12:56 PM  [28 Jul 2008 | Monday]

Off to Deliver Vegetables to the Catholic Worker

We harvested vegetables this morning and made our first delivery to the Catholic Worker on 1^st St. in New York City. This is one of our favorite things to do with our surplus veggies. We brought pole beans, two cabbages, beets, cucumbers and of course summer squash green and yellow. They accepted them with open arms and we are in the enviable position of not watching our vegetables rot or get tremendously huge. That's still going to happen, it's unavoidable. Our neighbor's garden is on a tear and they had to leave for a week.  There's no telling what their squash will look like when they return. We have carte blanche to harvest their blueberries from their unbelievable stand of blueberry bushes. I've never seen so many blueberries in one person's yard and they seem to be immune from the Japanese beetles and black bear. Why the black bear don't attack these bushes is anyone's guess. It's the same stroke of good luck that has kept the deer out of our garden for these past 17 years.

fficeffice" />>>

>>

Someone has been nibbling our produce and I saw the culprit scurrying out of the garden the other morning. It was a rabbit. We rarely see rabbits where we are and always assumed they were getting gobbled up by the local fox population but I saw the varmint exiting our produce hell bent for leather. There is another suspect as well, we have a ground hog that has taken up residence in humble our guest house. I should say under the guest house. I have not run into this creature in a while though. The ground hog managed to eat beautiful red native bee balm that our neighbor gave us. No animal has ever eating the bee balm in our yard but I guess since it was so close to the entrance to its house, it figured what the heck. It also ate the sunflowers but did not touch the cosmos or the hollyhocks. Sadly the hollyhocks and grape vines are being mercilessly attacked by the Japanese beetles. This year I'm not using the Japanese beetle traps because I thought they were attracting more to the area, so I'm daily out there with a small bucket of soapy water and positioning it so they drop in. The beetle traps are a problem. Last year we were called out of town unexpectedly for two weeks in August and when we got back a bear had broken into the garden and attacked the Japanese beetle trap mistaking it I assume for a bag of garbage. If you've never used one of these traps you've got to keep in mind that at the height of the season they will fill up in two to three days and if you don't dispose of them they will stink to high heaven.

The garden is going great guns right now. Tons of veggies for the picking. No need to visit the grocery store except to satisfy my meat eating ways.

We also had five inches of rain last Wednesday, no flooding in the root cellar and on the July 26 we experienced an incredible thunderstorm that crashed all through the night knocking out the electricity for about three hours. Very hot weather in the later part of July. >>