We Have Pumpkins
I picked two perfectly round, orange pumpkins this week. The bigger one weighs a hefty 22.8 lbs., and the second one weighs 8.2 lbs. 
I can’t wait to dig in!
Rain Gutter Planters
I happened across an ingenious use of rain gutters. There are no extra gutters lying around my house, but I bet a quick e-mail to Freecycle would turn up a few.
Mistakes Along the Way
This is the first year I have grown beans, and so far the haul has topped three pounds. I keep my beans in a green bucket on the kitchen counter to eat from whenever we want.
Then I thought the beans would be better if I froze them. I dumped the bucket onto the counter to find a pile of anemic, papery pods. No snap to them. Just yellowed, lifeless beans. Maybe the oldest ones had been there for two weeks?
Lesson learned. Those not-so-fresh beans are headed for the compost.
One Lonely Tomato
I’m convinced that blight has settled into the Suburban Farm. Each of my cherry tomato plants is brimming with beautiful green fruits, yet nothing is developing. With plenty of sunshine and rain, these fruits have sat for weeks without turning. Except for one. My one, lonely tomato. 
I feel sad, because I though I could escape the blight. Instead I see spotted leaves, drooping stalks, and a lot of wasted potential. I should pull out all the stalks, but this one tomato has given me hope that maybe all is not lost. I’ll give it until the weekend. Anyway, the cucumbers need room to spread their wings.
Pumpkins!
Take at look at this pumpkin plant. This single plant takes up nearly as much space as nine plants did last year. 
It’s everywhere and it’s getting itself involved with lots of other plants–everything from the watermelons to the crab grass. But I don’t mind because I love dramatic plants and I love saying to my husband every day, “Would you look at how big the pumpkin has gotten?”
To-date thare are two fruits, and they look gorgeous. I almost prefer the complexity of greens in a new pumpkin to the monotone orange of a mature fruit.
meet pumpkin number one
Also, we call this Jacson’s pumpkin patch. He doesn’t do much yet, but it will always be his and he can cultivate his own pumkins soon enough. 
Late Blight: Not Yet
As far as I can tell, my tomatoes do not have late blight. There are some spotted yellow leaves on the lowest parts of the plants, but it’s not the blight.
We have had an enormous amount of rain in the Northeast–8.59″ just in July in CT–creating ideal conditions for late blight, an airborne fungal disease that decimates potato and tomato plants.
As an organic gardener I expect there is little I can do to combat an infection, though even chemical fungicides have a minimal impact on the disease. However, I’m trying to be watchful because my blight will quickly become someone else’s, and inevitably the commercial grower’s.
My only hope–like that of farmers across the region who are facing a loss of their entire tomato crops–is to bag and toss the diseased plants and hope it won’t happen next year. Don’t burn the plants, don’t send them off to the town’s yard waste collection, and for God’s sake, don’t compost them.
I talked with a coworker who’s neighboring farmer has blight. He expects he can combat it as long as it doesn’t rain. If it takes over, he has about a three week supply of tomatoes, and then that’s it. No tomatoes.
Guess what happened when I got home that day?
Rain and sun, as usual
Corn and Tomatoes, Oh My!
Corn, July 2009
Tomatoes, coming along
First Beans
As I was giving the Suburban Farm a dose of fish emulsion, I was pleased to discover beans ready to be picked. That was fast! It seems like just a week ago–maybe two–I found little beans budding off the flowers.
Beans, ready for the picking!
This is the first year I’ve grown beans. They got a shaky start when I lightly mulched the whole Suburban Farm before seeds had emerged (oops!), and then there was no sun for a month.
I thought they were pole beans, so I’ve got a pole for each group of plants. But they are really short, so maybe they are bush beans?
Either way, I’ve got a small handful ready for dinner tomorrow night. I think Jacson will like them very much.
Fresh beans
Poison Ivy and Ugly Beetles
Things have been plugging along on the Farm: beans, tomatoes and peppers are forming, and everything is filling out nicely.
But in more general yard maintenance news, I’ve been dealing with two gruesome pests: broad-necked root borers and poison ivy.
The former comes around this time every year for one to two weeks, and I find them simply gross. The females waddle around the grass with their huge ovipositors and about-to-explode abdomens. They have large mandibles, and my unsuspecting mother was bitten by one the first year we owned the house. Naturally I’ve been reluctant to let Jacson tear through the yard during this period in the borers’ life-cycle. Last year the foxes happily came through and ate them at dusk, but I haven’t seen (or heard!) many foxes this year.
The poison ivy is a different story, a far more itchy and irritating one. I’ve concluded that I contracted it last Friday when I was trimming saplings from the front privet hedge. And now when I return to the scene, I see that evil three-leaf monster poking out of the top and base of the hedge.
Part of the problem is that I hate wearing gloves when I work. I like to feel what I’m doing, and I like to get in there and finely manipulate. Gloves are only good for preventing blisters and grabbing thorns.
So shame on me, now I have weeping patches of poison ivy on my arms, fingers, neck, and face. Nothing debilitating, but certainly ugly, annoying, and sometimes painful. Today I’m wearing Band-Aids in the hopes that I’ll be more presentable, and less things will tickle the lesions into a fit of itching.
Growing Wheat in My Own Backyard
I’ve been thinking about it since January, and I’m still mulling how to make it work on my property, but I’d like to try growing wheat. I won’t pretend that I could even begin to serve my family’s grain needs on a small, suburban plot of land, but I’d like to give it a go, just to see what it’s like. I’ll call it a novelty crop; it’s something to keep me entertained during the winter.
The Northeast is not known for its prolific grain harvest, but I was heartened when I found this article from the Boston Globe about the resurgence of grain farming in the Northeast. The idea is starting to catch on.
What seems harder, though, is finding basic information on the Internet about growing wheat. There is a glut of technical farming information for high-yield operations, but a dearth of info on things like when to plant and when to harvest. I did find a few blogs, which are helpful.
What I’ve gathered so far is that I can plant hard red winter wheat around September, and harvest in June. At first I thought I had the perfect solution to a winter cover crop, until I realized that lots of things have to get started in the ground before June. So where will I put the wheat? I considered taking a local community plot for the winter, but I would run into the same problem: people want to plant before June.
Normally I would tear up the yard and put in a new growing area, but my husband and I are still at odds over the lawn. He is right on one count: I should plan my growing areas better. And since I’m approaching wheat as a novelty, I wouldn’t call it great planning.
For now, my best solution is to use half of The Suburban Farm–the new half–where the watermelons and sunflowers are growing. It’s a small section, maybe 8×10′, but I’m sure I can get a nice harvest of wheat berries, which is all I really want.
The Suburban Farm 