I keep getting delayed on continuing our tours of the different garden beds this year. By the time I finish all of them, I’ll have to go back and start over, since the plants are growing and maturing so quickly.

Today we’ll take a look at the New & Unique Vegetables Garden. It is one of our smaller beds, so there isn’t as much in it. What it does have is pretty cool though!

I’m sure you are all sick and tired of me posting pictures of the ‘Fairy’ squash. I can’t help it! Since we don’t have Swiss Chard this year, it is the most photogenic plant in the garden at the moment. It is also a very vigorous grower and seems to be quite prolific in flowering and setting squash. The flowers are also huge, and would be great for using as stuffed or fried squash blossoms. Yum!

On the other side of the trellis is the ‘Lambkin’ melon. It is a “piel de sapo” (skin of the frog) type melon. It isn’t ripe yet, so you can see the coloration on the skin, but it doesn’t yet have raised bumps. The two melons that are set right now both have some weird flat spots on them. I am wondering if they didn’t get fully pollinated in the heat.

The Litchi Tomatoes (not a true tomato) are still flowering and growing prickles quite prolifically. They have also started setting fruit, but I haven’t seen any ripening yet.

This ‘White Egg’ eggplant has survived onslaughts of cucumber beetles and eggplant lacebugs, and still looks rather sickly. However, it does have a couple of small, white, egg-shaped eggplants on it.

The ‘Cocozelle’ zucchini isn’t setting heavily yet, and I’m not sure if it is just slow or if we have the plants too thick. (Or maybe some of each?) As you can see, it is a green striped squash.

Next to the ‘Cocozelle’ is this zucchini, called ‘Sunstripe.’ It is a yellow striped squash. This one hasn’t yet been overly productive either.

We do have another eggplant in this bed, ‘Prosperosa,’ but it isn’t yet doing much, since it got planted late. This picture is the ‘Indigo Rose’ tomato, and it was also planted late, and then got zapped with some herbicide injury. It is obviously still not recovering from that, even though it has a few flowers. Luckily, we have another plant over in the 100 gallon Smart Pot that seems to be doing very well.

That’s the “New & Unique Vegetables” garden for this installment. It will be a lot of fun once everything starts getting ripe in this garden.