… About Our Garden: Lettuce Entertain You

Full disclosure: there’s nothing especially entertaining about this post — I just couldn’t resist using a good (bad) pun for the headline. But we did finally do a lettuce harvest of heads (actually more like “bunches”) rather than just pick individual leaves. It certainly made the harvesting go more quickly, but since there were lots of places for bugs to hide down inside the bunches the sink became a battle of the spiders (exaggeration alert: there were only two). Isn’t it lovely!

We also did a big basil harvest so we could make pesto. We thought we had everything we needed to make it, so I picked quite a bit. Aldi even had pine nuts a couple of weeks ago, and since they don’t usually sell them the timing was perfect. Since that was the only “unusual” ingredient we needed we got ready to make it, but unfortunately we didn’t realize we didn’t have any garlic! Oh, well. There’s still plenty of basil growing so we’ll try again soon.

And thankfully the tomatoes are continuing to ripen at a staggered, reasonable pace, so we haven’t been overrun by them… yet. There are still lots of orange, yellow and green ones on the vine, and now that the weather is a little nicer there are new blossoms.

And the broccoli is coming along nicely so we should be harvesting some of that soon. We can’t say the same about the squash. The dusty mildew came back and we lost another yellow squash to it (it grew for a couple of days but then withered and died). I cut a bunch of the bad stuff out (again) and there are still some new flowers coming up so we’re still hopeful. But if it comes back, we’re pulling the plug on the squash for this year. We like growing our own, but squash is so cheap at the grocery right now it may not be worth it to keep fighting the mildew. Squash plants: you’ve been warned — fight back or else!