Here’s a close up of tonight’s harvest: 10 zucchini, 2 tomatoes and some magical purple beans.

I’ve been trying for years to get these sensitivity plant seeds to grow with no luck whatsoever.  Then my Mom, affectionately known as The Weed Woman, suggested I try putting the seeds in a wet paper towel in a plastic baggie and setting them in the sun for a couple days.  Needless to say, it worked like a charm and I am now the proud mother of several sensitivity plant seedlings (as evidenced below)!

It was a good thing I tried this trick with a bunch of the seeds because about half of them were duds!  This is a good technique to use on old seeds of dubious expiration date.  It’s so disheartening to plant and water and sun your seeds and have nothing pop out of the ground.  This method speeds the sprouting up and eliminates those days of heart wrenching worry.

I’ve now got a new batch of purple beans in my mini-greenhouse.  I secretly think these are magical beans – because they’re purple, the beans are a special glossy red, and the box says they grow really tall.  My suspicions were further confirmed by Weed Woman Herself, who assured me that they turn green when you cook them!  I’ll keep you posted on further magical properties as I discover them…

This is how I want my garden to look next year.  Aren’t these the most amazing rows of zinnia and iris that you’ve ever seen?

Look at the color!!

This woman plants the same thing every year and her flowers last for a ridiculously long time – she’s got blooms from May through the end of October.  *So jealous*.  I don’t know how she does it because she doesn’t even live that close to her garden – I always see her going to and from her flowers on an old orange Vespa with her harvest basket precariously balanced between her knees.

I hopelessly abandoned my garden this year after planting herbs, rhubarb and tomatoes.  The cuore di bue (ox heart) tomatoes below are about the only thing we harvested – they were really good, but most of them ripened while we were on summer vacation.  Here we prepared them with garlic, olive oil and basil and ate them with rustic bread and fresh ricotta that our mountain neighbor made.  I think always having colorful flowers would be a great incentive to pay more attention to what’s going on in the garden.

Va beh (oh well).  Better luck next year.

I started working in the garden a couple of weeks ago – turning the earth over (what’s the term for that in English? tilling by hand?), pulling weeds, removing debris and hoeing. I also built a little wall using old floor tiles from the 1800s. Today I’m going to have a bonfire to burn all the old branches and whatnot and our friend, Gianluca is coming this week to till with his tiller machine! Then, finally it will be time to plant. As you can see in the pictures below, I’ve already started some seeds inside. Mostly flowers and basil. After planting almost everything by seed last year I’ve decided it’s easier to buy the seedlings that are already a couple months old. They cost like 50 cents and save so much time.

On Sunday I decided to take out the porous hose we installed in the garden this summer.  I need to re-till the whole plot before winter sets in and the hose was only going to be in the way. I think I may have mentioned before that the garden isn’t actually on a flat piece of land, but a slope.  It’s been raining for the last couple of weeks, so the entire field was good and muddy.  Things went pretty well until I reached the steeper part of our plot and whoooooooooooosh, I totally fell flat on my face and slid down the rest of the hill. Hahaha.  (For those of you familiar with Anne of Green Gables – remember the scene where Anne & Diana chase the Jersey cow out of Rachel Lind’s potato field?  This was pretty much the same deal.)  My neighbor, who was gardening at the time got a good laugh anyways.

Explore my garden’s last harvest. Can you guess what these photos are by their thumbnail?
Click on the images to enlarge. Use arrow keys to go forward and backward. Open more than one photo at a time and move them around where ever you want!

Grissini

Decorative Squash from the garden

My biggest pumpkins. The one on the right weighed in at 25 kilos (50 pounds) the one on the left was 11 kilos (24 1/4 pounds). The yellow things that look like squash are actually zucchini that I left out in the sun for a really long time.

Me & the pumpkins

This zucchini is taller than our outdoor grill!

The last zinnia of the year

More decorative pumpkins and the last of the basil

I made a humungo wreath with a viney weed that was taking over the garden and gave it a little color with the dried out hot peppers that we didn’t use.

The harvest