My Garden Helpers

These are my garden helpers.

They're incredibly busy, pretty much always working outside the home, and coming back to share the wealth of their day.

It's my observation that since these guys have lived in my garden, my garden is far more productive than it used to be.

For example: my tomato harvest is pretty generous. This is about how many tomatoes I harvest from one 3' x 8' patch of tomatoes.    

This year's varieties, all heirlooms, all indeterminate:
 

Slicing tomatoes: Cherokee gold. Incredible flavor, modest production. I'm going to replace these with Brandywine next year: Pink, slightly more production.

 

Cherry tomatoes: Chocolate Cherry. Very good flavor, excellent production. I'll probably supplement these with Sun Sugar next year: yellow, prolific, and stunningly sweet. I do like cherry tomatoes in hanging baskets.

 

Cooking tomatoes: San Marzano: good flavor, incredible production. I'll probably use these again next year, but I might not plant them so thickly, and I'll attempt to prune them more often.

 

 

The Most Amazing Weeds

We took a tree out of a flowerbed in the front of our yard. It took a fair bit of mass with it, leaving a substantial hole. We had just retired a couple of old compost bins, so we had a lot of compost. So we filled the hole with fresh, and perhaps not completely mature compost.

We got some of the most interesting weeds. In addition to the usual assortment of weeds, we have some fruits and veggies. We have a really healthy zucchini, and it's not a hybrid pumpkini! We have a tomato plant and what appears to be a tomatillo plant. And we have what appears to be two very healthy melon plants.


If I'd planted them intentionally, I probably would have spaced the melon and the zucchini a little better, but they seem to be happy snuggled up together.

I don't actually know what kind of melons these are. The leaves look like a cantaloupe, though they're larger than the cantaloupes I've grown in pots. But the fruit itself shows some signs of watermelon-ness (I've grown both in the past, but no other melons).

It seems perfectly happy growing in our flower bed, so we'll let it grow there for a little while and see what we get.

Serendipitous gardening. How fun!