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

[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!