We picked our first of the two pumpkins. They have turned out rather larger than we were expecting. We made a pie and two loaves of pumpkin bread with the first half of one of them, and used some of the remaining pie slurry in french toast this morning.

We also have lots of ripe tomatoes. Probably half of the red ones have issues, spots on the bottom and the romas are cracking and not ripening evenly, but almost all are still quite usable. We made a salsa tonight that we will put in taco salad tomorrow.

The very welcome warmth in the first half of September has faded now, and so we picked the remaining watermelon today. (The only other one was on a vine that died and Mike had to pick it before it got ripe.) This one, while a bit lopsided and not as flavorful as could be, was ripe and juicy.

Mike replanted lettuce, spinach and peas while I was off in Alaska. Slugs have been going after the seedlings directly in the ground, but the others are doing pretty well, especially since it has gotten cooler.

Our 3 day weekend hasn’t, and doesn’t have much hope today, of reaching 70 degrees. We still have lots of plants with green fruits that really could use more heat before fall sets in.

Here is a watermelon (one of two that have gotten to any size) in front of a butternut squash (we have two or three fairly small ones).

Our pepper plants all at once stopped dropping their flowers and now has plenty of green peppers maybe 3 to 4 inches long, in addition to the original one that is just now starting to turn color.

The first pumpkin, out on the rocks below the garden area, was turning soft. Mike threw it across the street into the blackberry bushes. The bushes rejected the poor pumpkin and tossed it down the hill. We have one more decent sized pumpkin that is better sheltered in the mass of foliage in the main garden area that we hope won’t rot before we get to eat it.

And of course we have lots of green tomatoes still.  At this rate, I am hoping that we manage one more batch of roasted tomatoes.

This is a bit out of order, but:

We found out why you should not plant carrots in pots. Even if your winter is lasting forever. We pulled them up around August 1st. One or two were too tough to eat. The others tasted fine (I didn’t notice any difference between the various colors), but were small and contorted. The leaves on on all were lush and happy. Too bad that’s not the part you eat.

The yellow squash, after we moved the plant to less intense spot and got better at watering the correct amount, gave us several large, creamy squashes. This is from Aug 18.

Since then it has finished flowering, and mildew has started to attack the leaves.

With a warm week in mid July, two in August, and several pleasant days in between, we seem to be reaching the end of this year’s abbreviated summer.

The blackberries are mostly over now, but mid August we picked enough from across the street to make a cobbler.

Our garlic plants were flattened by wind storms and the encroaching squash, making the tops no longer usable. Underneath, all had developed bulbs a bit smaller than the average grocery store ones, with a bit stronger aroma and flavor.

The squash was similarly pushing over the red onions. Dear god they grew slow. Since planting in mid April (around 130 days), the largest got to about 2 inches in diameter. Only their outer layer is red. (And what a pretty color!) Their insides are all white. We’re using the onion tops as well. In place of the onions, garlic and where the cauliflower used to be (which we gave up on at least a month ago because it was full of bugs that refused to be washed off and tasted no better than cauliflower purchased from the store), Mike planted carrots, lettuce and spinach.

Several of our first tomatoes have had blossom end rot. The top halves are untouched and super tasty. We are getting tomatoes from the Early Girl and Yellow Pear. The volunteer Plum Romas are very green still.

We used our tomatoes, garlic and thyme to make roasted tomatoes yesterday.

Mike picked our first corn today. And then we made pesto with our basil and garlic.

All of the tomatoes have green fruit on them now. Even the volunteer tomato, which we’ve staked up and kept watering.

While it always perks back up, the yellow squash was wilting pretty badly during the during some of our warmer days, and I think that ended up damaging the first round of squash.

We have one pepper. All of the other flowers keep falling off. Here they say that peppers won’t set fruit below 65 degrees (!) so we’ve started pulling the plants in at night. It’s been getting into the mid 70’s lately, with a few days in the lower 80’s and a few colder than 70. Our lows have been around 55.

Our replanted spinach and lettuce don’t like the heat. The spinach has started bolting already, and they aren’t more than 2 inches tall.

And we have a couple of wee little baby watermelons:

We tied the leaves around the cauliflower heads a week or two ago with yarn, but they’ve now outgrown their hats.

We’ve seen several northern flickers lately. There were 5 on the telephone pole this afternoon.

On Mom’s last visit, she identified our pretty but horribly invasive and persistent japanese weed as knotweed. I’ve just pulled up all of it that was up against the garden plot. I’m not stating this as an accomplishment, as there’s plenty left just two feet away (and we even saw it up at Olallie State Park this weekend), but just to see how long it takes for it to regrow up past the railroad ties again. Two weeks?

They need neither dirt nor water (they store it in their segmented stems) and chopping them off at ground level doesn’t faze them in the least.  I’ve dug down 8 inches or so to remove all their roots in our garden area and still they come back.

I also pulled off two green caterpillars from the smaller cauliflowers. I didn’t notice any slugs this morning. One of the larger cauliflowers is starting to grow florets.

Unrelated but current garden pictures: