Garden Roundup for June

During the month of June, our chickens laid 92 eggs, all of which made it to the house.  I don’t know if one or two of them weren’t feeling well, because we usually get 3-4 eggs a day, but there were several days we only got 2.  And I couldn’t find any other nests in their usual spots.  But lately we’ve been back to 3-4.  At first I wondered if it was the heat, but the last couple of days have been the hottest, and we got 4 eggs each day.

Last month I said I only needed to plant our second batch of sweet corn and some potatoes.  Well, I planted the corn, but only six or seven stalks have grown.  Which is better than the 0 from the first batch.  We had bad luck with corn last year, so I don’t know what’s going on.  Two years ago, I finally finished off a big bag of corn we got, like ten years ago, and we always had good germination from it.  But these last two years I’ve only bought the little bags, but I may have to go back to the big bags.  Or find out where my sister got her corn, because they have a good crop coming.  As to the potatoes, other stuff happened in June, so we never got around looking for seed potatoes.  But, last year we also had trouble with our potatoes.  They sprouted, but never got that big and got lost in the weeds.  I tried digging some, but barely got anything, so I forgot about them.  But apparently, they produced some potatoes that survived the winter, and a rototilling, to grow in a couple of rows that I just noticed a week or so ago.  Some of them have already grown bigger than what they did last year, so maybe we’ll get some potatoes out of them.

Things I’ve harvested in June: more leaf lettuce, a few turnips, some onions, red currants, red raspberries, and blueberries.  I’m not sure what happened with our currants.  Usually, the plants are just loaded and I pick a few containers before I eventually give up.  But this year I think I picked eight.  Not eight containers, eight currants.  I don’t know if we had a late frost that hit at the wrong time, or we had a week or so of heavy rain that maybe knocked the berries off, or if the birds – which usually eat some but not enough to notice – had to eat them because whatever they normally eat wasn’t ripe on time.  It’s a bit depressing, but I guess it just means the hours I usually spend picking currants can now be spent picking raspberries or blueberries.  Joy.

A couple of days after I post this, I’ll probably be picking our first peas.  And a week from not I might have a zucchini.  So that’s good.

First currant harvest

 

There were more to pick, but it was so hot they'll have to wait.

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. 

June 24th Harvest

Today I was going on an errand and saw a few ripe black raspberries.

 We have five or six patches of black raspberries the birds have planted in various places, and when I checked them later, I found a few more ripe ones. 

 

I’m not sure what the difference is, but there is one patch that produces raspberries probably the size of my thumbnail, but they’re somewhat shadowed, so it will be maybe a week before they ripen.  But I may take a few photos of them once they do just to show them off.

I also picked some red and even purple raspberries.

 

Purple raspberries are some hybrid between red and black.  They taste like red raspberries, but it does seem that they start out a normal raspberry shape, but once they ripen they get somewhat deformed.  Someone with more interest and time than I can figure out why.  But it does seem that a few years ago, there were only a couple plants, but it seems I’m finding more each year.  Maybe someday, I’ll keep them separate to make purple raspberry jelly, but for now I just lump them in with the red ones. 

You can also see some blueberries in there.  These aren’t the first blueberries I’ve picked, that was last Friday.  But my sister and I were watering the blueberries and we saw a few were ripe, but they didn’t last long enough to get photographed.

I also picked a small fraction of the red currants that are ripe.

 

All last week I meant to spend an evening picking currants, but by the time it cooled down, it was time to water the garden and by the time that was done it was dark.  It did rain some yesterday, so we didn’t need to water tonight, so I finally was able to pick some.  But there are a lot more that need picked.  I just stopped because I was tired.

While I was picking currants, I also harvested a couple of things I didn’t want to: Japanese beetles.

 

These were the first ones I’ve seen this summer.  I put them in a container of water so their wings are wet and they can’t fly.  I then feed them to our chickens.

A day’s harvest

This is what I picked on Thursday, June 13th.

On the left are the first wild strawberries I’ve picked this year.  One year, I did manage to pick enough to make a batch of jam, but that was a looooot of work.  We might have a ton of strawberries growing in our fields, but I have 8,000 other projects.  These will end up mixed in with boughten strawberries for shortcake or jam.  On the right are some red raspberries.  I picked the first raspberries a couple days ago, but I forgot to get a picture of them because I was trying to do twenty other things.

This is the third, or fourth harvest of currants I’ve gotten, but the first ones were just two or three.  There are a lot more that are half-ripe, which I’ll have to pick next week.  If the birds don’t eat them first. 

What I do with all these berries is freeze them, then sometime this fall my mom and I will make jelly out of them.  If I pick enough red raspberries, we’ll make a red raspberry batch.  If there isn’t enough juice for one batch, my mom will mix in some currant juice to fill it out.  And if we don’t have enough of everything, we’ll just mix everything – currants, red raspberries, black raspberries, blackberries – into one mixed berry jelly.

A quick harvest update

Yesterday, I finally managed to harvest a currant harvest. 

I didn’t drop this one as I had the last.

I also picked some leaf lettuce, just barely enough for a sandwich. 

First currant “harvest”

As you can see, our currants are starting to ripen.

Now, the reason I have “harvest” in quotes and why I don’t just have a photo of a ripe currant, is that we had a ripe currant, but when I went to pick it I moved a leaf and bumped it or something and it broke off and fell to the ground.  So I’ve had our first pick, but no harvest.