My tomatoes this year leave a lot to be desired when I compare my summer luck to last year. Of course, the situation is completely different. For one, I planted extremely invasive cosmos alongside my tomato plants, which basically shaded and blocked out a good deal of sun for my Big Boys. I don’t really know what I was thinking. I’m pretty sure I was thinking to plant marigolds alongside the tomatoes, so what might have happened is the kids were helping.
The good news is that I like cosmos, too.
Me and invasive plants seem to have a good thing going, or at least we are reliably ignorant co-conspirators.
I’ve been more interested in growing a bigger variety of vegetables this year anyway. I’m always happily shocked at how well everything is doing, and how lucky we are to be getting winter squash at the beginning of August. It feels so strange!
We are very French and turn every squash into soup first off, almost before eating it in casseroles or stuffed or sautéed. I had a friend in Durango who fed me soup and I was amazed to find it was zucchini. No one in my life prior had ever made zucchini soup.
But if you sauté onions in butter and add your squash, salt, pepper and some chicken stock, you can purée it into the most delicious soup. (A little cream won’t hurt.)
So we’ve had summer squash soup and butternut squash soup on even the hottest days. Maybe we’ve been partial to this method this summer since we’ve been dragging the sore throat sick bug out for weeks. The Instant Pot is a whiz at making it simple and not heating up the whole house.
I started pretty much all but a couple tomato plants by direct-seeding them. Of the plants I began inside in March, I bet only two or three have made themselves at home in my garden, one being a cabbage and the other a kale. Even my tomatoes have done better direct-sown in June. Isn’t that something? I’m not going to wear myself out next spring.
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