evening!

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

You know, the hail completely missed us! But we did lost our cable/internet for awhile, and there was a pretty rad-looking sky over my friend's house. (I would love some rain right now, as it would mean I don't have to drive out and water the garden tomorrow!)

It is hot! Damn, I wish the weather would make up its mind! I'm just comforting myself that most of the veggies should enjoy the hot weather.

Ahh, the tomatoes! They're coming, they're coming! It will be so exciting when they're here! :D

[alias-amy.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the shout out regarding the Garfield Conservatory! It's a lovely place, a real oasis in the midst of a neighborhood that gets very little city attention. I got caught in that hailstorm on Thursday as well, and the streets flooded in less than 20 minutes. CRAZY.

Enjoyed the chat room the other day immensely, btw. Thanks so much for doing that!

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

Ah, another Chicagoan! Yes, the conservatory really is fantastic! My friend Kelly has worked there for about 3, 4 years now--I've gotten the 'back stage tour'! ;) I'm just heartbroken over the damage!

I'm surprised, but the storm completely missed us! (We usually get most of Chicago's weather a day or two behind.) I know the storm hit some parts of MI, but we didn't get a drop of rain!

I'm glad you enjoyed the chat! I wasn't around tonight, but should definitely be in tomorrow evening. And there are exciting things happening with the chat--ladylovelace is building us a permanent room on one of her domains that will be ad-free! Stay tuned!

[zolac-no-miko.livejournal.com]

Plaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaants~!! :DDD

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

Indeed! :D

[jobey-in-error.livejournal.com]

There's a whole harvest sitting there! Wow. Gorgeous.

Between you and evilhippo, I'm finally looking up chards... oh, it's silverbeet. So now I have a reference point but I've still never had any. ;)

[jobey-in-error.livejournal.com]

P.S. ... I'm guessing it's "chard" plural, not "chards." Bad Jobey.

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

LOL, it's ok! I discovered today that I've been misspelling the name of the site where I do my gardening for years now. (It's "Greenmead" not "Green Mead"!)

I'd never eaten much chard before I started growing it! It tastes quite a lot like spinach, but is much, much easier to grow! (And BEAUTIFUL! I just love the rainbow colors.)

[tierfal.livejournal.com]

YOUR GARDEN PORN IS BEAUTIFUL.

Also I've never even heard of that hipster!plant before, though I know I've seen it and I'm pretty sure I've eaten in it salads. (Probably because California is the hipster capital of the world, pretty much…) All the same, I lol'd more than a bit. :'D

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL! And HI! Good to see you. :D

Yeah, I see a lot of people haven't heard of it! I can't say I'd eaten it that much before I started growing it a few years ago. It tastes a lot like spinach!

[tierfal.livejournal.com]

Hi! Missed you while I was super-super-AWOL. XDDD

I love raw spinach, so I should really check that stuff out. I'd bet my life we have it in all of our grocery stores, because the Silicon Valley is LIKE that… very exciting! :D