On the hottest, most humid day we have had yet
this season, our enthusiastic group picked 95 pounds of produce and found our
first ripe tomato! Of the many varieties we are growing, the Green Zebra
heirloom tomato produced our first ripe fruit ready for the picking! The
others aren’t far behind! We picked a rainbow container of ornamental
peppers for the first time, too!
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| Landing on his behind picking carrots! |
The heat has been a friend to our summer
vegetables! We harvested zucchini large enough to become baseball bats
from Friday to Mondays picking! A plant produced enough cucumbers
to nearly knock over the picker! Carrots released from the ground landed
a little guy on his behind!
This group of kids was proud to help with
the
task of recording the patty pan squash collected for our University of
Minnesota Seed Trials.
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| Recording the Patty Pan! |
Patty Pan squash come in such fun shapes and
colors from ‘Eight Ball’ that look like a dark, perfectly formed orb to ‘Lunar
Eclipse’ that resemble light green spaceships!
As we enjoyed our watermelon, we decided it
would be important to sample the taste of our Kaleidoscope carrots as well.
Look at how beautiful they are on the inside and outside! The
opinion was that the purple dragon carrots had the strongest taste while the yellow
carrots had the mildest flavor.
Finally, when one lends her calculator on her
phone to an almost 11 year-old fun-loving and very smart boy so that he can
calculate the total pounds of produce, one might find her phone returned to her
with this boy’s face as her new screen-saver! Love it! We sure do
have fun in this garden!
- Contributed by Master Gardener Kathy Luoma
- Assisted by Master Gardener Tricia Jorgenson
