Garden Pictures July 2010

It’s time to do a little catching up with blog posts with some pictures from my garden.  The weather has been unbearably hot over the last week or two, and the garden’s been neglected for the sake of avoiding the hot sun.  Please forgive any weeds that may be visible…

Garlic rust is back.  I haven’t been paying close attention, but I think my plants have had it about a week now.  In about two weeks I’m going to begin harvesting, so it doesn’t matter any more.  The garlic will be fine.  Like I’ve posted about before, I sprayed dilute milk on the plants over the last few weeks, and I’m under the impression it help a lot delaying the rust and reducing it’s impact.

Sorry, it’s a little hard to see the forest for the trees in this picture, but this is one of my two corn patches.  This is Golden Bantum sweet corn, in plot number 17, and the plants are now about 5 ft tall with tassels on top.  I got these seeds from Bingenheimer Saatgut in Germany, and this is a locally (Germany) acclimated version of this variety.

Above is my other corn patch.  This is Strawberry Popcorn.  This is a Dutch Heirloom corn.  It may be heirloom other places too, but there was a time it was widely grown here.  Together with the Golden Bantum sweet corn, I’m growing this in search of corn varieties suited for my local climate.

I’m growing popcorn this year in part because I was inspired by Kathy at Skippy’s Garden, who had a good experience with popcorn last year.  Modern popcorn has had so much of it’s flavor bred out of it, then often packaged in microwavable bags.  Most of us (including me) don’t really know what popcorn really tastes like any more.  By growing it yourself, you get a chance to experience the flavor like it’s supposed to be.

Does anyone notice a strawberry theme creeping in here?

I’m really impressed with these white alpine strawberries Alan Bishop bred and sent me, and I think I keep getting more impressed by the day!  This is the second year, which is normally more productive than the first, but wow, these plants are really productive.  Normally alpine strawberries stop producing in the heat of the summer, but we’ve just had a really hot stretch of weather (30C/85F), and these strawberries have just kept going.  I’ve been short on water, and they have been in a dry raised bed, but they haven’t minded.

These strawberries are particularly nice, because the birds can’t find them as they aren’t red, and birds are normally a big problem in this way in my garden.

Finally, Strawberry Spinach…

Never mind the weeds!  Almost everything you see here that’s green in a weed, I just didn’t have a chance to remove them before taking this picture.  Strawberry Spinach is an old weed relative that at one time was widely grown in parts of Europe.  It has leaves that are a spinach substitute, and tasteless red berries that look like strawberries.  The plants have no relation to strawberries.

It’s my first time growing it, and it kind of got lost in the weeds, and I think I planted it a bit close because the plants never got very large and healthy.  In fact the leaves are now too brown to eat, so I don’t even know how they taste.  The red berries are great to look at however!