Looking down on our garden from the hillside
After all the working getting ready for Gazpacho, it’s been nice these past two weeks to focus on other matters in the garden. For the most part, right now in the season we’re just concentrating on caring for our plants and harvesting whatever’s ready to go (for the squash and zucchinis, this means daily). We have planted a couple of crops recently though. Last week we planted beans and snap peas where the cabbages used to be in order to put nitrogen and other nutrients back in our soil. Also, the pumpkins we planted a couple of weeks ago have all come up and are growing well.
Our summer crops are coming in, with the glaring exception of our tomatoes. We would have had a fair number of big, ripe tomatoes if not for a very hairy problem: groundhogs. Groundhogs have been munching on our tomatoes as soon as they begin to turn red on the vine. So rude! Last week we set up a Have-a-Heart trap, but no luck catching them.
The Have-a-Heart Trap
However, this week we asked the guys at Morven for help, and they stepped in with a plan. They set up a trap outside of our garden off in the woods a little, and the trap kills on impact. Since they set up the trap on Tuesday, we’ve caught a groundhog every day this week. While it’s sad that three groundhogs have already died, we don’t have much mercy when they’re eating our carefully grown crops. This morning I picked a tomato off the vine that was red and untouched- finally!
This Week’s CSA: look at all of that squash!
This was the last week of our second summer CSA session. Despite the groundhogs also eating 14 of our melons, we were able to give our CSA-ers a half of either cantaloupe or watermelon. As another surprise this week, we also had some okra which people could take handfuls of. I calculated the total poundage that we’ve given our CSA-ers this summer (8 weeks of the CSA in all) and it totalled to almost 575 pounds! What a great season! We’re excited to start up our Fall CSA in September. Let me know if you’re interested in joining (ris3xq@virginia.edu)!
The corn ears are coming in!
