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!

When I walk out to the garden, I am greeted by clouds of cherry tomato blossoms. These branches filled with giant, airy clusters of starry yellow flowers will, in a few weeks, be weighed down with as many little round fruits. The early slicing tomato plants, and even some of the later varieties, already have green fruits set on, slowly filling out before they begin to blush red.

Further into the garden, the cucumber vines grow faster than I can trellis them, and this week I spotted the first itty bitty baby cucamelons among the chaotic tangle of string-like stems. (Yep, that’s a baby cucamelon in the photo above!)

I am already overrun by zucchini, and they have only been producing for a week! The yellow crookneck squash may soon follow suit. I’m no longer entirely sure where the line is between bed and path in that section – it’s all just the summer squash patch now.

Back inside, in the cool of the basement, the garlic I harvested on Monday is hanging to cure. In a couple weeks, I will trim off the leaves and roots and bring the bulbs to the market. Whatever remains unsold by this winter will be dried and ground for garlic salt – and maybe some new seasonings!

In this transition from spring to summer crops, I don’t have many vegetables to offer at the market right now, aside from the zucchini, the surprisingly heat-tolerant kale, and the aptly named perpetual spinach chard. So it works out well that this is the one Saturday I am not planning to be at the market. I will miss seeing you all, and my fellow vendors, but I hope to have more to offer when I return next week!

See you at the market – next week!