End of Summer

It's literally the last day of August and this is the first blog post during summer vacation (haha). As a quick refresher in May-Juneish we planted cilantro, green onions (or scallions), swiss chard, butternut squash, cabbage, and a LOT of tomato. At this point we have harvested plenty of cherry tomatoes, not so much of the other tomatoes, some swiss chard, and scallions.

Here is what Maria (another GT gardener) harvested last Tuesday.

We may have gone slightly overboard this year with the tomato. I think we currently have about maybe 7-8 beds of JUST tomato although I did also see some sneaky plants growing where they should not be.

Despite our best efforts, majority of the tomato plants appear to have decided to take a nap and are hanging towards the ground instead of going upward. In the top left picture, it even looks as though one of the cages is pretty much horizontal to the ground. I spent some time trying to move some of the branches/vines so that way they weren't drooping as much but I have a strong feeling that given a strong gust of wind they will return to their original position.

These pictures were all taken after harvesting so they look a little bare. Here is the cilantro and scallions. Most of the scallions were harvested so you can't really see any in the picture. For reference, scallions sort of look like round grass and when you cut them there's liquid inside. They're really fragrant and I felt like I could still smell them on my hands an hour later. As for the cilantro they are that clump of green leafiness towards the left middle of the box. The seeds, once they are dry and tan-ish colored are what we have been harvesting. However, for now we've just been storing them in one plastic bag until there's a good number of them.

The swiss chard also was mostly harvested so now it just looks kind of sad. You are suppose to harvest them when they're about 6-8 inches long and cut them about 1-2 inches from the bottom. As I didn't have a ruler on me, I mentally imagined a ruler (the normal 12 inches one) and cut any swiss chard that was more than half that height. As mentioned before, that was almost all of them.

Here are the squash and cabbage! The cabbage and squash both aren't ready for harvest yet but they've grown so much!!!!

The squash is still green in some parts and there should be another one (probably hiding under all the leaves) somewhere.

For the sake of the picture (also it's really funny) have a picture of a mutant tomato! In my personal opinion it sort of looks like if 3 cherry tomatoes tried to merge somewhat successfully. See you all in school next week!