It’s been a [long] while since we’ve updated about the garden or anything actually. We just got sidetracked with life and our ability to find time to post updates disappeared.
This posting will just recap stuff that we’ve done over the past two months. And then hopefully here on out we’ll have a few minutes every week or two to post garden pictures and news.
Through June our garden chugged along quite well. We had rain almost every day or two plus cool weather so we were quite worried that our plants would end up diseased. I don’t think we got through it unscathed since our tomatoes are showing early blight already. I’m almost certain that we didn’t have signs of it until later in the year last year. Anyways it of course started on our store bought Mortgage Lifter *sigh*.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the Late Blight fiasco in the north eastern portion of the US. So far we have no signs of Late Blight thank goodness! Touch wood.
We seem to be having trouble with the tomatoes in one Earthbox getting blossom end rot. If it was just limited to one plant I wouldn’t think much of it but it’s both plants in the box so I think I’ll add more calcium to it and see if we can’t get this problem resolved. The plants afflicted are Early Girl and Delicious (which will hopefully be our contender for a Largest tomato contest).
Beans were/are great. We harvested a bunch 2 weeks ago and put 10 lbs in the freezer and 4 lbs went to the compost unfortunately. We were so harried and under a time crunch that we didn’t use the pressure canner for the first time but went with the blanching and freezing method we knew. As of last weekend the bush bean and haricot vert plants have been sent to bean plant heaven – but don’t worry, I’ve also planted the fall crop which is just starting to sprout. The pole beans are just starting to ramp up their production. I might plant a fall crop of them this week.
Here is a pic of all the beans we picked:
Japanese beetles have been spotted in the garden for 3 weeks or so but thankfully not in great hordes like previous years. They seem to be causing the most damage on our grapes and sunflowers.
Regarding sunflowers – we are participating in the Great Sunflower Project. They send out sunflower seeds, we plant and observe bees coming to the flowers and then report back our observations. The program is trying to assess what is happening to the wild bee populations since most of the data to date is from bee farms. We just got these seeds 2 weeks ago and I went to plant them only to discover all but 5 were crushed. So I added some of our own sunflower seeds to the mix and sowed them. So far no germination of any of them.
We had this visitor a couple of times over the past few weeks. I think I prefer the opossum better, LOL.
Speaking of out door critters, our stray we care for is injured. I tried contacting our rescue group for help but they haven’t gotten back to me. One of his back legs is wounded. At first I thought it was broken since it was so swollen and he was limping badly. Now the swelling is gone but there appears to be a wound on each side of leg (whether self induced or not we’ll never know) just below his knee. He still limps but is putting more weight on it and he seems to get around fine. We’ve also been feeding him more in case he can’t hunt.
Birds, particularly the robins have been eating our strawberries and today I caught them at our blackberries. We’ll be going to the garden coop on the weekend to get bird netting. %^&# birds :)
Other news, hmm… Oh yes! We went strawberry picking up at Linvilla Orchards in mid June. They are really close to us and we love going there. We picked I think 14 lbs of strawberries and we turned them into two batches of jam (one plain strawberry and the other cranberry strawberry) and dried about 7 lbs of them. Then we had a big bowl left over that we ate over the course of a few days. Yum!
Pics from the jam making:
In other more minor news, our Electric Black and Decker WeedHog gave up the ghost a few weeks ago so we replaced it with a Lehr Propane powered trimmer. Very nice. Lots of power. And an environmentally better alternative to gas powered trimmers.
I think that is it for today’s installment. Hopefully I’ll have more stuff to post soon.
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