Garden Roundup for September 2023

During the month of September, our hens gave us 97 eggs.  From our garden we got 1 zucchini, 1 watermelon, 2 cabbages, the last of the corn, the last of the tomatoes, the last of the peppers, the last of the shell beans, as well as a couple buckets of potatoes.  We also picked a couple buckets of grapes, as well as a few black berries and red raspberries.  We also picked several buckets of apples.  Most are for pies, but one tree makes good applesauce. 

The only thing left to pick are some cabbages, maybe a zucchini, most of the potatoes, and some apples.  The earliest frost date for here is in the first week of October.  The forecast only shows it getting down into the 40’s for the next week or so, but most things are dying back and getting ready for winter.  Since not much will happen in the garden for the next few months, I think I’ll hold off on these monthly updates.  I’ll do a roundup for the year, and then start these up again next spring.

Garden Roundup for August 2023

I wanted to get this out either on the last day of August, or the first few days of September.  But one thing after another kept coming up, and I kept putting it aside.  There were a couple of things I wanted to talk about, but I’ll save them for another post.  This will just be a super quick rundown of what we harvested in August.

For starters, we got – if my count is correct – 68 eggs.  Stuff harvested from our garden included: lettuce, just about all of our onions, 14 zucchini, a few peas (most of the plants are dead but a few are still kicking), a couple dozen tomatoes, some broccoli, some green beans, some shell beans, a bucket or so of potatoes, some cucumbers, a couple heads of cabbage, a couple dozen ears of corn, all the beets, and some green peppers.  I’ve also picked a few red raspberries and blackberries.  I also cut off the one sunflower head.  The deer ate most of the ones I planted, and I only got one good sized head.  I leave them to dry, and then sometime in winter I’ll hang them out for the birds.  The last item to mention are the apples, a few yellow transparent and a couple buckets of MacIntosh. 

If I can get around to it, hopefully soon I’ll have a post on why I think it was a good year for onions and beets.

Garden Roundup for July 2023

This roundup is late, and will be brief, because I was sick for a good chunk of July.  A stomach bug tripped me, and then like four or five other things dogpiled on.  I’m fine, the only issues I have left are a cough, and I tire easily, but I don’t know if part of that is from the heat, or just that I haven’t done anything for three weeks. 

Anyway, in July we got about 87 eggs.  I say about, because for a week or so I didn’t collect the eggs and didn’t care to ask how many we got, so that’s a rough estimate. 

The first patch of lettuce started to go to seed, but the second patch is up and I’ve started picking from it.  Our peas produced pretty well this year, and while some of the plants are dying, others still have blossoms, so I don’t know how much longer we’ll get peas.  I’ve also picked some red raspberries, and some black raspberries. 

We got swamped in blueberries.  Even with pies, and putting them in cakes and cereal, and letting neighbors pick as many as they want, I think my mom said we have 25 quart bags in the freezer.  And one of my sisters has 17.  And there are still some blueberries left to pick. 

New things we’ve picked in July: blackberries, tomatoes, several nice heads of broccoli, and zucchini.  We got 19 zucchinis, most of which were smaller sized, but three we missed and will be ground up for zucchini bread. 

Also, I had put a couple of potatoes in containers, just to see how they did.  They were starting to die, so I pulled them and got some pretty nice potatoes. 

Garden Roundup for June 2023

I’m still trying to figure out what to do with this blog.  One thing I figured I could do would be monthly roundups of what our farm/garden has produced.

If my tracking is correct, in June our chickens gave us 132 eggs.  Which, is far more than we can use.  Most of them we give away to family or neighbors. 

In June, I’ve continued picking leaf lettuce.  It seems like every three or four days I pick enough for three or four sandwiches.  I don’t know how much longer this first patch will continue to produce, it’s starting to get a bit ragged, but a second patch is already growing.  During June I’ve started to pick red currants, red raspberries, wild strawberries, and peas.  And just today, I picked our first black raspberries and blueberries of the season.  I don’t know if our late frost messed up the currants, or if the birds don’t have anything else to eat, but I’ve pretty much picked them clean and only have maybe a cup.  Some years I have ten times that without seeming like I picked any.  They’ll likely just get mixed in with the red raspberries – which we might get more of, there’s a couple patches out in the farm I need to check on – and some black raspberries to make some jelly.  We don’t have that many strawberries, and I’m not sure what we’ll do with them.  The black raspberries and blueberries are loaded, so we should get a lot of them.  The peas have just started producing, so we’ll probably get a bunch of them over the next month or so.

Finally, we’ll probably a week or so away from our first zucchini.  And I also just noticed today our beans are starting to bloom.  So we’ll be picking green beans before the end of July.

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.

Garden mistakes I’ve made this year

The weather here was pretty warm in April, and I wanted to get a head start on the garden.  So I went ahead and planted some zucchini, watermelon, cucumber, and cantaloupe seeds in pots.  They came up and were doing well, and the weather got cold.  So they stayed on the porch, and got a bit leggy.  But then the weather warmed, and I got the garden worked up, so I transplanted them and mulched them in good.  There were a couple of nights it was going to get into the upper 30s, and I worried, but hoped that with the mulch they would be okay.  But then I noticed half their leaves were brown.  I kicked myself, and worried, but hoped for the best.  Then, on our last frost date, we got frost.  I debated on doing something to cover them, but I’m a night owl and don’t usually get up till noon, and they were half-dead anyway.  So my seedlings died.  My onions, peas, and lettuce pulled through without issue, and the couple potatoes that had come up are recovering.  It did take a long time for my beans and corn to come up, but hopefully that was just because the ground wasn’t overly warm.  The beans are finally coming up, and the corn is a bit hit or miss, but that might just be because it’s old seed.

My plan had been to transplant in the seedlings, then wait some weeks before direct planting more seeds, to spread the harvest out some.  So I left spaces for where these new plants would go.  Now a week or so before the frost, we had some old eggs that needed to be gotten rid of.  And I figured I’d bury them in the garden.  I dug a trench about where some tomatoes will go and buried most of them, but I also buried some where I was going to direct sow the melons and such.  We have about six inches of soil, then a clay layer.  I dug down into the clay layer, dumped in the eggs, broke them, dumped some compost on top, then covered them over.  And I put a marker to know where to plant.

After the frost, I needed to replant stuff, but since we don’t have the longest of growing seasons, instead of planting one hill, then waiting some weeks to plant another, I figured I’d replant over the dead seedlings and in the new spots.  So I did that, and watered everything in good.  Then a couple days later I went to the garden to see something had dug up the old eggs.  I cursed, but got more compost and filled in the holes, and replanted the seeds again, only for the next day to find they had dug everything up again.  Apparently, they left an egg or two, or hoped the eggs would refill.  I really cursed, but left the holes open.  The next day it rained for most of the day, and the day after that I had to work.  But the next day I went to the garden and nothing else seemed to have been dug up, so I filled the holes in again.  It’s been three or four days since that, and the spots where I’m going to plant the zucchini and such haven’t been dug up, and the tomato trench has had a couple, half-hearted digs.  So hopefully, that’s all done with.  Now, the issue is do I replant the seeds again.  I don’t know if whatever dug them up also snacked on the seeds, but with my luck if I replant, I’ll probably end up with three zucchinis coming up in one spot.

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.