The Garden Groweth

And has gotten pretty big. Tomatoes, cucumbers, and string beans are the primary source of greenery right now. The cucumbers and beans are venturing past our carefully constructed bird netting shield into the wide blue sky beyond. This has been a crazy year for vegetative growth; hopefully, it will be matched by a crazy harvest.

The Best Cucumber Recipe Know to Mankind

Given our abundance of cucumbers, I was reminded of the cucumber salad I had in Germany. So a quick Google search yielded a smashing recipe for Gurkensalat; this stuff is the best possible way for a cucumber to pass on to the next world. If you ask nicely, we might be prevailed upon to share the recipe...

Exponential growth

We didn't check the garden yesterday because we irrigated early in the morning so it was too soggy to go out, and then we were busy for the rest of the day. So this morning, we had a crop of fairly large cucumbers, plus three zucchini. As you can see from the full sized pen dwarfed by the vegetation, these things are getting out of hand.

The First Tomato of the Season...

... was this cute little cherry tomato, photographed in a bed of chives. We cut it into thirds and had it with dinner several nights ago. It was quite sweet and tasty.

In Which the Apple Tree Becomes Less

We went out this evening to put the chickens away and discovered the apple tree had dropped a branch. I assume it produced too many apples and couldn't hold them up anymore.

Don't Turn Your Back on the Zucchini

Or they get really big. Overnight.

(The coin is a quarter. We use it here to impart a sense of scale to the squash.)

The Schnozzcumber

Technically, it is an Armenian cucumber. This is the only variety of cucumber we have found that continues to produce fruit throughout the Arizona summer. It seems to thrive on heat and abuse. The cucumbers are pretty tasty, especially given that they don't look very appetizing. And, they can be turned into fabulous light sabers.

And So It Begins...

Zucchini. First one.

Then two more.

In several weeks, we will hopefully be filling the cars of unsuspecting neighbors with the excess crop. For now, we are happy.

The Apple Tree is Still Not Dead

It actually has hundreds of little green apples on it. We need to thin them soon before the tree has hundreds of little ripe apples (instead of fewer large ripe apples).

Spring Has Sprung

The lack of recent posts has not been, as you might expect, because everything is dead and there is nothing to post about. Quite the contrary! The garden is growing marvelously; I attribute this to two things.

1. Chicken poop has magical powers. (Pay no attention to the funny looking chicken coop behind the curtain-actually a tarp that was making it waterproof that started blowing around and makes things look so unprofessional-it houses the producers of pooh, and is an integral part of the hobby farm ecosystem.)
2. I installed a cheap automated watering system before we left for Utah a few weeks ago.