July 2nd harvest

 Today I picked out first green beans.

It wasn't worth canning so few, so we froze them.  We'll see how many more I get in a few days.  And we'll either can just plan beans, or we were cleaning out the freezer a week or so ago and found some peas from last year.  We also have some bought carrots, so we might just make some soup mix.

I also picked some blueberries.

These are the first blueberries picked.  I picked one the other day, and I guess my dad and sister have also picked a few the last few days.  But all of those were eaten immediately, whereas these ones will either end up in muffins, or will be frozen to eventually end up in muffins, or pie, or whatever.

Garden roundup for June

During June, I picked our first leaf lettuce.  I was able to pick twice and got enough for, half-a-dozen sandwiches or so.  I would have gotten more, but the slugs just pretty much ate everything.  I have more lettuce growing, so hopefully the slugs won’t notice it.  We also picked some green onions, and harvested some parsley.  I also picked the first of the red currants.

Some not great news is our peas and kidney beans.  We have some, but only a fraction of what I planted.  For the beans, there’s a six-foot section that has beans as normal, and then there’s six feet gaps between the other plants.  And it’s almost the same for the peas.  It has been a wet spring, so I guess a lot of the seeds just rotted, but it’s odd that the six-foot section with beans and peas also seems to be the wettest area of the garden.  But they are blooming.  They’re only about four inches tall, but they’re blooming.  So I don’t know how much we’ll be able to get from what did come up.

Other not great news is my continuing difficulty with zucchini, watermelon, cucumbers, and cantaloupe.  Everything I’ve planted has either been old seeds that didn’t come up, the seeds were eaten by something, or rotted, or they did germinate but were immediately eaten by slugs.  None of these things I’ve planted in the garden has come up.  I did plant some of the newer zucchini seeds in pots, and the plan is to plant them once they are big enough to survive a slug or two.  The downside is that normally I plant one or two seeds indoors so that they are ready to go out once it warms up.  I then direct sow some seeds to try to spread the zucchini out some.  But now I have four plants that will be producing all at the same time.  I also planted a couple cucumbers in pots.  But unlike the zucchini, only half the seeds came up.  Hopefully, I can get them in the garden in the not-too-distant future.  As to watermelon and cantaloupe, I think I’m just giving up this year.  If we want any, we’ll just have to buy some.

Things coming up.  I’m typing this up on July 1st, which is when I picked the first blueberry.  I was watching our chickens – they spend most of the day in a little caged in area, but I’ve been letting them out to start roaming for an hour or so – and they were near the blueberry patch and I just happened to see a ripe one.  Well, it wasn’t fully fully ripe, but close enough.  So in the coming weeks we’ll be picking more of them.  Something else I’ll be picking will be the green beans.  It will either be the second or third I pick the first ones.  I’m not sure how well that harvest will go.  They’re in on of my raised beds, but I filled them on the cheap and apparently didn’t pack the soil in well enough, because after I planted it sank, way more than I expected.  And while I thought I planted them far enough apart, they are pretty close, which means a lot of the blooms are down out of the light and air.  I don’t know if they self-pollinate, or if the bees and whatnot will be able to find all of them.  We’ll just have to see how it goes.

First currant harvest

 

There were more to pick, but it was so hot they'll have to wait.

Garden roundup for May

During May, the only thing we harvested was some rhubarb.  We picked it three times over the month.  Most of what we picked ended up in a couple batches of rhubarb bread, but my mom also froze a couple bags. 

In May, I also planted: carrots, corn, peas, kidney beans, and some potatoes.  I had started some seeds indoors, but the only thing that came up was a cantaloupe.  I planted it, but I don’t know if a slug got it or what.  None of the other cantaloupe, watermelon, zucchini, or cucumbers came up.  Some of these are old seeds, but the other stuff shouldn’t be.  One possibility, is that it has been a cold, wet spring, but it has finally warmed up.  I’ll check a few days after this is posted, and if nothing else I’ll plant a bunch more.  Of course, I’ve already planted seven or eight zucchini seeds, and if I plant seven or eight more, they’ll all come up and we’ll be drowned in zucchini even more than we usually are.  We also bought some tomato plants, as well as some peppers and broccoli, which I’ve also planted.  Besides the zucchini and stuff, all that I have left is some more potatoes.  I’ve just had too many things going on to plant them.  But there should be a few good days next week I can finish up planting everything.

The one problem I have so far – other than stuff not coming up – is the slugs chewing up my green beans.  We set out some beer traps last year, and we had some leftover beer, but it rained like every other day.  We used some extra plastic tubs you get sandwich meat in, and just the other day I realized they come with lids.  So I’ve cut some holes on the sides for the slugs to get in to the beer that won’t be watered down now.

I guess the only other news is our chickens are growing.  Which is great, except we still have to get the coop fixed up, and they’ve almost outgrown what we have them in.  But, as I’m posting this, we’ve finally gotten around to fix it up.  There were unexpected things with the coop, as well as some personal drama that held things up.  But the roundup for June should have news about the coop, as well as more harvests.  I did pick some leaf lettuce the other day, but it ended up on some cheeseburgers before I thought to take a photo of it.  Also, our red currants are starting to turn, so I might be picking them in a few weeks.  Hopefully, there will be other good news.

Garden roundup for April

Here’s a list of what I got planted in April.

Last year, my mom got a couple parsley plants figuring that my siblings would take a couple of them.  But nobody wanted any.  So there were three plants put in a pot that we picked off over the summer.  In the fall, the pot was brought inside and the plants … slowly became half-dead.  But once it warmed up, I planted them outside and they seem okay.

We had a really good onion harvest last year.  We still have a dozen or so onions to use.  But there were three that started growing, so I’ve planted them.  I’ve also planted two dozen or so new onion sets.  All seem to be growing well.

I’ve also planted green beans that are doing well, and beets which – I think – have just come up.  I also have a little patch of leaf lettuce that have only been up a few days.  The only other food thing I planted in April were parsnips, but they take a long time to come up.

The non-food things I’ve planted are sunflowers – which we just grow to feed birds over the winter – and other flowers.  The sunflower just came up, and the other flowers may have come up, I’m not sure what they look like.   

In March I planted some potatoes, but they haven’t come up yet.  One I think was eaten by a mole or something.  I dug down and didn’t find anything.  I started digging in another, and I found the potato and it was just starting to grow, so I reburied it.  It did freeze a couple times after I planted them, but I figured they would pop out as soon as it got warm.  Hopefully in another week or so they’ll finally sprout, if they haven’t been eaten yet.

All of this is in my raised beds or other beds.  I have one more raised bed that’s almost full, which I’ll plant with carrots.  I haven’t gotten the regular garden worked up yet.  Last fall, I was busy with the raised beds and didn’t get around to cleaning out the garden – all the cages and whatnot – but I did get around to doing that in April.  Now I just need it to not rain for a couple days so I can get it worked up and plant peas, kidney beans, potatoes, and everything else.

I planted some zucchini, cucumber, cantaloupe, and watermelon seeds inside.  The only one up so far is the cantaloupe.  The others were pretty old seeds, so I don’t know if they’ll grow or not.  We’ll have to see.

Garden roundup for March

I usually start these roundups by saying how many eggs our hens produced.  Well, they quit laying towards the end of last year.  Between their age and the cold, it wasn’t too surprising.  Well, about the middle of January we got an egg.  And then about every two or three days we’d get another one.  Given that egg prices were going insane, it was nice to have enough eggs for the occasional cake or whatever.  Then one morning I went out and found that five of our six chickens were dead.  Something had gotten in and killed them.  And it came back a few days later and got our last chicken.  About a week later we did manage to trap the likely culprit: 

So we don’t have any chickens right now.  We need to get some supplies, and then we can hopefully get a crew together to board up the holes and do some other, low priority but needed things in the coop.  Once that’s done, we’ll get some chicks and hopefully in a few months get back in the egg business. 

Other than the five or six eggs we managed to get, the only other harvest these last few months were the parsnips.  For some reason, we didn’t have that many germinate last year, but we got enough for four meals.  One with fresh parsnips, and the other three in the freezer.

The only thing planted so far this year have been some potatoes.  I’m doing a little experiment where I planted seven smallish potatoes and we’ll see how many I get in return with minimum work.  I’ve planted potatoes at the end of fall to have them come up as soon as it warms in the spring, but I didn’t get around to it last year.  It’s still freezing a few nights a week, but it should be a few weeks before they start growing, so hopefully it will be warm enough by then.

The only other garden stuff I’ve been working on are my raised beds.  I have three put together – there’s still one more I need to put together – and two of them are “filled.” I would love to have them fully full, but I’m trying to fill them on the cheap.  I put logs and sticks in the bottoms, but I’m filling them with regular dirt.  I’m screening the dirt to get the big rocks out, but it is a slow process.  I started last fall, but I stopped once the snow came.  And, of course, it seems every other day it rains, which gums up the works.  My plan/hope is that while I’m using just plan dirt, I’m also adding in a bunch of organic stuff, from leaves and what I cleaned out of the coop to banana peels and tea bags that normally would have gone into the compost.  Hopefully, as this breaks down it will turn my dirt into okay soil.  And over the years as I add in compost and other stuff, the soil quality will only improve.  That’s the plan.  We’ll have to see how it works out.

First harvest of the year!

 

Parsnips.

For some reason, we didn’t get that many parsnips growing last year.  I don’t know if it was bad seeds, too dry, slugs, whatever, but we only got about a dozen parsnips.  A couple of them are fair sized.  Once cleaned up they should be enough for two, maybe three meals.