The red onions have been hanging up in bundles and drying for some weeks now. Today Lee took them down and I trimmed them up. I can’t believe we really have an onion harvest this year after four years of trying and failing.

I haven’t trimmed our elephant garlic yet, but the normal garlic is all dry. I moved the last of it into a large onion bag and then weighed it. It weighs 20 pounds. Wow! I think we are set for garlic for the next year.

This has been our most successful garden to date. Crops which failed for us in the past have been thriving and past successes are bigger than ever. It’s also been the first time in four years that Lee wasn’t completely stressed out by the garden at the beginning of June. The reasons for our successful gardening season seem to be a combination of good weather, early weed control, and more experienced gardeners. We spend a little less time being puzzled by every problem, and have already started talking about the changes we will make next year to further simplify our efforts.

Mid July

Mid August

The picture below shows Lee standing by the potato rows. These are the most lush and tall potato plants we’ve ever grown. Lee is super excited that all that plant growth will translate into lots and lots of potatoes. They are ready to be harvested now.

Early July

Mid August

Last year the pollination for some of our crops was lacking. I planted Borage this year to attract more bees into the garden. The bees seem to like it–I always find them hovering about. I have been very impressed with the Borage and plan on including it in the garden next year. It is still blooming and also producing seeds, which I have started to collect.

Early July

Mid August

What seems to work even better than Borage for attracting bees is flowering broccoli. Several of our broccoli plants got away from us and turned into a huge mass of yellow flowers. The bees were in LOVE with it. I’ve never seen so many bees in one place.

Early July

We didn’t defeat the cucumber beetles, but our plants eventually just outgrew them. The one upside was that our squash and pumpkins set lots of fruit, so I think the evil leaf munchers were providing the pollination for us. (They like to congregate in the flowers.) The squash plants are literally taking over a quarter of the garden. They have spread into the adjoining potato and sunflower rows and are growing out across the grass into the orchard. It is impossible to walk between the two squash “rows” or see the label stakes. Recently I saw some black-looking squash for the first time in among the foliage and remembered that I had planted acorn squash too.

Early July

Mid August

I planted Hartman’s Giant Amaranth this year. It’s beautiful and hopefully we get a nice quantity of seed from it. I would love to plant several full beds of amaranth next year and use the seed as chicken feed.

Early August

Mid August

The official sunflower patch is quite interesting. I planted them all at the same time, so it has been fun watching how tall each variety grows and when they bloom. About half of them are still growing. The tallest variety so far, Lemon Queen, is over 9 feet high.

Mid August

The peppers seem to be doing well for an Oregon summer. We tend to have good success with hot peppers but fail at bell peppers. This year we grew smaller sweet pepper varieties instead of bell peppers, and that was a good decision.

Mid August

Lastly, I was given a free seed packet of Love In A Mist. I put the whole packet in one row (because I didn’t think any of them would sprout) and it looks like every last seed decided to germinate. I was shocked, but then I never got around to thinning them out. They somehow managed to grow anyway (but to a reduced height), and then bloom away like they didn’t care about their cramped conditions. They are supposed to self seed, so I hope they come back next year. If they do, I will thin them out so they can grow bigger.

Early August

A couple months ago we lamented the cucumber beetle army which was attacking our cucumbers, squash, beans, sun flowers and pretty much everything else. We smashed hundreds of them and even resorted to Pyrethrin once. The cucumber beetle battle lasted throughout June, but at the beginning of July the striped forces of evil began to falter. In one final assault they razed most of our green bean sprouts and then virtually disappeared. We now see only a few derelict individuals flying aimlessly through the garden, while the cucurbits sprawl with unchecked vigor.

In the resulting power vacuum, a new menace rose. Ladybugs! Ladybirds! Lady beetles! Coccinellidae! They may at first appear to be cute and harmless, but tell that to the carnage of shredded aphids left in their wake. And yet, they were everywhere: settling on the sorghum, lounging on the legumes, sunbathing on the sunflowers, and ambling on the artichoke.

Worse still, while the cucumber beetles fled in terror before humans, lady beetles go about their business with brazen disregard. Some have even been known to dangle confidently from dill plants while being menaced by cameras.

It’s the game show for people who don’t get their food from a box! For 200 points, what is this garden vegetable:

Bonus points if you know the cultivar name as well. Please answer in the form of a question for no particular reason. Some exclusions apply. Points have no cash value. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera …

Updated on 08/10/2012: The correct vegetable name was guessed in the comments within 6 hours. This is a Cylindra Beet, also called Formanova Beet. When I checked our site this morning there were four comments awaiting moderation which all had the correct answer. Wow! Some of you really know your beet cultivars!

We’ve grown beets for the last 4 years, but this is our first year growing Cylindra. Cylindra has a number of advantages which make it our new favorite beet variety. First, it’s just funny seeing those beet columns rise from the surrounding soil. Weird vegetables make hand-watering more fun. Since only the small tip of the beet is underground, it’s easy to pick. The shape makes it easy to peel and slice. Each slice has the same diameter. It’s almost immune to root maggots. Root maggots are an Oregon pest that hatches at the ground level and chews tracks down the sides of turnips, parsnips, beets, and so forth. Most importantly, the root and greens are both very tasty. We found Cylindra seed at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

Our veggie garden this year has an abundance of volunteer sunflowers. Last fall I left the sunflower stalks until the wild birds had cleaned up all the seeds. I’ve never had volunteer sunflowers before, so I guess the birds planted them for me.

Most of the sunflower plants were weeded out, but I transplanted the healthier ones around the garden. Some of the volunteer plants have been blooming since the beginning of July.

They seem to have many more branching arms than the original varieties.

Last year I posted my first sunflower picture at the end of August and they were still blooming at the end of September. Letting the sunflowers seed themselves seems to have given me a jump on enjoying the flowers.

Some of the stalks are bigger than your wrist and others have grown very tall.

Besides the wild sprouting sunflowers I also planted a whole 30′ bed of different varieties at the edge of the garden. These plants were supposed to be a trap crop for the cucumber beetles. I think I may have planted them a little late though. The first plants in this bed just now blooming.

We always talk about starting a gardening notebook, but somehow the talk never materializes onto paper. Lacking a decent notebook, we often refer to the blog for gardening dates from previous years.

Looking back on our garlic harvest for the last few years we find the following trend:

• 2009: July 15^th – Spring planting makes date unreliable
• 2010: July 12^th
• 2011: August 2^nd – Normal garlic : July 15^th – Elephant garlic

This year we harvested all our garlic on July 15^th and we were disappointed to find that about half the elephant garlic had already started to split. We obviously should have pulled it around July 1st, because as it is we will have to use many of the heads or replant them. Split heads don’t store well. Ali suggested that we try pickling some of it, which I thought was a good idea. I will have to see how much I have to work with after it dries.

The normal garlic we harvested was perfect. There were only two split heads so we dug them at the right time. Lee was hoping the garlic would be bigger but I thought they were fine. This was our best season for weed control. Next year we will try to side dress with fertilizer at the right times, so that might further improve the harvest. All in all, we are very happy with the 2012 garlic though. It is one of our favorite crops to grow as it doesn’t seem to have any pests and doesn’t require much fussing.

Preparing garlic for storage is pretty straightforward. We tie the whole plants into bundles and hang them outside to dry. They should get plenty of air movement but no direct sunlight. Lee has been talking about adding hooks under the tractor port roof so we can dry many more bundles at the same time. After the stems brown we cut off the roots and stems and peel off the dirty outer layers. After a bit more drying, I plan to store the garlic in old onion bags.

This is the first year that we have had a decent onion crop. Yay for compost and tillers! We planted red onions from onion sets this spring and harvested the crop on July 21^st. If you leave onions out too long the centers start to separate and the onions won’t store well. Of course, red onions don’t store well anyway. Preparing onions for storage is apparently very similar to preparing garlic. Presently the onion bundles are hanging indoors since the garlic is taking up all our free space outside.

When we finish peeling and trimming all the elephant garlic and red onions, there are six rows of Copra storage onions still waiting to be harvested. It’s somewhat overrun with weeds, but the heads are good sized so we are still calling it a success. If we can grow five times as many onions next year, we might be close to meeting our yearly onion needs.