Getting Hot

It's finally getting warm. For the last week, it's been in the 70's and even hit the low 80's a couple of times. After a month of slow progress, these warm temperatures have gotten things jumping in the garden.

I've been doing my regular weeding with a 1 gallon sprayer and roundup. The Giant-Magic-Marker-O-Death has seen some use too. With the the magic of chemistry and some warm weather, I've got nice dead patches around just about everything now.

Over last weekend we planted a couple of my odd ball seeds. A row of sugar sorghum and a row of peanuts. Sugar cane grows in tropical areas only so in the old days, northerners like me, used sugar sorghum as a sweetener. Sorghum is still grown as a grain and the stalks are used for animal fodder but no body really grows the sweet varieties anymore. I found a source on the internet. I tried sugar sorghum last year but killed it when I was "hoeing" my garden with herbicide. I should have know better since I learned as a little boy not to spray into the wind.

oddities: peanuts and sorghum

Peanuts are only an oddity because they're grown down south and not in New Jersey. Our growing season is too short and too cold. I was hoping to start these under plastic to get an earlier start but never got around to it. Maybe I'll get peanuts anyway. Probably not.

Since I only put in my rows of asparagus last spring, I didn't want to harvest too hard this year. We cut asparagus a couple of times and then let it grow. It's getting pretty big already. We can cut as much as we want next year but I can't imagine wanting to cut very much.

asparagus gone wild

I bought three more blackberry plants at Lowe's this year. Since they sit on shelves indoors in plastic bags and never get watered, I figured they wouldn't be in very good shape for very long so I picked them up a month ago, as soon as they hit the shelves. There were no leaves but the little sticks had some green inside so I thought they would be okay.

The sticks turned out to be dead. But two of the three are putting out new leaves from the roots. If you want quality, buy from somewhere other than a home center.

back from the dead.

The grapes are starting to flower. Grape flowers don't look like much, they're easy to miss. But each of these flower clusters will become a bunch of grapes.

grape clusters

For the last couple of years, my pear trees have done nothing. This year they flowered like crazy and now I've got pears. I'm not sure if you pick pears under-ripe to ripen on the shelf or let them ripen on the tree. Either way, I'm going to give these a little time.

pears

And finally, I've even got strawberries. My Giant-Magic-Marker-O-Death is working very well at keeping weeds to a minimum in my strawberries and I've actually got berries. I'm not a fan of vegetables. The stuff that I'll grow in the actual garden, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, peas, broccoli, peppers, and the other vegetables can feed everybody else. The fruits are mine.

strawberries

That's enough for one post. Radishes, lettuce, spinach, peas, onions, broccoli, and other stuff is really starting to take off but I've typed enough and you've read enough.