Columbus Foodie

Sorry about the radio silence from here lately – it’s been a really rough month and a half for me. I felt like a bunch of things were hitting me at once. Sometime in mid-June, I ended up in the emergency room with massive pain in my chest, shoulder and neck, and the past month has been all about trying to deal with the pain as everything was healing – it’s been a haze of pain and physical therapy and painkillers that has left me pretty debilitated. I was trying to handle a massive course load at school while all this was happening, and quickly got overwhelmed. And I got some really disappointing news last week – I got a rejection letter from the nursing school I applied to, so I’ve been in a pretty deep funk all week with no passion for eating *or* food. I’m choosing to look at the rejection as a blessing in disguise – the stress I’ve been putting myself under both physically and emotionally were taking a toll on me, and it’s only since I’ve eliminated some of the sources of stress that my problems have started to resolve. And on the bright side, P. has started working again after being out of work for over a year and a half. It couldn’t have come at a better time – we had just exhausted all of his unemployment benefits, our credit cards are maxed out, and our savings are gone. Best of all, the new job comes with health benefits. Expensive health benefits, but benefits nonetheless.

But I digress. Things are starting to look up, and I’d like to talk about the garden. Unfortunately, there probably won’t be an August or September update, since I’ve not been able to keep up with the weeding and/or tending and the poor things are starting to suffer. We’ll see – some plants are still going strong, others (like my poor Sungolds) only have a few weeks left.

Click on through for an update of what’s going on in my backyard.

The raspberries, as beautiful as they are, have mostly been going to the birds. I still manage to get a handful of berries now and then, which taste wonderful. And now that the bush is established, I hope to get a bumper crop next year.

And I got a ton of blueberries this year. Big, fat, juicy and sweet, better than anything I’ve bought in the stores.

The poor mulberries were wasted on me this year. Part of my shoulder injury is that I (still) can’t reach over my head – working on it, but impossible when the mulberries were producing.

I’m still waiting for these darn blackberries to ripen, almost a month later.

The grapes were definitely setting fruit by the beginning of July, but they’re just now starting to sweeten.

The Japanese beetles did a number on the leaves, though. Picking them off seem to have done the trick, because I haven’t seen any for a while now.

These are supposed to be Paul Robeson tomatoes, but now that they’re ripe, I’m not so sure…

The Early Girls are producing much later than they usually do, for some reason.

Can I just say the Topsy Turvy isn’t worth a damn? I lost one tomato plant to blight very early on, the other one has withered and died despite being watered regularly and fertilized.

I’ve been getting quarts of Sungolds from these 4 (make that 3 – one of them actually is a Sweet 100, I believe) plants.

And the red beets had just come up at the beginning of the month, and we just harvested these (small, but pretty) the other day.

Still clueless on how to grow fennel. Ours turned out to be mostly leaves, no bulb.

The zucchini hasn’t been as prolific as I expected it to be. Go figure. I have twice as many plants with half as much yield.

It’ll be a while before the leeks are ready…

I planted 3 kinds of eggplant, haven’t had much yield yet, though. And the plants are still really small.

The herb garden looks like hell, but some stuff is thriving in it. Many, many lessons learned for next year about what works and what doesn’t.

My poor basil is getting choked out by the pineapple sage – I think I’m going to start a separate pot of just basil.

So tell me, what are the rest of you growing this year? How are your gardens doing? Are you having as many problems with weeds as I am?