Garden Delights

 I harvested the garlic yesterday!  It's late this year.  Usually I dig it up in July when the bottom leaves are starting to turn brown.  I dug up two plants about two weeks ago, to see how they were coming along and they weren't mature enough.   Finally, the leaves were dyeing back, so I figured it was time to harvest so they didn't split or rot in the ground.   There are lots of heads, but they are smaller this year and there were a number of heads which are too small to use.  Normally, I save all the largest heads of garlic to use for planting.  This year, however, they are all smaller than I'd prefer so may end up purchasing seed garlic to plant this fall.

The past couple of years my beets have been eaten by bunnies, eaten by birds, just not come up, so I only planted a half a row as an experiment with a totally different type of beet.  It's cylindrical instead of spherical.  Of course this year they're doing great.  This variety is sweet and tender, even though it's kind of ugly.   If I'd planted enough, they'd make spectacular pickled beets.  Good idea for next year if I can remember what variety it is or find the empty packet that I'm sure should be hiding in my seed box.

The cukes are still producing.   I've a 3 litre basket on the counter and more in the garden.  Looks like cucumber salad for dinner tonight.

Tomatoes!   Sungold I think, which is a hybrid, but produces early, sweet and flavourful orange tomatoes.   I've been picking them for over a week, but only a couple here or there and they never made it out of the garden in order to be photographed.  The taste of them, freshly picked, warm from the sun, right in the garden was too much to resist.

My last minute pepper plant that I rescued is doing well too.   I hadn't realized it was a mini-pepper plant, but they are tasty. 

The large, red tomato is probably a BetterBoy variety although I thought I'd planted the  Black Krims in that area.  However a Black Krim would be much darker with fairly pronounced green shoulders and this one is definitely all red.   I do hope that some of the Black Krims fruit this year.   We've had such a cool summer that there may not have been enough heat for the longer season heirloom variety.