Early July garden
The
mountains of produce started piling up around the first of this
month, and momentum is still building. The photos in this post
show just a few of the big harvests that have gone into our bellies
and/or freezer during the first week of July.
(No, we didn't eat the
bug or the cats.)
Since
outdoor temperatures were in the high nineties to low hundreds for the
last two weeks, the trailer got so hot inside that Mark couldn't stand
to
spend more than about thirty seconds there. I could handle a few
more minutes, but was very glad to be able to do most of our food
processing on the porch.
In addition to cooler
temperatures, when you work outside, you get
visited by fascinating insects like the wheel bug above. These
predatory insects like to eat caterpillars and Japanese beetles, so I
was thrilled to see one carried in on the produce. (Be careful
--- I hear they have a painful bite.)
After figuring out where to process the produce, the
next decision was what to do with it. First
step --- eat as much as possible right away! At this time of
year, I try to put a cucurbit on our plate for each lunch and dinner,
along with another vegetable or two. I've also been
trying out various vegetable salad mixtures, all of which have been
very heavy on the cucumbers to use up that bountiful crop.
Despite
the joy of working on the porch, I've been giving away more food than
usual. Due to the wonders of quick
hoops, we only ate
about
twenty gallons of frozen summer produce between us during the off
season, which means I lowered my quotas on everything except vegetable
soup. (It
seems like we can eat an unlimited amount of vegetable
soup.) Although summer vegetables sound more interesting than
kale and lettuce, when the former is frozen and the latter is fresh, we
subsist nearly entirely on the latter.
I did plant less of
certain crops in 2012 and used less manure to fertilize, but the garden
seems bound
and determined to churn out just as much food as last year despite
having a smaller area planted. As the person we see the most,
poor Bradley has been burdened with the excess. Maybe that huge
bag of summer squash and cucumbers we pawned off on him Friday is the
reason he had
other plans and couldn't come back to work on Monday?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Great post. I have wheel bugs all over the yard, but mine haven't become adults yet. Mine are still juveniles. I actually stumbled upon a batch of eggs hatching out in the Spring.
If anyone wants to take a look at what they look like when freshly hatched, see the first picture in this post.
They are one of my top insect predators, second only to the mantis. Luckily when I first moved in I did a little research before killing a bunch of little weird looking bugs in the yard.
Emma --- I usually put dried squash in spaghetti sauce, where it rehydrates quite well in the tomato juices. I haven't tried it in stir fries, but I wouldn't count on it --- I don't think the texture would be that great.
Fritz --- Nice insect photos! I'm still learning all of the good bugs, but it sounds like I need to keep my eye out for wheel bugs in the future. Maybe we're as overrun by them as we are with mantids and I don't even know it.