This weekend has been all about working in the yard. On Saturday I spent most of my time deadheading all the flowers in the front yard and weeding. It looks a lot more tidy now. While I was working, my next door neighbor told me she thought my hydrangeas were so pretty that she decided she wanted identical flowers for her wedding.
My cucurbits are finally maturing enough that I can start picking them. I harvested one kabocha (an open pollinated variety named Kogiku), though I'm going to leave most of them on the vine for a while longer. The lemon cucumbers are starting to come fast and furious. I'm attempting to make pickles from a few of them using my Japanese pickle crock.
Sunday I harvested a bunch of tomatoes and made sauce. I used the Snow White cherry tomatoes to make a sweet jam; with the brown sugar and spices, it tastes remarkably similar to applesauce. It's just a shame that it takes a whole pot of tomatoes to make one cup of jam (though all the excess juice will be great for soup). I combined a bunch of orange and red tomatoes with caramelized onions for a yummy pasta sauce. It was fun to see the different colors combine like a sunset. When a few more of the yellow tomatoes ripen in a couple days, I plan to make a lemon ginger tomato jam.
The sorghum is starting to put out tassels. It didn't get as tall as I expected, but then it's growing in unmodified soil with limited water. Out of the eight potatoes I planted, only one actually sprouted, so that was disappointing. However, the summer crop buckwheat is doing much better than the spring crop did; I attribute it to planting them closer together so that their leaves can shade the soil. I have to keep a close eye on my ripening figs or else the squirrels will make off with them; I've lost at least one to the wildlife.
