Garden roundup for July

In no particular order, here is what I picked in July.

I had mentioned that the first patch of lettuce I had planted was eaten by slugs, but I had a second patch coming.  Well, I was able to pick from it a few times, but it’s been buried by a nasturtium.  I don’t know if I’ll get any more from it or not.  I have planted a third patch, but it hasn’t come up yet.

Last month I mentioned that I’d be picking our green beans, and I have picked four or five times.  I was worried if we’d get any, for various reasons, but I believe we had enough to can ten quarts, and there’s still a bag in the freezer we can add to any soup mixes we make.  There are still plenty of beans on the plants, but I didn’t pick them soon enough so they are getting big and tough.  Which is okay, because we’ll just let them go and get some shell beans.  These we either can by themselves or with kidney beans, or as part of soup mixes.  So I’ll probably get them in August.

We grew a bunch of onions last year and stored a bunch.  Early in the year, I noticed some of them were starting to grow, so I planted them.  About mid-July, I noticed that they were flopping over, so I pulled them.  A couple had rotted, but the rest were okay to start drying.  Shortly after that, I noticed that many of the onions in the first batch of sets I’d planted were flopped over.  Since we were supposed to have rain for two or three days, I figured I should just pull them and get them drying.  I left the ones that were still upright, but by the end of July they were starting to flop over as well, so I pulled all of them to get them drying.  The second set of set onions I planted are still growing, but were only planted a few weeks after the first set, so it won’t be long until they are drying.

I had a couple potatoes come up in my parsnip bed.  They’re either from the old potatoes I put in the bottom when I was filling it, or more likely some potato peels mixed in with banana peels and tea bags I added to start composting when I added the dirt.  One was starting to die, so I dug it up but only got a couple small potatoes.  A tad disappointing, but they were free potatoes. 

Very disappointing were my peas.  My total harvest was about seven pods.  What was worse, is that each pod only had one pea.  Last year, when we had better harvests, I saved a dozen or so peas I planned to plant in a raised bed as a sort of test.  But I forgot about them until after I had everything planted.  I wasn’t sure what to do with them, but I had an open space and decided to just plant them and see what happens.  I know the heat of summer isn’t great for peas, but who knows.  I might end up with more peas than from my spring planting.

My kidney beans – the few that came up – are producing pods.  With some shell bean padding, I might be able to can a quart.  We’ll see.

We buy our tomato plants from a local greenhouse.  Most are a few weeks old, but for the last few years my dad has also been buying an older tomato we plant in a big pot near our garage.  These usually already have blossoms when we get them.  In July, we got the first tomato from this older plant.  As I type this on August first, there’s another one that is about ready, and one of the younger plants has one that’s starting to ripen.  So August will likely be the tomato month.

It will also be zucchini month.  I had a lot of issues getting my zucchinis this year, but I have four, healthy plants starting to bloom.  So in a few weeks we’ll be buried in zucchini.  I also have a couple cucumbers that are … growing.  We’ll have to see if I get anything from them.

In July I had the last picking of currants.  There were more, I just never had the time to get around to pick them.  My dad and one sister picked most of our blueberries.  I think my mom said we had seventeen quart bags in the freezer, and I think my sister has about the same.  That’s despite the blueberry cakes that have been made, as well as my dad putting a handful in his cereal every morning.  And the end of July saw the first blackberries ripening. 

Somethings that we haven’t had this year, are raspberries – red and black – and yellow transparent apples.  The apples, I think, got wiped out by a late frost, and I think the birds got most of the black raspberries.  I’m not sure what happened to the red ones.

July was a busy month, and August will probably be just as busy.

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.

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.