More Drought and Heat Wave!

With no rain and temperatures above 100 degrees all week, it is surprising that the perennial and annual flowers are still doing well.

It is NOT surprising however, that the vegetable garden looks pretty stressed. I just can't keep it watered enough. When the plants were young, I successfully used drip jugs next to each plant but I can't use them anymore now that the summer season veggies are so big.

How are other gardeners doing in the watering department? Do you water daily, use soaker hoses, drip irrigation or some other method? Maybe you don't have the drought problem at all. I know our friends in England has had the opposite problem of late.

Anyway, what follows are some painful pictures of the stress that most of my plants are in. These will not win me any "gardener of the year" awards, that for sure.

A new problem that I am having that I don't remember from years past is that tomato branches are splitting or buckling under their own weight. I assume this is due to lack of water inside the branch. Here's one I noticed as I was watering:

Here's my daughter surveying the stress in the vegetable garden:

Not everything is doing poorly. I don't mean for this to be a depressing post so I will end it on a good note. After all of the watering was done last night (I watered again this morning), I ate a late supper consisting of a Brandywine BLT and some fresh Bread & Butter pickles!

After I ate, my daughters and I made some more pickles with cucumbers we had just picked. Here is a picture of the sliced Brandywine, along with those cucumbers:

And since I've already put too many pictures on this post and since I have begun to ramble, I will post one last proud picture of my first heirloom Brandwine tomato!

Gina from My Skinny Garden wrote a great post about tomatoes being the most photographed of all vegetables. She pondered if we have reached our quota on tomato posts. She is right that we garden bloggers are crazy about our tomato photos. They are like pictures of our children and grand children. So just like you do with kid pictures, look at the blogger's tomato pictures and politely say "Oh wow, how nice."

I just hope it rains soon so I have more tomato photos to show!

My favorite fruit from the garden!

Botanically speaking a fruit is the part of a plant that contains the seed. With this definition in mind we could call something from the garden a fruit if we eat the part with the seed. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and green beans would be examples of fruit. Lettuce, celery, radishes and carrots would then be vegetables.

These are not the definitions we use in cooking or when eating however. Luckily this whole mess was cleared up in 1893 when the United States Supreme Court declared the tomato a vegetable instead of a fruit. In that case, they wisely gave us our current definitions of fruits and vegetables. They said a vegetable is something we eat with lunch or dinner and a fruit was something sweet that was generally eaten as dessert.

So with the Supreme Court's definition in mind, the fruits we are growing this year in our garden are strawberries, watermelon and cantaloupe. We also have apple and peach trees and blueberry bushes but none of these are my favorite garden fruits.

My absolute favorite fruit from the garden, by the Supreme Court's definition, is......

Zucchini!

That's right, zucchini. I know zucchini is a squash which is a vegetable, but my dessert last night was sweet and delicious and made from zucchini.

My wife and daughters made the best zucchini bread ever! They used a fantastic Amish recipe. Maybe I can get the recipe from them to share with you in a future post.

For now I will have to tell you how to make it by explaining in great detail what they did and by showing you step by step pictures. Pay close attention now.

First they cut and grated the zucchini:

Then they mixed in some sort of ingredients and put in the zucchini. They proceeded to mix the batter up some more and put it in bread pans:

Then they put the pans in the oven at some temperature for some amount of time.

See? Its easy. If you do it exactly like I have explained it to you, you will have tasty Amish zucchini bread.

When I got home, my wife cut me a big piece and served it on one of our old fashioned Amish plates.

And this is what it looked like after I did my part:

I was happy to pitch in.

So there you have it. My favorite fruit from the garden.