Veg

I prefer the British slang veg over the American veggie. But then, I’m not one to shorten words much anyway. You’ll often hear me refer to telephones, automobiles, gasoline, and brassieres. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken the word fridge.  

Last year we constructed two small raised beds to grow vegetables.  They make an appearance in this summer’s first episode of manic expression.

One is dedicated to tomatoes. We got a variety of heirloom cherry tomatoes.

As well as a more conventional cherry tomato variety.

For something different we got some Polish Linguisa. They vary in shape from something like a Roma...

To their more common sausage shape. They’re an indeterminate variety and only produce a few tomatoes at a time.  We ate these just sliced with salt. Very tasty.

As backup we got a couple Early Girls and a Big Boy, but oddly they’ve been the least productive.

There still are a lot of green tomatoes.

Some pesky mammal opened up this Big Boy for dining.

It became a popular spot to get a snack.

We had to keep a sharp eye to stay ahead of the furry population. Someone just cut this green Early Girl off the vine. I found it before they started into it.

It ripened nicely on the counter.

With all these fresh tomatoes, we thought we’d need a good bit of basil.

And rosemary.

For the first time this year we tried Sorrano peppers.

They’ve done fairly well.  We read somewhere that they’d eventually turned red so we decided to try to wait for that.

I thought the habaneros were quite behind, just beginning to produce flowers.

Then, tangled with the Sorranos, I noticed a familiar atomic glow.

A habanero in the final stages of getting all lit up.

We put in a bag of onion sets but they didn’t do well at all. Now we have lots of little onions if we can find them under all the other growth.

I know this isn’t a vegetable. It is a close cousin of an onion.

Nice to be able throw fistfuls of parsley into everything.

We planted a row of Arugula and a row of Mesclun mix.  Turns out the mix was about 80% Arugula.  We now have a lot of spicy greens.

Politely spilling out of the raised bed are two volunteers - a cherry tomato and a squash.

The squash puts out a few flowers but we haven’t seen any fruit.

And a tip of the hat to the pollinators...

And the fertilizer.

I’m too much of a nerd to not want to share some technical details.

• There are lots of things to do with a tripod rather than standing on it’s legs.  It can be leaned against the side of the raised bed at variable angles and partially supported by a tomato cage. You can also just lay the camera on the ground. Right, Justin?
• I wrote a bit ago about “discovering my negatives.”  That goes double when the camera is in a place you could never get your head to see what it looks like. Very pinholey though.
• I try to avoid it, but about a quarter of these are pretty severely cropped. Can you tell which ones?

All with the Manic Expression Cube. .17mm hand-drilled pinhole 24mm from 24x24mm frame. Fujicolor 200.