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.
