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 August

During August, our chickens laid 71 eggs, of which 54 made it to the house.  That’s the fewest eggs laid since January.  I don’t know if it was the heat, they’re really slowing down laying eggs, or what.  I guess we’ll see in the next few months.

I said that June and July were hectic, but then August came around.  There were several first harvest, such as kidney beans, corn, watermelon, pears, etc.  I got pictures of some of these, but never seemed to have the time to post them.  I also picked all of our onions and currently have them drying. 

The big thing, and part of why this post is late, has been tomatoes.  In the last two weeks we’ve canned enough pizza sauce for twenty-two pizzas, as well as enough spaghetti sauce for about twenty nights of spaghetti.  We still have about a dozen jars from previous years, so we’ll have to go from having spaghetti once or twice a month to two or three times a month.  And just yesterday, we canned about a dozen jars of just tomatoes.  And there’s still more in the garden.  I even started looking for recipes for ketchup, just to use them up.  Although, my mom said somebody had made homemade ketchup some years ago, but they didn’t care for it.  But if we have more tomatoes than we know what to do with, we might just try an experiment.  I’ll let you know if we do. 

Hopefully, things will slow down now.  All that’s left is the last planting of corn, which might not do so well, the beets, pumpkins, potatoes, some apples, and more tomatoes.  I’m already starting to plan next year’s garden, and two things I know we’ll have will be fewer zucchini and fewer tomatoes.