The weather has been teasing the past couple days, with overcast skies and an occasional drizzle, but nothing of any real substance. I am immensely grateful that I finally invested in drip tape irrigation this spring. Instead of spending every morning hauling a hose through the garden (and grumbling when it flattens a plant instead of staying in the path), I simply turn on the spigot and let water seep through the drip tape for about an hour a couple times each week.

I’ve been picking beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes, and I plan to finally harvest the first of the cucamelons tomorrow! I also hope to get some of the garlic, which has been curing in the basement, trimmed and cleaned up for market on Saturday. Of course, I have garlic salt made from last year’s garlic, too, and it’s great on just about everything.

I took the platter in the image at the top of this post to a small gathering last weekend, and the Dragon Tongue beans were a hit! They’re at least as delicious fresh as they are cooked. I grew everything in that dish from seed, which is immensely satisfying (including the carrots, though the harvest has been very small so far).

Next Wednesday, July 24, is the special Christmas in July Evening Market, from 6 to 8 p.m. We have a great lineup of vendors with festive items alongside their usual offerings, including some special food. Check out the Facebook page for vendor spotlights (link above).

I don’t usually get excited about Christmas in July – it’s a bit of a strange concept – but I’ve been happily working away at a new festive crochet project: Christmas trees! These cute little evergreens stand on their own but will pack flat to take up minimal storage space. I also plan to bring mini stockings, as well as my usual crocheted offerings and, of course, fresh produce.

See you at the market!

Disappointing good news? Has the heat addled my brain? Possibly. But I do have good news, and it is laced with disappointment. So, here it is: I picked the first of the Dragon Tongue beans this week! These are my favorite bush beans, a stringless yellow wax type with purple streaks, crisp texture, and excellent flavor. I love them raw, steamed, sautéed, and pickled.

Okay, but what’s so disappointing about harvesting my favorite beans? Well, there should be green beans mixed in with the Dragon Tongues, but instead there are empty gaps in the first bean bed where the green beans should be. Inexplicably, the green beans never sprouted, while the Dragon Tongues appear to have had near 100 percent germination rates. The second planting of beans has yet to set pods but also looks patchy, so we’ll have to wait and see if there are green beans in that bed.

Speaking of waiting, the cucamelons are taunting us, taking their sweet time ripening. Part of this, undoubtedly, has to do with the drought, as cucumbers love water, and irrigation can only achieve so much. There’s nothing quite like a good soaking rain to set the garden on a sudden growth spurt.

And yet, I do have a good pile of slicing cucumbers to bring to the Broadway Community Market Saturday morning, as well as zucchini, yellow squash, and the first tomatoes! You can also find garlic salt made with my own homegrown garlic, aloe plants, and crocheted flower bookmarks, fish scrubbies, dish cloths, skillet handle covers, and fishbowl stuff-and-spill toys at my booth.

See you at the market!

I made the mistake of planting all of my cucurbits – winter squash, cucumbers, and summer squash – on the same side of the garden. Besides the fact that this will allow pests to move more easily between them, it mostly just makes moving through that part of the garden almost impossible. The cucumber vines, seeing the sprawling winter squash on one side and enormously bushy zucchini on the other, have apparently decided to take a page from their neighboring cousins’ books and go wild themselves.

That entire section of the garden is now a lush, chaotic tangle of greenery, and it is both beautiful and daunting. (One of these days, I’m going to lose my balance trying to get through there and go tumbling down onto the innocent sweet potato vines.)

The good news is that when I dive into that green mass, I come back out with cucumbers, zucchini, and yellow crookneck squash. Soon, I’ll be picking cucamelons too. Yep, that’s one in the picture above, still only half size.

A stroll through the rest of the garden (positively relaxing after the cucurbit chaos) this morning revealed the first blushing tomato, which means fresh tomatoes will be coming soon as well! As I was admiring that faintly pink-tinged green fruit, something golden caught the corner of my eye, and I discovered the first of the cherry tomatoes had ripened. I popped it in my mouth, and it was like a little burst of warm sunshine on my tongue. I can’t wait to share these with you!

In the meantime, come visit me at the Broadway Community Market tomorrow for some cucurbits! The Straight Eight cucumbers, true to their name, grow about eight inches long and beautifully straight, with with a sweet, crisp flavor. I’ve been enjoying salted cucumber spears with lunch almost every day. And even the largest zucchini I hacked into was still tender and had remarkably small seeds. Although I shredded it for zucchini bread, it just as easily could have been sliced and sautéed.

I’ll also have garlic salt, crocheted items, and possibly some fresh basil tomorrow.

See you at the market!