The Harvest

If you have been wondering what happened to our garden patch, you must wait no more. Here are pictures of our giant plants and the fruits of our labors. The corn is huge! We harvested the first ears of corn about a week ago. I could not believe that we really grew it. Everybody was amazed at the size of the ears which had nicely filled in with the most delicious tasting sweet corn kernels. Who says you need fertilizer to grow giant corn? You really don't!

Now the squash and green beans are another story. Was it a success? Well, the final verdict is not in yet. Stan, the gentleman farmer you see in the picture below, insisted on ordering a pumpkin variety from Italy called Zucca Barucca. According to Stan's favorite Italian cookbook, Zucca Barucca makes a great filling for pumpkin raviolis made from scratch. I see more big projects in our future...

Zucca Barrucca. Zucca Barrucca. Just say it a couple of times. Sounds good, no? Like a magic spell almost. The only problem is that this pumpkin takes 101 days until it matures. Our squash is only halfway there. We may need some magic here. Will it make it before the first frost hits? It would be very sad, since we have tons of beautiful squashes on the plants.

I don't even want to think about the beans. The beans were probably the least successful of our trio of plants. We definitely planted them too late. They had trouble growing since they were crowded out by the huge squash leaves that hogged all the sunlight. Hmm, did anyone notice that it said on the package to plant the squash 18 inches apart? Nope, we missed that, trying to follow the Three Sister Garden instructions, which called for planting the squash plants closer. I suppose the Indians didn't grow fancy schmancy varieties from Italy. After all it's a New World food, and what do Italians know about squash? Maybe next year we will figure it out.