Picked my first harvest this week! 5 cucumbers and a nice variegated zucchini!
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Yay for harvest!
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Started planting late (just after Memorial Day) so have only harvested herbs (basil, parsley, tarragon, dill, mint, chives, cilantro, and scallions), lettuces, and Swiss chard, which is one of my favorite veggies (I sauté it with onions, potatoes, and garlic.) My only other garden plants are hot peppers and tomatoes–all of which are doing great–but not yet ready for harvesting.
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And the tomato stands alone! 
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Just came home after being away for a week and had a nice harvest:
Now I just need to get my tomatoes to ripen!
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Ok CC gardeners, tell me what I did wrong picking this fennel and also share with me how to use it! I only planted it because my community garden had extra plants and I had some room for it.
I was at the garden without my phone when I picked it so couldn’t look up how to pick it. So I just pulled it roots and all. I think that was a mistake! I think I was supposed to to CUT it at the base??? I have another one ready to pick so I want to treat that one right!
Any easy recipes, I’d appreciate. Raw or cooked.
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No picture but just had the first tomato from our garden and it was perfect! I made a copycat Panera veggie sandwich - sourdough bread slathered with hummus, sliced tomatoes and thinly sliced cucumber, also from our garden, red onion, feta cheese and lettuce (thoroughly washed romaine!). So yummy!
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Fennel is great in salads! Arugula, finely shaved fennel bulb, feta cheese, some of your favorite nuts, and a drizzle of balsamic dressing!
Sorry. Can’t help with the harvesting question!
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We have been eating our homegrown cucumbers for a while now. Just ate the zucchini. I sliced it into medallions, lightly floured them with salt and pepper-spiked flour, and pan fried. Served as a side to a grilled fillet mignon.
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If anyone wants any zucchini recipes, one of my favorite foodies/cookbook authors from Instagram posted this substack article last week. I love the butter zucchini pasta, and last fall I made the summer squash pizza for friends while on a beach trip and it was a big hit (even among people who don’t like zucchini much).
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Here is a photo of my tomatoes from the last couple of days: They were slow coming in, because I was late starting them from seed this year; but except for the cherry tomatoes (Tropical Sunset) which began to ripen about 10 days ago, the slicers are now all ripening at about the same time. The tomato varieties on my kitchen window sill are variously Brandywine, Tidwell German, Black Krim, Beverly, and Big New Dwarf; with more of these varieties ready to pick in another day or two. I have one or two other varieties that are slowly ripening on the vine, and I should be harvesting them in another week or two.
I will slice (or give away) the ones that are well-formed, and the rest I plan to chop up and use in a panzanella that I make with cucumbers from my garden and sourdough bread that I bake.
The garlic (in the plastic container) came out of the ground about 3 weeks ago.
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We have our first ripe tomato! 
it is a Kahuku Golden from my saved seeds. 
Early Girl has a fruit that is about to start ripening… I’m disappointed that Siberia which was supposed to be a very early tomato is not doing much.
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I read a couple places recently suggestions to pick tomatoes before fully ripe and to let them finish ripening off the vine/inside. Part of that reasoning is so critters who like juicy 
don’t get to them first but also to avoid too ripe fruit.
Thoughts??
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Makes sense! Wood rats ate some of mine last year.
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I have brought a couple of my tomatoes in early to let them ripen on the windowsill because we have had a lot of rain here in East Tennessee recently, with some of my tomatoes splitting and thereby allowing ants and other undesirable creatures to get inside the tomatoes.
Mostly I can judge the ripeness of my pink and red slicing tomatoes, although with darker tomatoes (black, brown, and purple) I can frustratingly be off in my estimates, even after all these years of growing them.
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it works to get tomatoes off the vine while not fully ripe. We have so many rodents that my husband has now resorted to saving all the clamshells from berries and other fruits/vegs and snapping them over any fruit to protect them. (small drawstring bags could work too, but seem to come off easier). One year we had literally 100s of tomatoes ruined with single bites taken out of them. Honestly, did not mind “sharing” the harvest with critters that live in the wild but to have so many ruined with single bites (why not eat the entire thing??) was just frustrating. At the end of the season (late fall here in CA) when our wet weather starts we still might have green hard tomatoes but these can be taken off and ripened successfully over a couple weeks to avoid mildew and mold.
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I have apple trees, same thing. I’ve decided that squirrels are the dumbest animals on the planet. They take a bite, “shoot, not ready”. Come back another day for apples? Nope, somehow they expect one of the next 5 they take a bite out will be just ready.
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I think that I might have smarter squirrels in my area. They eat the entire apple, or sometimes the entire crop of apples. Pears? Same thing.
Where I live without cover blueberries do not fully ripen. Instead they just evaporate from the bushes into thin air sometime prior to their turning blue. However, if I cover the berries with sufficiently impenetrable barriers, then they turn blue and ripen.
All of this reminds me that it is time to put polyester mesh bags over my tomatoes.
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