We recently returned from our trip to Nashville and were a little worried about our garden. Temperatures crept down to the high 40s a couple of nights while we were gone, and tomatoes hate temps below 50! Things were looking ok, but they are definitely slowing down. As expected, based on the baby zucchini when we left, we had…drumroll…another club! This one was a good bit bigger than the last.

We also recently picked the first of the butternut squash, but our crop will come nowhere close to last year’s!

Finally, here are a few more tasty treats from the lovely garden. The cherry tomatoes still taste great, but the big ones are tasting terrible right now – I don’t know why!

I took our neighbor a couple of tomatoes the other day. I didn’t know she gardened, but I saw a few tomato plants when I went over. They were still very green, so maybe mine ripened faster. She said she gardened in the back as well, and that must be the truth! Her great-grandson brought us this on Saturday…if only we liked green beans! We’ll have to try a new recipe.

My first regular tomato is here! This is the Azoychka variety.

In other food news, last week I went to the u-pick strawberry farm on a whim on my day off. I picked 4 quarts of strawberries and a few raspberries. A couple of friends and I went on the last day of the early crop, and this time the pickings were MUCH better!

And then…I canned jam! I made strawberry jam and strawberry lemon marmalade. It went well, and I am happy to say I know how to can.

Finally, here are a few carrots I dug last week. They looked great when I took the picture, and then I put them in the fridge. They got rubbery again! Super rubbery… I must figure out what is wrong, because Joel isn’t getting to eat any of his beloved carrots. I also dug the rest of the onions, and they ranged from large marble sized to golf ball sized. Hmm.

When I got home yesterday, it looked stormy. That’s nothing new, because it looks stormy often, but it never rains. I didn’t think much about it until it started pouring…and then the hail came! Joel and I had been quite nervous about hailstorms after we first started our garden, knowing that any amount of hail could decimate the tender transplants. I worried while I watched, but I hoped that our hardy friends would stand up to it. Here was my one rash effort at protection to a tomato plant:

As far as I can tell, there was no harm to anything, since the hail was pretty small. I was sitting outside afterward and thought I’d take a few more garden pics. Here’s the main bed and a smaller one.

Notice the massive potato plant spilling onto the sidewalk above. We kind of made it do that, as it was eating two parsleys, a marigold, and a pepper! Here’s one of my earth box with thyme and sage that are flourishing…and oregano that is not.

I am not ashamed. This was once a cilantro plant:

And finally, here’s one of Joel as he was getting home from work after the storm. I was sitting on the front porch and snapped an awkward pic for ya.

It’s maybe a touch embarrassing since we weren’t out of town, but somehow we missed this baby in our garden:

Zucchini is terrible when it’s so huge, but I guess we’ll always miss a couple. On another note, I keep picking the cucumbers smaller and smaller. They have continued to be very seedy, and occasionally bites of them are bitter. I don’t know…I just saw a picture of them on the blog of the person I got the seedling from, and hers were enormous. I think I’ll email and ask!

I can hardly believe my eyes, but here’s what I just got from our garden: a zucchini, two eggplants, and, wait for it, two tiny cherry tomatoes!! Our cherry tomato plants are loaded up with green ones, so we’re expecting a bounty. It’s fun to get the first ones.