Another Successful Garden

We have had another successful garden!  This summer was one of the few summers where we only went away for one week and so we could actually focus on our garden.  We don't have a lot of variety of what we are growing; we have picked what we really want to eat: carrots, lettuce, peppers, rhubarb, and lots of tomatoes.

 The carrots were all sorts of colors and were straight for once.  We also have so many types of tomatoes, to the point that we don't even know what kind they are.  We just know that they are delicious. 

We also have lots of lemons on our little tree-- so many, in fact, that we had to pick some off because the plant really couldn't handle all of the fruit.  We left 6 on the tree and they are developing nicely.  Our mini orange tree also had so many blossoms on it that we are also concerned about the amount of yield.  Currently, the oranges are about the size of one of the super bouncy balls that you can get for 25⍧ from the old-fashioned gumball machines.  We bought a new lime tree-- really, it is a twig-- and it has loved this hot, dry summer.  It has grown about 10 inches up and out since we received the bare-root stick in the mail.

We also had a bumper year of apples!  The tree finally produced so many apples that we didn't know what to do with them all.  Our neighbors were picking them too.  We made apple tarts, apple crisps, applesauce, and just ate them raw.  Delicious, tart, and juicy.  Whatever variety of fruit they are, they are excellent cooking apples.

The sad news is that our last surviving rhubarb plant is dying. I got only a few stalks off of it for one rhubarb crumble.  It sent its huge stalk of seeds up about mid-July and then slowly died.  We tried watering it more, adding more compost, putting some fertilizer around the base.  Nothing has done the trick.  It is rather distressing, since in previous years we have had some rhubarb that I was even able to make rhubarb vodka! 

The herbs are prolific again and the fig tree is recovering from the harsh winter of two years ago. It has figs-- they are tiny, but they are figs-- all over the limbs.  The tree itself isn't tall anymore; it is more like ground cover.  Hopefully it will continue to grow up versus out as the summer comes to an end.