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.

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.

Garden roundup for May

During May, our chickens laid 108ish eggs, of which 68 made it to the house.  I say 108ish because, last month I said I suspected there was a nest in the barn.  Well, I finally found it and it had a dozen or so eggs in it, but they were all broke.  The nest was between two bales of hay, which I moved apart.  I don’t know if they’ll find a new spot now, or what.

At the beginning of the month, one of our hens wasn’t do so good.  And after a couple of days, she died.  In previous months, I’d said that one of our hens was at the bottom of the pecking order and I think wasn’t getting enough stuff for strong eggs.  She was the one that died.  Like I said, they’re getting kind of old, so it wasn’t that surprising.  I had hoped that that would be the end of me finding broken eggs, but it turns out we do have one hen that eats them.  Well, I think she just eats her own.  I don’t know if she was the one laying in the barn, but when I disrupted her she came back to laying in the coop.  Whatever the case, I’m still pretty annoyed with it.

The last note about eggs, is it was the last week of May 2023 that I started keeping track of eggs.  Well, I kept track of how many eggs made it to the house.  And even though we’ve lost a couple of hens since then, the numbers aren’t that much lower. 

Other updates, the onions that had started to grow over winter and that I planted in pots to try to transplant out, all died.  Most died before I had a chance to transplant them, and the two I did transplant didn’t survive.  I guess I’ll just have to make sure I dry any onions I get this year so they last through the winter.

Last month, I hinted at two upcoming stories, one about lettuce and one about something else.  The lettuce one I’ll have to write up a post in a week or so.  The other one … will take a lot more work.  It’s something I’ve tried several times over the years, but without any luck.  And circumstances demand I try again, hopefully with better luck.  If I do have any luck, I’ll write about it.

Something I forgot to mention last month, was that I had started some seeds indoors.  I started a zucchini, a cucumber, and a pumpkin.  I also tried to start a watermelon, cantaloupe, and a squash that germinated but almost immediately died.  Well, this month I transplanted the zucchini, cucumber and pumpkin.  I also direct planted another zucchini and squash, but they haven’t germinated yet.  I didn’t direct sow any watermelon or cantaloupe because my sister finally gave up trying to garden in her … bog, so we needed garden space for her plants.  But she had a watermelon and cantaloupe, so hopefully they do well enough that we can get a couple.

May was a very busy time in the garden.  I also direct sowed some parsnips, peas, green beans, kidney beans, corn, and beets, as well as some onion sets.  All of them are up, unfortunately, something – probably a rabbit – went to town on the peas.  I plant a double row of peas, and then put stakes on the outside and run line for them to climb up.  I hadn’t done that when I found the damage, so I put in the stakes and ran the line pretty close together at the bottom, so hopefully the rabbit will look elsewhere for a meal.  I’ll probably sow in some new seeds to fill in the gaps.

I’ve also planted some marigolds, sunflowers, and some other flowers.  Some of the sunflowers were up, but then something – rabbit? – ate them.  I was thinking of replanting some sunflowers, but putting some type of cover over them so they would get some size before something could chew on them, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had a chance to do that yet.

Other plants we got at a greenhouse.  We got tomatoes, green peppers, broccoli, and cabbage.  All have been transplanted in, with the last thing – the tomatoes – going in on the 31st.  So far, the only problem I’ve had is that something dug up around one of the cabbages to get at the compost I buried next to it.  To stop whatever digging up the other plants, I didn’t put any compost with them when I transplanted.  Instead, I’ll spread it out in the path above them and work it in.  But that will have to wait until I have time to do it.

Other notes, we picked some rhubarb this month, but I can’t remember how much we stored.  I’ll have to get those numbers later.  Our currants are starting to ripen, so that will be one thing I’m doing in June.  Also, the only things left to plant are our potatoes and carrots.  Both we just started working up their spots, now if the rain will hold off for a couple of days, we’ll get them in.

Garden roundup for April

During April, our chickens laid 87 eggs, of which 67 made it to the house.  This is less than the 107 they laid last month.  There are two possibilities for this.  The first is our hens are getting pretty old.  It does seem that whenever we need a bunch of eggs for baking or whatever, we need to crack a few extra because we find some with blood spots in them.  So I’d say their egg laying days are numbered.  The other possibility is, now that the weather is more or less good, they’re running off and laying in some hidden nest.  I did find one nest with three eggs in it that I just threw in the compost because I wasn’t sure how old they were.  My dad is the one who lets the chickens out in the morning, and he says there’s one that immediately runs off to the barn, but I’ve looked in there multiple times and haven’t found any nests.  Of course, something that’s happened in years past, is I’ll stop looking in the barn for nests, and then a month later I’ll go to grab something and find a nest with two dozen eggs in it. 

I finished digging up all of our parsnips.  We have 17 quart bags in the freezer.  One of my goals in the next couple of days is to add some compost to the parsnip bed, work it up, and plant the new parsnips.

Other things I’ve planted so far are some lettuce, which I’m trying something new with, so there should be a post on it in a few weeks if it, hopefully, works.  I also had some potatoes that sat on the porch all winter and were starting to grow.  I planted a couple, but then it froze one night and I didn’t think to cover them.  In years past I’ve planted some potatoes in the fall and let them come up the next spring.  Sometimes these have been hit by a frost or two, but they seem to keep coming back. 

In past months, I’ve said that I planted some onions that had started to grow.  Well, I finally had a spot worked up for them so I transplanted … some.  I think I had planted seven bulbs in three batches over the last few months.  All of them grew, but then they stunted.  I don’t know if they didn’t get enough light, or it was too cold, or what.  But when I transplanted them I found that five of the bulbs had rotted away to nothing.  The other two … might still be alive.  I’ll have to see if they do anything.  I still had five or six little bulbs from last year, one of which had started to grow, so I planted them.  I’ll have to see if they can grow bigger this year.  And lastly, last year for the first time I tried planting onion seeds.  It didn’t go well.  I think all the ones I planted indoors and transplanted out died, and I think few of the ones I direct sowed even germinated, and most of them later died.  I still had some seeds left, so I planted all of them, and again, I’ll have to see if they do anything this year.

There might be something big happening tomorrow.  If it does, I’ll do a post about it, probably in a few days.  If it doesn’t work, I’ll just mention it next month.

Garden roundup for February

During the month of February, our chickens laid 75 eggs, which – even with two fewer days – is more than the 67 laid in January.  Unfortunately, 17 of these eggs were damaged.  At first, I thought it was just that a few hens weren’t eating their oyster shells, and while that might have started the problem, I think at least one hen is eating eggs.  I don’t know if, with the cold and snow, there aren’t any bugs or worms for them and their feed isn’t protein enough.  It did seem that when it was really cold every day there was one or even two eggs ate, but it has been somewhat warm this last week or so, and some eggs have been eaten but not as many.  We’ll have to see if warmer weather will break them of this habit.

The only other garden thing was I potted a few more onions that had started to sprout.  Last year was a pretty good year for onions, and I had two dozen or so nice big ones.  I hung them up to dry, and I thought they had dried enough, but earlier this month I went to grab one to use and most of them were starting to rot.  The smaller onions – that I figured I’d plant this year – are holding up pretty good and getting used.  I guess I’ll just have to be extra certain to dry any big onions I get in the future.

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.