It’s been a pretty pleasant week in the garden. Some nice rain, warm-but-mild temperatures, plants growing like crazy. Have you looked at the forecast for next week yet? I think summer is planning to arrive over the weekend.

As with last week, the changes aren’t as visible on a whole garden scale. If you look close, you can see the hole in the garlic garden where we harvested the ‘Maiskij’ garlic. If it really gets as hot as it is claiming next week, there could be a big difference in plants by next Friday.

After letting the harvested garlic dry for a day, I tied the stalks into bundles and hung them from the edge of the stairs in our garden shed. It’s probably going to be a little fragrant in there as the harvest progresses.

I was checking for green tomatoes this morning (since I told you last week that there were sure to be some this week), and found this nice cluster on the ‘Arkansas Traveler’ tomato plant. the tomatoes are a little more oblong than I was expecting, so I’m definitely going to keep track of these to make sure they end up being the variety the plant claims to be. Also, do you see the aphids hanging out? I’m not going to do anything about them, since it’s going to get hot next week.

By far the winner of the “most impressive cluster of green tomatoes” contest is the ‘Taxi’ tomato plant. (Okay, so there wasn’t really a contest. But it sounded nice.) This plant has 3 nice clusters of green tomatoes. I’m not surprised, since this is an early maturing, very determinate plant. I’ll be interested to see if it produces much after this first flush.

Some of the Master Gardeners trimmed up the perennial herb garden on Tuesday. The sage was ready to be deadheaded and trimmed back, and they ended up trimming several other herbs as well. The haircut should keep everything growing nice tender shoots that are easy to cook. There was a nice pile of rosemary and tarragon sprigs, as well as some thyme, oregano, and lemon balm.

We have our first eggplant flower! This is the ‘Millionaire’ bud that I showed you last week. I think this plant could be one of my favorites, with the dark purple stems and lavender flowers.

The ‘Emerite’ pole bean in the Kids’ Snack Garden was just starting to runner on Tuesday, so I clipped it to the trellis. You can see how far it has grown in just 2 days! (This picture was taken on Thursday morning.)

Have a great weekend, and get ready for the hot next week!