Your fruits, vegetables and herbs sound wonderful! Yes, the summer harvest is delightful. Fresh fruits and veggies are so delicious.

My roses and flowers are a mess due to high heat and heavy rains, so don't feel lonely, Camp. I am envious of your vegetables and berries. It is almost impossible to have a vegetable garden in Florida this time of year as the bugs devour everything.

Do you eat all of the cherries fresh or preserve some of them? They won't grow here.

Hi Camp: I love to read about your garden. It makes me want to eat more veges ... the stuff you grow sounds very yummy.

I layered cocoa mulch NPK 3-1-4 into the soil a few months before I planted my tomatoes. The best tasting tomatoes in 12 years, thanks to the potassium, calcium, and trace elements in cocoa mulch. My cherry tomatoes are super-crunchy, juicy, and sweet this year.

I found cocoa fines as one of the ingredients listed in Epsoma RoseTone.

Hi Camp...glad to hear about your gardening this season. I have a question for you. This spring my Husband and I took a grafting class. The teacher recommended that we grow Mirabelles. I believe our climates are similar and I notice you have them. Anyhoo...what are they? Tasty? growing tips? Thanks.
By the way, the dahlia's have been blooming for the last two weeks as have the gladiolas early for my garden. They have been hiding my messy mildewie stuff.
Take care
Jeannie

Thanks for a good read, Campanula. Sounds yummy.

For the last few years when japanese beetles have been scarce, July and August are fine for roses in my garden. It doesn't get too hot here, and water is plentiful from the pipes if not from rain, but, with 16 inches in July, I haven't had to water at all this summer. Some of my roses are in full flush, while others just finished.

I used to devote half my small garden to vegetables until the groundhog population exploded. They ate everything but the onions and the corn, and the coons ate the corn. I have one paltry tomato plant in a pot on the deck (not ripe yet).

I'm glad to hear you grow sweetcorn. Long ago, on my first trip to the UK, I was conversing with a ladylike person as our train rolled through fields of maize grown as livestock food. She said she had heard that, in America, humans actually ate the stuff. She had tried bread made from cornmeal once, but it wasn't very nice.

And you have trouble buying starchy potatoes? That's odd. In the US, it can be hard to find the waxy kind.

Hi Jeannie - we grow the common old hedging plum, prunus cerasifera and also the French variety which is very similar but actually a smaller version of the ordinary european domestic plum (P.domestica subsp. syriaca). I think the thinner leaved japanese plum is more commonly grown in the US (P.salcifolia or beach plum) and we will be having a go at these too. Then there are the damsons, bullaces, gages which all used to be eaten either cooked or preserved as various jams, jellies and cheeses.
The prunus family are brilliant in so many ways - great blossom, fantastic timber (Reuben has a wood-turning and carving interest), delicious fruits, great for wildlife, good colour in autumn - what's not to like.

Anyhow, mirabelles - these are much smaller than normal plums and can be eaten off the tree (they are sweetly refreshing), easy to train (they respond really well to fan-training or can be kept low as hedging) and have none of the issues associated with cultivated plums such as leaf curling aphid, rust, silverleaf. Gloire de Nancy is a good variety which has been around for ages. I think they are often used to make various liquers such as kirsch and are lovely, bottled in brandy.
Have fun with your grafting classes (try and make a 'family tree' - my horticultural lecturer grew one with over a dozen different apples, from doing cleft grafts on a fairly large stock).
Let us know how you get on.

Michael, coming from Irish stock, the potato is close to my heart (and stomach) and has been a staple carbohydrate on these shores for over 300 years.....and yet, for the past decade, it is impossible to buy a potato which can be made into crispy chips. Yep, we grow many varieties, both floury and waxy so why this should be an issue, I honestly don't know. I suspect the supermarket (and public) fetish for clean spuds is behind this travesty because the days of buying a brown paper sack of unwashed potatoes seems like a distant dream. Varieties such as King Edward, Maris Piper etc, have always been grown (and still are) yet they are either kept in cold stores or somehow kept for mass consumption throughout the year and now make for miserable soggy, tasteless chips. Why? Are we all so used to microwave, reconstituted 'fries'? I couldn't say but here, digging the first Kestrel second earlies has something of a treasure hunt about it. Kestrels are lovely potatoes, often seen on the show bench, but never in the shops (yields are not massive) but the taste is like no other - a straight down trip to childhood, where we all ate plain boiled 'tatties' with a knob of butter.....or sauteed them, or made layer bakes, or potato cakes....but best of all, chips. And then, to compound the nutritional sin, we often doubled our carbs by filling non-nutritious soft white bread with as many chips as we could hold (doused with salt and vinegar obvs) and dipped the fatty but delicious treat in ketchup (and those of us who had been 'on the continent' might even add mayo).

Of course, growing veg is a battle from start to finish - my allotment is an obstacle course of old timber, various netting, fleeces, mesh, wires, strings and other critter deterrents (the hateful pigeons are my bete noir) and, if left alone, we would have nothing - certainly not a single fruit (but the blackbirds would be fat) or green leaf to be seen. As for sweetcorn - a short-lived but delicious treat (although the much lauded 3 sisters method is a bit of a joke) - we tend to grow a shorter variety and eat the fresh ears rather than tall maize ground for cornmeal. Also, I never bother with ridiculous crops (for the UK) such as okra (vile anyway), sweet potatoes, tomatillos, goji berries, or bitter oriental greens, nor do I crave mangoes, pineapples and avocados (when we grow the best apples, plums and cherries in the world).....but I have fought a bitter (losing) battle against the horrible peach leaf curl and do without peaches, nectarines or apricots.....but my son and I are grafting vines next year and planting mulberries (although I probably won't be around to eat them, my grand-daughter might). And then there are almonds, filberts, walnuts...........

I didn't make myself clear enough in the anecdote about maize--this Englishwoman ca. 1962 was totally unfamiliar with the idea of sweet corn and thought field corn was the only kind there was.

My mouth is watering and I envy the end products, until I read about all the work involved, and I then have a pizza "improved" by taking off most of the sausage and salami and covering the pizza with chopped Anaheim chilies and Mexican green onions (they're much larger and rounder) which someone else has grown. All the fruit I'd love to have, since what you buy in stores here in mostly insipid and very expensive nowadays. The oranges are wonderful though since I steal them off trees that are never picked and all that wonderful fruit goes to waste. These are seedless and the flavor is sublime.

Ingrid

Thank goodness, for that last bit, Campanula, about your marauders -- misery loves company and, for a moment there, I thought somehow you had none and got your wonderful haul of produce without having to fight for it "tooth and nail" so to speak. Here it's the blasted squirrels and their partners in crime: crows, jays, and mockingbirds. All of them absolutely love grapes, figs, apricots, and plums; the mocking bird loves the currants. What astounds me, however, is that none so far (knock-on-wood), bother the blackberries -- why, I don't know. Putting on bird netting is total aggravation and taking it off is even worse, but it's either that or "donate" a significant part of these crops to so-called "wild"-life. Starlings steal most of my mother's figs every year. Nobody bothers the oranges, lemons, or pomegranates, at least

Your garden's production sounds very impressive, in any case. The plum I've got is like a golden gage though I have no idea what it is -- was here when we moved in, probably a seedling. The tree, however, is absolutely trouble- and disease-free and trained as a quasi-espalier against a fence, clouds of white flowers in spring. Makes a good jelly, too.

I really enjoyed your post Camp. I noticed that you started by talking about how awful things were but It all turned out sounding fantastic. Isn't this the way of gardens and life in general? Every single thing can't be perfect every single moment and we'd never want it to. Having one's own fruits and vegetables is such a blessing. I can't wait til Michael and i go out to the vegetable garden this evening to pick our dinner.

It all sounds wonderful, Camp, but I imagine you are working very hard getting all that bounty canned.

I was recently in Germany, and they may challenge the UK for best cherries. I couldn't eat them without ruining my clothes with juice. When I got home, I eagerly bought some from a local store (Trader Joe's) and realized they had no flavor and very little juice - nothing like the cherries I'd been devouring in Germany.

I remembered German strawberries as especially good, too, but they weren't as good as the California ones that I buy at the Farmer's Markets. We have Southeast Asian family who grow them and bring them, freshly picked. They smell like strawberries should, and taste just as good. They are much better than grocery store berries.

I'm only growing tomatoes and herbs this year. The tomato tidal wave is rolling in, and I need to get to work making salsa and sauce in addition to eating them morning, noon and night.

We get a nice August flush from our Tea, China and Noisette roses, and it's starting already. But you are right - the tucker reigns supreme right now!

(Am I the only American who thought that "tucker" began with an "f" when I first read it in Camp's heading?)
Anita

i took a bunch of photos of the flowers today, but will probably not get time to post until I deal with some of the gardens bounty...just what to do with the bumper crop of pears. And the tomatoes plants are loaded with softball sized tomatoes. And then there are the passion fruit, tomatillos, peppers, peaches and way too many cucumbers!

we had a little break in the weather and the roses started making some really wonderful flowers. I think the heat will be coming on later. Everything looks good but I do miss my veggies which I didn't plant because I was going away in July and they would all die with no care. I got some early peaches and plums before I left and some strawberries but nothing now until tangerines ripen in december. There are a few grapes but my vine is still young and possums raided it before I got home again. I am planning to plant some snap peas and carrots in the fall. I do miss tomatoes. The pomegranite out front on the walk is loaded and kids come up and ask if they can have fruit when its ripe.

This time of year is why I don't just grow roses. They're not at all at their best right now. Lots of spots, leafless parts and few blooms to speak of. They'll perk up come fall. But over time I've collected lots of perennials that bloom now. My dahlias look fabulous. The hibiscus are all in bloom. I have a giant array of sunflowers opening. Balloon and bell flowers in bloom. Spikes of glads opening up. The butterfly bush is covered in purple spikes AND butterflies! Even the columbine are giving me a second bloom. It's taken a while to find things that would bloom through out the season but I'm pleased with the results now.