So far so good

It's summer, it's hot, and a lot has happened since my last post on the 8th. Two weeks ago I was loosing peaches and my pears had what looked like fire blight.

The permanent plantings

So far, so good. The peaches stopped dropping and I've still got a lot left on the tree. I'm assuming there was just too much fruit ont he tree and it was natural thinning.

Peaches, almost full size

I've had to cut out a couple of more branch tips on my pears as they curl and turn black to keep the fire blight from getting a real foot hold but there hasn't been any new damage in a week so I'm hoping I'm out of the woods. The few pears that were on my two small trees are still there and starting to look like pears.

pears looking like pears

The apples have been doing well. They've got some brown spots but nothing that's really going to hurt them. They're not pretty enough for the supermarket but I'll eat them.

apples

The only other permanent planting that's doing anything interesting is my grapes. I've got grapes, lots of them. Most are hidden under the leaves but you can see a couple of bunches on the left side of this picture.

grapes

Now onto the garden.

You might remember that I'm trying some giant walking stick cabbage this year. I think they're doing well. I have no idea what they're supposed to be doing but they're not dead. This is one of this year's odd ball plants I'm trying. I should have walking sticks in no time.


The corn and sugar sorghum is looking good. Actually, only about half the sorghum came up but that half is looking healthy. Corn always does well until just before it's ready to be picked. Then beetles eat the silk, worms move into the husk, or earwigs take over.

The broccoli came on unusually early this year. I cut the first heads a couple of weeks ago and it was already full of worms. I'm going to let the rest go to seed without cutting any more. I just want to see how that happens and I can buy broccoli at the supermarket without worms. If I was starving, I could eat the broccoli. Thankfully I'm not.

The onions are looking great. I don't have much luck with onions so I don't know what's different this year. Usually, they get rotten right at the ground line in the early spring.

corn and a sparse row of sorghum

Celery is starting to look like celery, The lettuce and other greens are past their peak and should be sending up flowering stalks to make seeds soon. I've never tried planting lettuce from my own seeds but I have had them go to seed and ended up with a yard full of lettuce in the fall. There are hundreds of little 1/4" diameter carrots.

everything else (almost)

I planted 5 tomatoes. Three regular full size tomato plants and two grape tomatoes. They're not doing well. I don't know what's wrong. They haven't grown much, they look a little wilty and the color isn't really as green as they should be. There are a couple of diseases that can do this but they've been like this for three weeks and if it was a disease, they'd be dead.

I've still got some room left so I think I'll try some new tomato plants on the other side this weekend.

underachiever

I had planted 8 cucumbers. only two have survived. The two look good but I'm also growing dill and was hoping to can some dill pickles. I went looking for cucumber plants last weekend to replace the dead ones but no body had any left. It looks like I need to finish stringing the trellis for the cucumbers this weekend. I am going to try growing them up on a trellis to keep the cucumbers off the ground.

lonely cucumber

Random Summer Stuff

June's here, it's hot, and things are happening in the garden. The peaches are going through June Drop. That's when peaches fall off in June. Last year, I lost everything in June but this year, only the small peaches are falling off...so far. The peaches this year are also much bigger than they were last year. Most of the peaches are an inch across and last year they looked like almonds.

Everything got fertilizer this morning. Hopefully that will kick some of my slower stuff into gear like the peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes.

We've had a lot of rain in the past week. That's good it's less irrigation for me. We had a couple of rainy days, a few thunder storms and I've lost track but it was nearly 3 inches overall and may have been more.



The strawberries are just about done. We had so many that we didn't even pick them all. There are a few still ripening but the ripe ones are pretty small and not nearly as sweet as the first couple of rounds.

Strawberries no bigger than my thumbnail

I've got 3 decent sized heads of broccoli to cut today. Last year, the broccoli was at least twice as big as it is this year before it started producing heads. Maybe I've got a different variety, maybe the weather was different.




I'm waiting for the rhubarb. I've never grown rhubarb before but I've read that the stalks should turn red in late spring or early summer. I'm still waiting. A few stalks are slightly reddish but certainly not red. I've got a recipe I want to try. I had assumed that rhubarb and strawberries would be ready at just about the same time since the famous rhubarb recipe is strawberry rhubarb pie.

Big rhubarb, bigger asparagus, and strawberries

My hanging basket tomato experiment hasn't done much. I moved it to a location where it will get sun for half the day but there's no place on the porch where it can get full sun. It's trying very hard to grow up instead of down.




The apples are growing apples. I have been skeptical about these 5 in 1 apple tree grafts since I bought them 3 or 4 years ago. Gimmicks don't usually work out very well. It seems like I'll have at least 3 different varieties this year.




The white powder on the apple leaves is a fungicide. Fruit trees need a lot of spraying to make nice shiny fruit.

And finally, I'll sign off with a game called "find the pea pod".

Find the Pea Pod.

Shock and Awe Gardening

The weeds started invading this week. We had a couple of very wet weeks and now it's warmed up and I've got thousands of small weeds everywhere. I could have kept up with the hoeing and I wouldn't be facing this problem but I don't have a garden so I can do work. It's even gotten beyond what I can manage with the Giant-Magic-Marker-o-Death.

check out the weeds around the broccoli

So last night, I sprayed everything that isn't a garden plant with Roundup herbicide. I was careful not to spray anything I wanted to keep alive, but there may have been some collateral damage. That's the sad reality of war. I learned the hard truth of war a long time ago, sitting on my couch watching war movies. War is not pretty. I won't know the casualty count for a few days but at least the weeds are going to be dead.

It's hard to tell what's a
weed and what's a spring green

The strawberries are still going strong. We've had strawberry shortcake, strawberry milkshakes, strawberry ice cream, and plain strawberries. I pick a few every morning on my way to the car and a few when I get home from work on my walk to the house. I figured out what's eating them on the vine, I've seen several birds helping themselves but they have only done a small bit of damage so far and If I kill a few there will always be more to take their place so for the time being, the birds get a pass.

My few blackberry bushes have been in full flower for a couple of weeks. I think there will be a good crop of blackberries when they come on.

a blackberry bush (hard to see because of
all the weeds... they'll all be dead
in a few days though.)

Something's been taking nips out of my peaches. Several had small holes weeping sap last night where some bug must have bitten through the skin. I have no idea what did this but I knew I had to take decisive action. I carefully mixed a cocktail of malathion, benefrin, and imadicloprid. The only approach that works when dealing with garden terrorists is my "kill em' fast, kill em' hard, and kill em' all" approach to gardening.

bugs that mess with me wish they were dead.

There was no more insect damage this morning so whatever it was, it isn't anymore.

wounded peaches recovering comfortably at home

A Slow Week

It's been a busy week. I'm not sure why. I don't think I had more to do than usual but I just didn't' have the time I wanted to spend working on the Garden. I planted a few things but overall not much got done. So there's not much to blog about this week.

It's gotten warm. Last week was mostly in the 70º's or close to it. It hit 84º yesterday. Today's in the upper 60's. The rest of the garden will go in in the next two or three weeks.

We ordered 25 more strawberry plants from the local Ag Extension office during the winter came in a few days ago. I put in 75 plants last year. Those 75 put out runners that grew more plants and those new plants did the same thing. By the end of last Summer, I had a pretty good matted row of strawberries 25 feet long and about 4' wide. It has a few thin spots here and there so I planted 25 more plants in those spots. I'm sure it didn't need it. It will fill in the bare spots on its own. But I'm very impatient.

Strawberry plants don't look like much before they're planted. Actually they just look like roots. But they grow fast. These will look like strawberries in a few weeks.

strawberry plants

The asparagus I planted last year is starting to pop up. Each of the surviving 18 plants has at least one spear. The photo below is the biggest. I'm actually considering having some asparagus with dinner tonight. I've always wondered what asparagus tasted like but was pretty sure it was bad. Tonight we'll see for sure.

asparagus spears

I've got two varieties of asparagus. Last Spring, I planted 10 plants of an old variety called Mary Washington and 10 plants of a new variety called Jersey Knight. The Jersey Knight is supposed to be almost all male plants. Male plants don't expend energy making seeds and therefore grow into bigger plants that make more asparagus than female plants.

Yesterday, I picked up some celery plants and broccoli plants at a local garden center. I tried celery from seed last year and nothing even came up. I've never seen celery plants before and was looking for celery seeds to try again but found this instead.

celery and broccoli

Six celery and eight broccoli plants completed the 4th row in the garden. Last year, we grew 4 broccoli plants and harvested broccoli for a month. We don't eat a lot of broccoli but we still have broccoli in the freezer from last season.

celery and broccoli planted

I also picked up some onion sets from the garden center at the same time. Onion sets were $1.99 per pound. I ended up with 40 cents worth of onions sets. That's enough for a full row and more than I'll actually eat. I never have much luck with onions. I think our soil is just too heavy and onions don't do well if they're kept wet. They like sand because it drains easily. Add to that the fact that I should have had them in the ground a couple of weeks ago and the forecast for onions this year isn't so good.

I had planted the row of celery and broccoli yesterday and then left to work on my mower. By the time I got back out to the garden, the bag had been shredded and the onions were spread around the grass. I'm not sure what was after the onions but I'm sure whatever it was will find them in the garden and leave me with none.

The pear trees are in full bloom. If you look at the upper right of the photo below, you can see a small bee checking out a flower.

pears in full bloom.

I had posed here that my rhubarb was flowering. I did some reading and it's not supposed to. Rhubarb only flowers if it's under distress from poor soil, not enough water, or some other problem. It turns out that the flowering takes up so much of the plant's energy that it won't make many stalks. So I cut off the flower stalks yesterday morning. I've also fertilized and watered it well. We'll see if it starts to produce more stalks.

rhubarb sans flower stalks.