you say tomato, i say yes please

A day I have been waiting for (and never quite believed would come) since I planted the garden: The day I walk out with a big old bowl of STUFF -- basil, parsley, chives, green bell pepper, ripe cherry and grape tomatoes, five or six green tomatoes, yum.

Grape and cherry tomatoes have officially arrived, enough that I don't eat all three of the ripe ones before I get in the car. Not to be immodest, but they're awfully good, too... very sweet, and the skins somehow seem thinner than regular tomatoes so that they kind of pop when you bite down. Also, they are really good when they're warm from the sun. Yum.

All this is not to say that there aren't some tomato-related problems. Note the color: None of the full-sized tomatoes are even close to ripe. They must have lost their little standard-issue tomato calendars, because they seem not to realize that it is the middle of August, in theory the warmest that the weather is going to get, and that means they need to stop it with this green nonsense and turn red already. But I don't blame them for being confused, because the weather here is distinctly un-warm... it doesn't break 80 most days, which I think is unusually cool even for Ithaca, and I'm wondering if the tomatoes aren't a little confused.

Also in this category is this guy: There are now three butternut squash, all of which are the proper shape of butternut squash but are the size of a mass-market paperback book -- again, a little worried it's going to start getting cold before these guys are actually ripe. Moronically, I think I broke one of them off their stems yesterday when I was trying to get a bug off of it. Not sure if it's broken the whole way through, but even if it doesn't do the fruit in entirely, it that isn't going to speed up the ripening process.

The summer squash are not suffering the same fate: That's probably the fifth or sixth nearly full-size squash, yay! We've eaten three or four of them already and even the little runty plant is starting to produce little runty fruit. Those damn squash bugs are still waxing and waning, sometimes with a bunch of adults and eggs on the leaves and sometimes nowhere to be found. That photo also shows the slightly troubling weird white stuff on the leaves... not sure if that is bug-related or what.

Also in the news of the troubling, I did not document this photographically, but the tomato plants definitely have a number of yellowing or dead leaves on the bottoms of the plants. Too much rain? Air flow problems? Overabundance of unripe fruit sucking away all the nutrients and attention from the rest of the plant? It's seriously hard to overestimate just how many unripe tomatoes are on these plants... all of them but the ones in the biggest cages are constantly falling over, the drama queens, no matter how many stakes I add to prop them up. On the list for things I've learned for the next garden will be ALWAYS buy the biggest cages, and plant the seedlings farther apart so that you can walk between the giants without stepping on anyone.

Let's see, what else... oh yes: New sprouts! I replanted on the spot where the arugula (RIP) used to be after I got two free packets of buttercrunch lettuce, with no big expectation that a second planting would work in this temperature. But the lettuce is actually sprouting in a shorter time than the packet said it would take the seeds to germinate -- I think the cool weather is actually working in my favor, here, and these guys think it's spring.

That's it! I am going to do a big post at some point about the changes I'm going to make in my next garden, but for this year, I think we're in the heyday and it's pretty fun.