Monday, July 9, 2012

Corn, Eggplant, Strawberry, and More


   The first crop of corn's ears are maturing.  Here's a picture from today.  This ear is measuring about 8 inches long.  I have the second crop starting to flower and attracting honey bees once again.


   The Summer Veggies SFG Box is starting to look like it's being overtaken by the giant broccoli.   Also growing rather tall is the eggplant.


   The eggplant has started producing beautiful fruits.  This is the Asian-type eggplant "Ichiban", which is my favorite with slender cylindrical fruits and mild flavor.  Reminds me of the eggplant I grew up with in Japan.  In summer, we ate eggplant in one dish or another every day.


   Close to the Summer Veggies Box, I have three pots of flowering kale plants I started in mid May from seeds I bought on eBay.  These are called Pink Kamome hybrid.  Once mature, the center leaves will be pretty pink color and look like a giant rose (at least, in the pictures I have seen).  I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  For some reason, the one I transplanted into the SFG box (in the Summer Veggies Box) is way slower in growth.  Maybe the potted plants get more sun and also the soil warms up more?


   The Strawberries SFG Box has been steadily (although not in large amount) producing.  Not too bad for the first year I suppose.  I remember growing strawberries years ago in Japan and they really took off the second year.  We had berries going bad right on the vine.  They produced so much and a family of four couldn't keep up the consumption.


   My tallest sunflower at the moment is at 3.5 feet this morning.  I have many different varieties planted in a strip in the backyard.  This one pictured here is not the tallest variety, so I guess it can be expected that it's already forming buds at this height.  They only started to take off, growing couple of inches every day, in the last week or so, after I started drip irrigation in the area since the daily high has been consistently in triple digits and things were drying out so fast.

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