Back from Vacation

Vacations are funny. I'm always so excited about going and have a great time, but I look forward to coming home. I love sleeping in my own bed. The only flaw in the ointment is all the things that get backed up and have to be taken care of. This includes the garden.

I came home to a pile of smelly grass cuttings. Usually I don't let it sit for very long, before mixing them with leaves and composting them. But the service comes whether you are there or not and I've trained them well to put it in a pile for me. It had also been raining a lot while I was gone. We had three inches of rain in the last five days according to the weather service. The compost pile that needed turning was soggy - way too soggy. Maybe tomorrow I'll dig out some more plastic to keep the rain off of it. My two finished piles, that have been combined into one, have plastic over the top so they don't get wet, but my other piles don't. I'll need to fix this if it keeps raining every day.

I left my garden in the care of some friends. I only asked them to pick things, so my plants would keep producing. I had the garden well weeded the day before I left. It is hard to tell if they got a lot of zucchini and yellow squash or not, but I came back and picked three squash and one zucchini. Two of the eggplants from the last entry were gone, so I'm guessing they grew big enough. They were pretty close when I left. I have plenty that will be ready soon. I also had a pile of cucumbers. One of them was huge. It may have only been about five inches long but it was very wide. I've never let one get that big before. It screamed to be made into sliced pickles so that is what I did with it. Usually I just make whole ones, but it was so big around that it almost filled my jar all the way to the sides.

My friends missed a couple of beans. They were huge and had full size beans inside. I thought about keeping them for something, but there weren't that many. Kentucky Wonder is supposed to make good fresh and dried beans. I keep thinking about letting some set and keeping them. I wish I had two legs of my bean pyramid planted with them. Then I could keep getting green beans from one and let the other go to dried beans. If I get sick of them later in the season, I'll experiment and do this.

My coriander had no more seeds left on the plants. I was hoping there would be some left, so I could collect it. All the seeds that dried earlier were mildewy from the constant rain. Since it just kept raining, I'm thinking even if I were here, there would have been none to collect. I'll have to make due with last year's seeds. I'm sure the seeds that did fall will provide me with next years crop. All that was left to do was to rip up all the plants. I will compost them with the next set of grass clippings.