Pickle city

This summer I put in three types of cucumbers, a straight 8, and two types of pickling cucumbers.  We love pickles in our house, and we love making them ourselves so we can flavor them and choose the amount of pickling we give them. I am here to say new pickles, just about a week after they are canned, are incredible.  Here's  is what the different types of cucumbers look:

This is the gherkin varietal. It's a French gherkin, they are covered in spines, curly, and look just like the tiny gherkins you see pickled whole.  The spines honestly make these not my favorite, and the cucumbers themselves are kind of soft, so I don't know that I'll put this variety in again. 

This is the other pickling variety. I can tell you from experience that even if you leave them be, they will only grow about 4 inches long, then they just get fatter and fatter. These cucumbers have very firm flesh, very little seeds, and I think they will make excellent dill pickles. This week we will be making our first round of pickles from the garden, I'm very excited.  

In other news, monarch butterfly caterpillars are all over everything in my garden right now.  They are especially big fans of the dill and fennel.  I know my plants would prefer me to remove these pesky herbivores, but I love monarch butterfly's, so I'm letting it go...

In the picture above, there's lettuce in the foreground, then fennel with caterpillars, and then on the other side of the fennel there's carrots (on the right), beets (on the left), and artichokes behind them. I'm concerned my artichokes are still too small to put out buds this year, so I'll keep them covered and hopefully alive this winter and see what happens next year. 

Happy gardening. : )

Summertime, and the living is easy

Now that its full summer, the garden is going crazy. My tomato jungle is out of control. 

That space on the right? That used to be a walkway. That space on the left? Used to be a walk way. 

I'm getting lots of cherry tomatoes right now, and finally after literally months of chasing mice out of my tomatoes, I have Roma tomatoes starting to ripen.  I can't wait until they are ready.  

In contrast to my tomato jungle, these are the tomatoes in my topsy turvey planters. 

I got these planters this year because I had way too many tomato plants that survived seed starting, and I couldn't throw the baby plants away.  Unfortunately,I am not great about watering them every day, which in the texas heat is probably why they have failed to thrive. At least now I know that these are not going to be worth the effort next year. And I can console myself by literally getting up to my ears in happy tomato plants.