Garden - Week 20, July 29

We put up a fence! The deer have been getting progressively worse in Southampton and have started really attacking our garden. It's so sad to see plants just chomped off and missing little baby tomatoes. The whole process took about an hour, if even. I really hope it works! There are still some more steps - like pulling up the grass inside and replacing it with gravel or mulch or something. Any suggestions? Is anything weed resistant?

It's actually super low profile. It was hard for me to get a picture where you can really see it. We're thinking of tying some bring orange ribbon or something to parts of it so people (and animals) don't walk right into it.

Vegetable Garden Week 19

Although the deer have been chewing on some parts of my garden (the green grapes got crushed and one of the Better Boy plants got chewed on a fair amount), there were some amazing tomatoes!


This was the first of the yellow brandywine. Look how pretty and orange it is! I should have held it in the picture to show scale - it was huge and probably weighed almost 2 pounds.


Look how gorgeous the slices look - so meaty! We made the most amazing BLTs with these. Crispy bacon, good baby lettuces, and a thick slice of tomato that took up the whole width of the sandwich. It was sweet and tart and juicy. I could have eaten 5 of them.


Here are some other goodies from the garden. Some amazingly pungent basil, a delicious red tomato, and some zucchini blossoms just begging to be fried.


Here is the better boy tomato all sliced up. We ate it with some heirlooms and beef steaks from the farm stand and we were happy to know that the homegrown tomato definitely tastes better and is worth all the work! (The farmstand tomatoes were good too, just not quite as sweet or flavorful.)

Vegetable Garden - Part One

I had a little back porch vegetable garden last year with a few tomato plants etc in pots and have since been planning my real vegetable garden. Summer tomatoes are so amazing and juicy and red and having them fresh from your yard is such a treat. My tomato plants did pretty well on the back porch, so I'm hoping they do even better with more room to grow. I'm also planning on planting some zucchini, eggplant, peas, swiss chard, hot peppers, and strawberries, along with some herbs. It was a really fun activity - and luckily this early April Saturday was sunny and warm. Jamie was an amazing help, very handy and strong - the bags of top soil and the beams were super heavy.