Other good stuff

While I wait impatiently for my tomatoes to kick into gear and get ripening, other yummies have emerged here and there.


One soft neck garlic, one hard neck garlic (with the purple tinge), and one Danvers carrot.


The hard neck garlic produced lovely, absolutely delicious scapes this Spring (see photo, two paragraphs down).

There's more than just one carrot that's ready (or beyond ready) to pick, but, I enjoy the carrot foliage so much, that I put off harvesting until the last possible minute.


Beautiful carrot foliage.

One disappointment, I have to admit, has been the garlic. The plants were gorgeous; the bulbs are small (in the photos above, the carrot is actually quite large, but, still, the bulbs are smaller than I thought they'd be). Clearly, I neglected something as far as feeding goes. The bulbs look good; they're just small. They need to be cured for a couple of weeks before they can go through a proper taste test, but, I need to do some research to see where I went wrong. I'll post what I find here - or, if anyone has tips, please feel free to share! - because garlic planting season is coming up in a few months (can you believe it? It's mid-July already!), and I don't want to make the same mistake for next year's crop.


Garlic scapes (above left and middle) and oregano, cilantro, and the first jalapeno pepper (above right, from the top down), some heavenly-scented dill, below. The oregano, bless its little heart, just grows year after year after year, no matter what I do to it, giving me a fresh supply of the lovely dried herb. I go through so much fresh cilantro, it's not even funny. I reseed every week, and even then, I usually end up buying transplants now and then at the farmer's market, just to keep up with the need. Wait until the tomatoes ripen! Let the salsa fest begin.