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 lettuce of the year

The other night, we had cheeseburgers and potato salad for dinner.  I was getting my burger fixings ready – ketchup and onions – when I realized that I had some leaf lettuce that was just about ready.  So I hurried up to the garden and got some lettuce – about three leaves per burger – to give our burgers a bit of the “fresh from the garden” taste.  I’ve tried to take a picture of my first harvests, but the lettuce was all eaten by the time I thought about it.

This lettuce has a bit of an interesting history.  Last spring, I tried starting more seeds indoors than I usually do, but with limited window sill space, I ended up with a lot of straggly seedlings.  So I bought a grow light, hoping I’d have a larger area than a window sill to start seeds.  I also wondered if I could grow some leaf lettuce during the winter.  I found a spot I could put the light – it’s not the best place, but I’d have to clean out a spot for something better – and planted a small pot with some old seeds.  And nothing grew.

In late winter, I went and bought all my seeds for the year, including new leaf lettuce.  I planted another small pot, and it germinated.  At first, it seemed fine, but then it still went a bit straggly.  I think my light was too high, something to fix for next year.  But about a month after I planted it, it finally stopped snowing and I worked up a spot and transplanted out my indoor lettuce.  I also direct sowed a larger patch. 

That was about a month ago.  The lettuce I direct sowed looks like it will be ready to harvest sometime next week.  So it took a month of growing lettuce indoors to get a harvest about a week-and-a-half earlier than if I had just waited to plant outside.  Of course, if I hadn’t tried to grow lettuce indoors, we wouldn’t have had any for our cheeseburgers.

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.

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.

Trying something new – sky lettuce

I recently came across this video about using plastic bottles to grow plants.  And I thought it was great, but I didn’t have any place to hang such bottles.  Then I remembered we have a fence around our main garden to hopefully keep the deer out, as well as around the tires we use as raised beds.  And I figured I could cut out the side of a milk jug, and tie the handle to a fence post. 

I made one and planted some lettuce in it because, well, it was starting to get to the point where I needed to plant something.  But I only got one plant that came up.  I don’t think the seed is that old, but we did have a few cold nights shortly after I planted it.  I planted a few more seeds, but so far, nothing else has grown.  A few days ago, I made the first harvest, which was not quite enough for half a sandwich. 

I’ve made two more, one has some marigolds in it, and I made a second one for lettuce.  These are a little deeper, and have more of the top cut away so they get more rain.  I do think one problem I’ll have with them is that they’ll dry out pretty quick.  So far, it’s been a rainy spring, so I haven’t really had to water them much, but we usually have dry summers, so that’s one thing I’ll have to keep an eye on. 

I have plenty of jugs to make more.  I just have to think of what best to plant in them.  One idea is to plant some perennials.  That way, in the fall I could just untie the handles, and set them somewhere they won’t have to deal with the snow, and put them back out the next spring. 

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 harvests of the year

So the point of this blog is to show what we harvest from our garden/farm.  But as evidence that I still have a lot of bugs to work out of the system, I completely forgot that we’ve already had some harvests.

Aside from eggs – which right now we’re getting about four a day – the first garden harvest this year was back in February, when I pulled the parsnips from last year.  The way we’ve always done parsnips is to let them grow all summer, and leave them in the ground over winter and only dig them once they start to grow again next spring.  There is a reason to do this, but I don’t feel like looking it up right now.  But this year we had a warm February and they started growing again early.  So I dug them up, and we had some for dinner, gave some away to my siblings, and froze five or six bags. 

The second thing we harvested was some rhubarb three or so weeks ago.  We have two rhubarb plants we planted last year and one, for some reason, is only about half the size of the other.  My dad picked it the rhubarb, so I think he only picked from the bigger plant to let the smaller one grow some.  What was harvested then was turned into a pie, and my dad pick some more this week which was froze to be made into pie in the future.

The last thing we’ve harvested is some leaf lettuce.  I picked enough for a sandwich about a week ago, three or four sandwiches worth earlier this week, and it looks like I’ll need to pick some today. 

That’s our harvests up to the first week in June.  This month I’ll probably also start picking red raspberries and currants.  I may also get some wild strawberries, although where I usually picked them is now a corn field.  But we’ll see.

First outdoor planting of the year

I was going to call this “First planting of the season,” but I did plant some potatoes last fall as a bit of an experiment.  And I had planted some seeds in pots, but yesterday was the first time I planted something outside, this year.  I was also going to start by saying I planted seven things yesterday, but there are some grey areas, so I won’t try to number them.

First off, we are still about a month away from the last frost date for this area, but there’s also a week of good weather, which is rather rare this time of year, so I wanted to get something done.  But I will have to keep an eye on the overnight temperatures.  Also, our garden is damp, but hopefully it will dry enough this week that I can at least start on working it up.  We do have some small, raised beds, and that’s what I planted into.

There were three very simple things I planted: a short row of leaf lettuce, a couple of daisies, and a couple of marigolds.  These were all planted from seeds.  Everything else I planted were onions, which is where some of the grey areas come from.

First up, I think last fall one of my nieces sold boxes of fruit and vegetables as a school fundraiser for something.  In one of these boxes were some nice, fist-sized onions.  One day, a couple of months ago, I noticed that one of these onions had sprouted.  So I got a pot and planted it, and stuck it in with all the houseplants.  It grew, but I don’t think it was getting enough sun, so I planted it outside.  Hopefully, it’s the right type of onion for this area, and we’ll get something from it.

We normally plant onion sets, and that’s what we did last year.  I gathered our onions, dried them out, and put them in a mesh bag hanging in our cellar.  A month or so ago, I noticed that one of them had sprouted, so I put it in a pot.  It grew and I transplanted it yesterday.  But there were also twenty or so bulbs from last year still in the cellar.  Either we didn’t use as many onions this winter, or the fundraiser onions were more than enough.  So I just planted the rest of them as a new set. 

Now, as I said, we normally plant onion sets, but I was curious about trying onion seeds.  So I got a pack some time ago.  Wanting to get a head start on them, I planted some in pots back in February.  I also wanted to try biodegradable pots made from cardboard rolls, so I made a dozen of them and planted onion seeds.  But, either the seeds aren’t that good, or I didn’t water them enough, or it was too cold on the porch, or something else, or some combination, but only four plants sprouted.  So I planted those four, along with the other pots in case the seeds were just waiting for better conditions.  I also direct sowed some of remaining onion seeds. 

I guess this is another grey area.  In two of these cardboard tubes, some non-onion seeds grew.  I’m not sure what they are, but I planted them to see what they become.  And incase the onions I did plant in them ever come up.

So that’s the beginning of my 2023 outdoor gardening.