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.
