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All my sunflowers in the vegetable garden are volunteers. They are either lemon yellow or golden yellow. Some are 8 feet tall. They are good supports for my climbing beans when they happened to grow in the bean bed. Otherwise, they attract the bees as they bloom, and when they go to seed, the goldfinches come to eat the seeds. I've yet to catch them in a photo though. Today my husband helped me cut off about 8 large seed heads to put away to feed to the birds in the winter. I'll let the goldfinches enjoy the rest now.
Here is my first string of onions. This is the section of the white onion harvest that had tops long enough to use. There are a handful of other onions which I put in a mesh bag. I didn't braid the tops of the onions, rather I used a method from John Seymour's "The New Self-Sufficient Gardener." He recommends tying together the ends of a 3 foot string to make a loop. Then you hang the loop from the hook. You have two parallel strings. You tie the first onion on the bottom of the loop and weave the tops back and forth between the strings. For the following onions, you don't have to tie, instead you just weave the tops in and out between the strings. Move the onions around the string to start in different places so the onions are evenly distributed around. I didn't end up using the whole length of the string for these white onions, so I knotted it off at the top and made a loop to hang it from.
Now I need to go practice some more on my yellow onions. There are many more yellow onions than white. Maybe I'll add photos to the steps above after I do my next string.
On Tuesday I spent a pleasant and full day in the garden. I spent a lot of time with my potatoes. I was concerned about their foliage, and they have been falling over for weeks.
I did some research to try to figure out if it was late blight, early blight, or something else. I decided it was either early blight or fusarium wilt.
Either way I surely didn't want it to spread to my tomatoes. So I cut back all the foliage and bagged it. I had been filching potatoes from my short row of Iris Cobbler potatoes, so I went ahead and dug the whole row. I also dug up a few of the All Blue and Yukon Gold to see what they potatoes look like. They are a fair size. Here are a few of the All Blue, straight out of the ground.
However, I've read that leaving them in the ground for a few weeks will help them harden up the skin to store better. So I'll be leaving the rest of them in the ground for a bit more.
I went on to check on the tomatoes and found a bit of leaf spot which I cut out, and some possible early blight on the lower inner leaves.
I trimmed out a bunch of the lower foliage to open up the plants some. Next year I'll plant them a bit farther apart. However, all in all they seem to be doing well. I'll continue to keep an eye on them.
I decided it was time to pull my onions. The bed looked like this. They were all flopped over, starting to brown on some of the leaves and I wanted to clear the space to put in some fall crops.
About one fourth of the onions were white and three quarters were yellow.
I lay them out on a tarp in the sun. At night I folded the tarp over them so the dew wouldn't get them wet. I turned them occasionally and left them in the sun for two days. Then we had threat of rain on Wednesday night so my husband and I brought them in and spread them on a sheet in our very warm attic. I'll let them dry there a week or so before bringing them down to trim, weigh, and string before hanging in a cooler place.
Now, the bed looks like this with only leeks left. The far end also has the All Blue potatoes still in the ground where the fork is sticking out. What's green in the front is grass I need to pull :)
I also pulled all my peas, the old broccoli and the asian greens that the slugs prevented me from enjoying.I pulled the lettuce that was bolting, and weeded out the cold frame where I have some more cabbage starting. My early cabbage seems to not be forming heads because of the heat we had. You can see a lot more bare earth in the garden.
Today I planted fall peas and tomorrow I want to put in fall carrots where the onions were. I also want to put in fall greens. I have some kale, tyfon, bok choy, asian green, broccoli (a long shot), and kolhrabi started in cell packs to transplant later too. Its hard to believe I need to be planning for fall when I'm still waiting on all those tomatoes.
Lately our dinners have been relying heavily on the garden. Last night we had Swiss-Chard Zucchini Soup which used onions, chard, zucchini, potatoes, and cilantro from the garden. We base it on this recipe, but use the chard in place of spinach, add lemon thyme from the herb garden, add crushed red pepper and serve it with cheddar cheese. Above is the harvest that went into the soup, with some of the potatoes you'll see below. The tomatoes made it into another meal.
Tonight we enjoyed Oven Potatoes on the Grill. We love potatoes with our burgers, but I didn't want to heat up the kitchen with a hot oven. So instead, I used up the small potatoes, or cut others into chunks.
I used our first All-Blue potatoes, with the last of our Irish Cobblers. I tossed them in a bowl with olive oil, salt, pepper, rosemary and thyme before skewering them. It made skewering a little slippery but it made the coverage of the oil more even. Here they are going on the grill.
We cooked them on the grill over medium heat for about 15 to 20 minutes, turning occasionally. They were nice and brown on the outside and tender all the way through when finished. 
They were delicious. Looking back to find the link for the recipe I make in the oven I realized we could have put beet sections on here too and those would have been good also. Next time!
We also had Romano beans stewed with cherry tomatoes, onions and basil. I sauteed the onion and a bit of garlic in a pan, added quartered tomatoes, and the beans, half the basil and just a bit of water. Covered, they simmered for 5 to 10 minutes until they were tender. I added a half teaspoon of sugar to cut the acidity and topped with more fresh basil.
We're looking forward to even more garden dinners.
All my sunflowers in the vegetable garden are volunteers. They are either lemon yellow or golden yellow. Some are 8 feet tall. They are good supports for my climbing beans when they happened to grow in the bean bed. Otherwise, they attract the bees as they bloom, and when they go to seed, the goldfinches come to eat the seeds. I've yet to catch them in a photo though. Today my husband helped me cut off about 8 large seed heads to put away to feed to the birds in the winter. I'll let the goldfinches enjoy the rest now.
