Garden roundup for July

During July, our chickens laid 91 eggs, of which 70 made it to the house.  I wish I could figure out why so many are breaking. 

Anyway, for the June update I said that June was hectic, but July has been … hecticier?  There were several first harvests I meant to post a blog for, but never got around to.  For example, in July we picked the first: peas, green beans, potatoes, green pepper, and onions. 

The slugs really did a number on our pea plants, so there aren’t that many plants, but some of them are producing pretty well.  So far, I think the only thing we’ve done with the peas is use them to fill out some jars of green beans we’ve canned.

This was about half of our first harvest of green beans.  And while the slugs did some damage and the weeds have taken over a bit, the green beans are doing really good this year.  We’ve already canned enough for our normal yearly use, and they’re still coming.  Now we’re basically just letting them go for shell beans.

We have some tractor tires we grow onions or carrots in, but we also have a few car tires filled up with dirt.  These I use for sunflowers, or I’ll put a potato in.  I can start them early, weeks before the normal potato patch is ready to plant so we can get some early potatoes.  And a couple of these were dying, so it was time to dig them up.  The yield wasn’t that great, but considering I’d planted little, marble sized potatoes, the return was pretty good.

I’m not sure what happened to our peppers this year.  They grew a bit, but then seemed to stop.  They’re only a foot or so tall, but there are a few peppers on them.  The biggest thing we use peppers for is making spaghetti sauce, and we still have a few left over from last year, so we should be fine for peppers.

Last year, I planted a bunch of onion sets.  We got some nice sized onions out of them, but we also had a few that didn’t get much bigger.  Over winter, we used – or had to throw away – the nice sized onions, but were left with a dozen or so smaller bulbs.  I planted them, and in this case, it turned into three onions.  I went to pick one, but two came.  I didn’t get a picture of the other one because it was cut up for dinner.

I think that pretty much covers July.  The currants, raspberries, and blueberries are done for the year, and the blackberries are starting to finish.  Which is good, because coming soon will be kidney beans, corn, watermelon, and a glut of tomatoes.