Garden roundup for June

During the month of June, our chickens laid 100 eggs, 77 of which made it to the house.  As to the broken eggs, I think they’re just messing with me.  For example, I used to just record the number of good eggs and the number of broken ones.  But then I realized I should keep track of which nests the broken eggs are in, to change them more often.  For the first round, there were eggs broken in all three nests, so I changed all of them.  But for the second round, eggs were only being broken in the left and right nests.  Since everything in the middle nest was still good, I figured I’d only change the left and right ones.  So when I gathered eggs one day, I cleaned the grass clippings and shredded paper out of the left and right nests.  There wasn’t any egg leakage in the shredded paper, but I left the nests empty for a few hours to dry out just in case.  Well, when I went back to fill them in, there was a broken egg in the center nest.  And since I changed everything, broken eggs seem to alternate between the center and right nests. 

June has been a hectic month.  We discovered that it wasn’t a rabbit eating our peas and beans, but slugs.  We’ve tried several ways to deal with them, and I don’t know if they helped, or if the plants have just gotten big enough that they’re growing faster than the slugs can eat them. 

The red currants are just about done.  We have a couple containers in the freezer, but if I had the time I could easily fill a few more.  Our red raspberries are going strong, and our black raspberries and blueberries are starting to hit their stride.  I mentioned when I first picked some black raspberries, that we had one patch where they grow pretty big.  I said I should get a picture, so ….

The small one is one I picked at random from one of the other patches.  The first one I picked at random from the big patch wasn’t that much bigger, but then I saw the one in the photo.  The big ones are nice because they fill the container fast.

Something else we picked, on the last day in June, was our first tomato.

We buy a bunch of tomatoes from the nursery that are all at the ready to transplant stage.  But we also buy one or two older tomatoes that probably should have been transplanted a couple weeks earlier.  Not only was this one blooming, there were little tomatoes already on it when we finally transplanted it.  This way, we get some tomatoes earlier.

Other things, we finally got the potato patch worked up and our potatoes planted.  As well as a spot for carrots. 

As I said, June was hectic, and July will probably be even worse.