CATS & DOGS & CORN!

 

It has been raining cats and dogs!  Glorious weather with lots of rain, incredible thunder and lightening and awe inspiring clouds and light and shadows. The commute this morning was fabulous with rainbows everywhere.

This evening's garden inspection yielded an exciting surprise.... we have an ear of corn sprouting on one of the stalks!  We heard corn doesn't do well here but we had some space between our squash plants and corn was listed as a companion plant and we figured... what the heck.  We love the way corn stalks look.  This is an experimental year with everything being a learning experience.  It has been fun to watch it grow.  We even passed the "knee high by the 4th of July" test this year!

With all the virus woes it has been easy to focus on the failures and setbacks.  We had visions of an abundance of tomatoes growing on plants six or seven feet tall!  The loss of our first round of beautiful tomato plants was heartbreaking.  The return of the virus in our second round has been truly discouraging.  The infection of the potatoes was unbelievable and now the chile peppers are showing signs of leaf curl too!

Nonetheless, this morning while walking around the garden, we stopped to look at the big picture and it really is pretty incredible.  The berries are doing quite well.  The volunteer zucchini is enormous and beautiful (even if it is harboring those vile, virus carrying white flies).  We have harvested three large zucchinis so far.  The second zucchini was so big that we had meal number two from it one tonight (pizza for us and the neighbors) and will probably grill up the last of it tomorrow for dinner.  I also harvested an abundance of basil for the pizza tonight.

Giant volunteer zucchini plant

The lettuce and arugula are growing faster than we can harvest and eat them.  We have an abundance of radishes waiting to be eaten.  In fact, bed number one (mostly root crops) is impressive looking. In addition to the radishes, our rutabegas are growing beautifully, the carrots are slow, but finally beginning to look like carrots.  The green onions are still fairly pathetic... I need to see if those were old sees.  Even the beets are starting to come on!

 

The squash and pumpkins are doing well too... and did I mention the corn?  It's good to step back and remember this is really our first year, we planned for it to be a learning experience and so far it really has been fun and is going quite well.

Our first ear of corn!