Garden Update, September 10th, 14th, 17th

Post 2 of 3 today! I'd been remiss about posting pics of the garden progress.   So here are some pics I took over the last week.

Garden View, September 10th... far enough away that deer-induced carnage is not yet visible.

The Giant Russian sunflowers, September 10th, thinking about blooming:

 Well we got a few tomatoes anyhow despite woes with bad soil, weather and deer.  A few is better than none! (Sept. 10th)

Pumpkins! Picture taken Sept 10th, I think we'll have a dozen or so:

 

 Broccoli! Sept 10, we've been eating lots and drying the leaves in the dehydrator (to be the topic of a different post)

 

We'd been lucky with deer until the morning of September 8th or 9th they had been in the squash and bean area munching.  

Bean teepee Sept 10th, topiary performed by local deer.

Squash patch, climbing our "deer fence".  We've been eating a lot of zucchini... a few days ago we had stuffed zucchini, zucchini pad thai, and zucchini cake all in the same day.  I've been researching zucchini soup recipes. It is better than no fresh produce so I'm not complaining! I've also dried a lot for winter stews.

Squash patch, Sept 10th, the green sticky looking things sticking up are stems where the deer ate off the leaves.  Grrr.  Brendan constructed this ingenious deer fence out of twine, with beer can 'windchimes' hung at intervals.  It has actually been working! Up until now we didn't think the deer would walk on the silage plastic, but they obviously were.  Twine fence with beer can windchimes = successful deer scaring object.

 September 14th: Broccoli patch with majestic maturing broccoli crowns.  Sad looking, yet productive, deer-eaten bean teepee in background.

Kale, Sept 14th.  The awesome thing about kale is you can pluck their leaves and they keep growing back! We've been making and eating Kale chips like crazy in our dehydrator, thanks to the delicious inspiration from Gali's Healthy Kitchen, but more about dehydrating to come in another post.

 

 Bean teepee Sept 14th with big delicious beans.  I had a moment stopping at Sobeys the other day and seeing beans for sale for $2.99/lb.  2.99/lb seems like a lot of money! I'm now following in my father's footsteps, marching around the garden announcing the price of everything we grow as compared to the supermarket!

Sunflowers, Sept 14th, mostly bloomed with the tallest few over 7 feet tall.  I'm happy to have blooms at all seeing as I got them started so late, we'll see if I get any seeds!

 

Here are the sunflowers today! They're almost all out!!  And full of bees happy for September flowers.