Garden Roundup for June 2023

I’m still trying to figure out what to do with this blog.  One thing I figured I could do would be monthly roundups of what our farm/garden has produced.

If my tracking is correct, in June our chickens gave us 132 eggs.  Which, is far more than we can use.  Most of them we give away to family or neighbors. 

In June, I’ve continued picking leaf lettuce.  It seems like every three or four days I pick enough for three or four sandwiches.  I don’t know how much longer this first patch will continue to produce, it’s starting to get a bit ragged, but a second patch is already growing.  During June I’ve started to pick red currants, red raspberries, wild strawberries, and peas.  And just today, I picked our first black raspberries and blueberries of the season.  I don’t know if our late frost messed up the currants, or if the birds don’t have anything else to eat, but I’ve pretty much picked them clean and only have maybe a cup.  Some years I have ten times that without seeming like I picked any.  They’ll likely just get mixed in with the red raspberries – which we might get more of, there’s a couple patches out in the farm I need to check on – and some black raspberries to make some jelly.  We don’t have that many strawberries, and I’m not sure what we’ll do with them.  The black raspberries and blueberries are loaded, so we should get a lot of them.  The peas have just started producing, so we’ll probably get a bunch of them over the next month or so.

Finally, we’ll probably a week or so away from our first zucchini.  And I also just noticed today our beans are starting to bloom.  So we’ll be picking green beans before the end of July.

First harvests of the year

So the point of this blog is to show what we harvest from our garden/farm.  But as evidence that I still have a lot of bugs to work out of the system, I completely forgot that we’ve already had some harvests.

Aside from eggs – which right now we’re getting about four a day – the first garden harvest this year was back in February, when I pulled the parsnips from last year.  The way we’ve always done parsnips is to let them grow all summer, and leave them in the ground over winter and only dig them once they start to grow again next spring.  There is a reason to do this, but I don’t feel like looking it up right now.  But this year we had a warm February and they started growing again early.  So I dug them up, and we had some for dinner, gave some away to my siblings, and froze five or six bags. 

The second thing we harvested was some rhubarb three or so weeks ago.  We have two rhubarb plants we planted last year and one, for some reason, is only about half the size of the other.  My dad picked it the rhubarb, so I think he only picked from the bigger plant to let the smaller one grow some.  What was harvested then was turned into a pie, and my dad pick some more this week which was froze to be made into pie in the future.

The last thing we’ve harvested is some leaf lettuce.  I picked enough for a sandwich about a week ago, three or four sandwiches worth earlier this week, and it looks like I’ll need to pick some today. 

That’s our harvests up to the first week in June.  This month I’ll probably also start picking red raspberries and currants.  I may also get some wild strawberries, although where I usually picked them is now a corn field.  But we’ll see.