The Kitchen Garden This Week: June 21 to 27

It was a week of extremes in the garden in more ways than one!

This week started off delightfully cool and went to blistering hot for days and back to very cool. People in general, and gardeners in northern New England, do best if they learn to calmly navigate the extremes the world can throw at us these days. It was a week of doing that in our kitchen garden.

Here's the garden week in pictures and a few words:

By the start of the week, our vegetable garden was finally starting to grow after having been in a holding pattern for weeks with all the damp and cooler than expected weather we had for the last several months.

Our dill harvest kicked into overdrive! That was a blessing with all the hot weather meals we needed by the middle of the week. Since the extreme heat would make our current plantings bolt, besides harvesting we planted more dill seeds. With luck, we’ll have plenty to enjoy when our cucumber harvest starts later in the summer.

Garlic scape harvesting day arrived! The crop was great, but it was too hot to even think about pasta. They went into our refrigerator to be made into what we call “green sauce” to enjoy later on in the year. (Let me know if I should post about our green sauce!)

An early morning lettuce and greens harvest in the rain was necessary before temperatures in the mid and upper 90’s hit for several days. I also got our organic edamame planted and under protection from the hungry birds. (Birds are our allies for pest control, but sometimes they’re seed thieves or seedling bashers!)

The homemade olla’s I wrote about making in “Dealing with too much rain and too little rain in the garden” worked wonderfully! I’m so glad I put them kept the plants happy in the high heat and get water to where it was needed instead of running off or evaporating.

Our first harvest from this year’s kale, which we started inside in March, was a good one. With the need to harvest so many greens at once due to the heat, there was no room in our refrigerator to enjoy any of the kale. We immediately processed it and got it into the freezer to enjoy this winter.

We started our tomatoes in mid March and early April to extend our harvest season. The early Sun Gold plants had blossoms this week.

Speaking of blossoms, the pansies I started in February bloomed even through the heat. So many people think of them as spring plants because they are one of the first to appear in garden centers, but I’ve found that under the right conditions, they will continue to bloom into the summer.

We’re ending the week with our snow peas and sugar snap peas starting to heavily produce. Here’s hoping the high heat hasn’t shortened the season!!

So that’s our kitchen garden update for the week. How are things going in your garden? What are you picking? Post a comment!