Vegetable Garden in July

This heat and sunshine is doing wonders for my container garden. The cucumbers are still out of control, sprawling all over the place, stretching out their tendrils and pulling themselves up on anything they can reach. Here they are, gripping the leaf of the neighboring pepper plant:



After all this sprawling, the plants finally appear to be bearing fruit. Here is the tiniest cucumber I've ever seen.



I don't know why their size and shape in the very early days surprise me so. What would I think a immature cucumber should look like? Somehow, I'm totally taken aback by a vegetable in miniature. I actually catch myself cooing at some of these brand new vegetables, the way people coo over newborn babies.

One thing I'm learning is how much water these cucumbers need, which has caused me to discover a very small-scale water-conservation practice, that of keeping an empty milk jug in the sink to catch all the over flow when we're washing dishes, rinsing off rags, etc. Now, our family goes through what I'm sure a lot of people would think is a RIDICULOUS amount of milk, like 5-6 gallons a week (and that doesn't include our kids). So we're always rinsing out milk jugs for the recycling bin. However, over the last week, while it's been sooo hot and sunny and the cucumber plants wilt seemingly within hours of the last watering, I began letting the jugs fill up over the course of our normal sink use, and then using that water to feed the plants.

Here are some of the other gems of my garden:

The yellow cherry tomato plants have been the work horses so far. We've already enjoyed about 2 dozen tomatoes on salad, or on occasion, plain.

They are so flavorful and couldn't more appealing to the eye.



Here are the brandywines, which are taking longer to mature.



We've yet to harvest one. For the longest time, these were the only two fruits ripening. However, just the other day, I was relieved to see a third baby brandywine.

And here is the eggplant.



Last year, we got one lonely fruit that ripened to the size of a kiwi and then... nothing. It didn't grow, shrink, rot... it's growth just arrested. This year, however, there seem to be many more eggplants popping up. Fingers crossed.