I picked four small Early Girl Tomatoes today. That’s about 73 days to maturity instead of the promised 53 days. The cold weather in June probably didn’t help. The rest of the tomatoes are still green, so it will be another August harvest.

The hatch brought about by the flooding from several weeks ago has emerged, and it is impossible to walk into the garden even in bright sunlight. If I want to harvest greens, I put on a hooded sweatshirt and long pants and pull the strings tight around my face, and then pick very fast. This is with temperature in the mid 80’s. The only other option is to drench myself in DEET, but that seems hardly worth it for 5 minutes of harvesting.  Any work in the garden for the next week or so is out of the question.

The only bright spot is that the Kale, Collards and Swiss Chard are doing very well, so we are eating a lot of sauteed greens which we are both starting to love. The pepper plants seem puny, but the Jalapenos, and both hot and sweet banana peppers are bearing well. The Jalapenos are totally un-hot however, maybe due to all the rain.

I picked the last of the kohlrabi today and made a great salad for our Friday night group. The kohlrabi was just starting to get woody, so it appears that the harvest season will be short.

The broccoli failed, it was starting to bolt. Most of the heads were stunted and rotten as a large volume of flower remains from the Honey Locust fell on the heads and held water during the weeks of rain and damaged the heads. I got one good bunch which went into the salad.