In Our Maine Garden, Week 7 … or the Tomatoes Cometh

After last year’s disappointing tomato season, we worried about trying to grow them again. Fortunately, the worry was for naught, as you’ll see in the seventh installment of In Our Maine Garden.

Three tomato plants. That’s all we planted this year. Last year’s tomatoes were so sad, I didn’t have the heart to devote any more space to tomato growing.

As it turns out, three can produce a lot.

Here’s our latest harvest — well, part of it. We’ve been back and harvested more green beans and tomatoes since then. It’s been super exciting.

What wasn’t exciting was having half our carrots ripped out by vandals. Our community garden space has dealt with vegetable theft year after year. Last year, we had cabbages stolen. This year, it was the partially ripened carrots that the kids were so looking forward to.

Whenever this happens, I say “I hope they really needed them to eat.”

But this time, that clearly wasn’t the case. We found the discarded carrots tossed onto a different garden bed. Ugh.

The good news? We still have carrots to harvest and the kids have been pulling them each time we visit.

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And then washing them off on the spot and eating them. Same goes for the fresh beets too.

It’s kind of awesome to see my kids harvest something they helped grow and immediately eat it. Not only is it as fresh as you can get, but it’s also an amazing cycle they’ve participated in – one that has become too removed from the modern experience, I think.

As for our garden, it’s showing the impacts of an intensely dry summer in the plants. But we’ve been combatting it with regular watering. Still, there’s more we can do – like removing the dead bits from the plants.

We’re also planning to plant another row of lettuce to see how it does. This is the first season we’ve done second plantings. So far, the beets and carrots seem to be slowly chugging along.

How’s your garden growing?