Just a Boring August Update

My first batch of peaches in July were awful. The bugs had almost completely destroyed the fruit before it ever had a chance to get ripe. I got to eat a few but that was only because I was willing to eat around to cut out the damaged parts. I never would have bought any peaches that looked as bad as mine. I may have found the solution to my problem.





My other peach tree, the Belle of Georga, is starting to ripen now and there's no insect damage. It' s late enough in the season that there aren't as many bugs around now. I found a semi-soft peach yesterday and ate the softest half right off the tree just to see how they tasted. It was a little crunchier than I like but really sweet. White flesh instead of the yellow flesh on my Gala peach. The few I picked today will need a couple of days on the counter to ripen but they look great.




If these work out well, I might order a couple of more Bell of Georga peach trees in the spring.

As you can see, we've also got tomatoes, (on the bottom of the basket) and all the grapes are ripe now. 6 varieties. 3 seedless (one of which has seeds - I don't know why), and 3 with seeds. I prefer seedless grapes but had read that the seeded varieties produce bigger fruit so I tried both. I could fill this basket 10 times with just bunches of grapes but how many grapes can one family really eat? I've never heard of frozen or canned grapes so I guess the rest will go to waste.

The best in my opinion are the white Lakemont seedless (Just like the white grapes in the supermarket), the red Reliance seedless (same variety as the supermarket) and the dark purple Concord seeded grapes.

Concord are what's used to make grape juice and they taste just like grape juice. I also have a variety called Glenora that's dark purple. This tastes just like grape soda. I never realized that the grape flavor in grape juice was different than the grape flavor in grape soda until I tried these grapes.

The fire blight I haven't seen in a month or more has shown up again on a pear tree. Since the limb is dead all the way to the trunk, I had to cut several inches of the top of the trunk. This meant cutting off one of my 5 remaining pears. It's not ready yet but I took a bite anyway. Needs another month.





The sugar sorghum seed heads (say that 3 times fast) are starting to turn orange. I'm going to try to use the seedheads like any other variety of sorghum. Sorghum is grown in Africa and the Middle East as food for people and animals. My dad actually grew several acres of sorghum as a grain crop when I was a kid growing up on a farm. My parents had a bird seed store and mixed their own seed. Millet (sorghum seeds) was one of the ingredients in their mixed bird seed.




When this stuff is used as people food, they toast the seeds and then boil them with water to make a porage similar to oatmeal. Mixed with milk and sugar it's eaten in lots of places, just not here. I'll let you know how it turns out in a month or so.

Mostly Pictures

It's been another busy week. I took a vacation week last week and spent this week at work catching up. Sometimes taking a vacation isn't worth it. I've neglected the garden even more than usual this week and it's a mess.

But here's an update anyway. Mostly just pictures.

The sugar sorghum I'm trying has put out seed heads. I'll cut it down in a few weeks and see if it's actually sweet.





I checked my garden this morning and set up some irrigation. My two remaining walking stick cabbage plants looked pretty good. They both had several large leaves at least 18" long and probably closer to 2 feet long. This afternoon, one of them has been eaten by something.





The vine that came up by itself in a flower bed is still unidentified. I thought it looked like a pumpkin but now it's got fruit and I don't know what it is. It's nothing I've ever grown before.





The fuji apple I cut down due to fire blight is putting out new suckers. I'm cautiously optimistic.





Something's been eating blackberries. I think it's a groundhog. At least he left me two.





The upside down tomato experiment on my porch is a limited success. It never got as big as I had hoped but it only gets a few hours of sun a day. It does have a red tomato.




The loofa sponge gourds are getting big. I'm not sure when to harvest or even what to do with them once I do harvest but this was my wife's idea so I'm off the hook. I also don't know how to spell "luffa" so I'll be trying out all possible spellings hoping I get one right.




And finally some of the grapes are almost ready. Several bunches are just raisins. I don't know why.

Hot and Thirsty

It's been in the mid to upper 90's for a week and we haven't had any real rain in several weeks. It might have been a month since we've had more than just a brief evening thunderstorm. The grass crunches when you walk on it and everything around here looks parched. I've been watering every day and am having a hard time keeping up. The loofa gourds are looking especially thirsty. They got water overnight on Friday and they're already wilted again. I guess they'll get water again this afternoon.

luffa gourds

The grapes are looking pretty good. Even I have a hard time messing up grapes. The vines grow wild like weeds around here and they're hard to kill. Getting grapes from the vines takes a little work since grapes don't really make fruit unless you prune them but that's not too much work. They fruit to produce a second generation if they're in danger so you have to cut them hard enough to really scare them. A grape vine can grow to be 100 ft. long. I cut all of mine to about 6' long. I also cut off all the branches and just leave a few buds to make new branches. This jumble of vines will be just two little branches this winter.

grapes

To get supermarket quality grapes requires a lot of work but all I really need is grapes that are eatable and that's pretty easy.

We've got a volunteer squash of some sort growing in a flower bed around the house. I don't know what it is for sure yet but I'm guessing pumpkin. Maybe we dropped a seed there when making jack-o-lanterns. I don't know where it came from but we're letting it grow. We had to trail it up over the steps to the laundry room to save it from the mower.

volunteer pumpkin?

Japanese Attack!

My computer's been down. I wanted to post that it had a bug but the problem really was that it didn't have a registry. I'm not an expert on computers but I learned this past weekend that if your computer has a corrupt registry, it won't work. It won't boot windows, it won't do anything. It becomes a paperweight with your life trapped inside.

So I had to reinstall everything from scratch. Fortunately I was able to recover most of our files but I expect that it will take me another month before everything's working the way it was working before.

There wasn't very much to post about anyway. It's been hot, and dry for several weeks. I'm running water somewhere in the garden almost every day trying to keep up. It's the time of the summer when things get a little bigger every week but nothing interesting happens. The spring fruits and vegetables are done and now we're just waiting for something to be ready in the fall.

Nothing interesting happened until today.





Today, at work, I noticed a couple of Japanese Beetles flying around. I made a mental note to check my grapes when I got home. I forgot the note. This evening, My wife mentioned that her roses were covered with beetles. So I went out to see and sure enough so were my grapes. I had this problem a couple of years ago, it only lasts a few days but these bugs can eat a grape vine bare in that time.




I sprayed some pyrethrin which knocks bugs down fast and some sevin which sticks around for a while. Hopefully they'll all be dead soon. They've already eaten lots of leaves down to the skeleton in just a day.




Japanese Beetles are immigrants to the us accidentally imported from Japan 90 years ago . They do a lot of damage but they will do jobs that American bugs won't do.

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

June Drop, Fire Blight, Squatters

Last year, all my peaches fell off the tree in early June. This year, the peaches on the tree look bigger and healthier than they looked last year and I hoped I was in the clear. Yesterday, it started. June Drop. When peach trees have too many fruit, they do drop some fruit this time of year, I'm hoping that's all this is but after last year, I'm expecting the worst. No body knows exactly what causes it but competition for nutrients and water seems to have something to do with it. We've had plenty of rain and I fertilized earlier this week.

June Drop

I've had to cut two branches out of one pear tree. It looks like fire blight to me. Fire blight is a bacterial infection that works its way down the branch to the tree. There is no cure. The only thing to do is cut out branches as they start to show symptoms. You cut several inches below the obvious infection and hopefully it hasn't moved down past where you cut the branch off. A few days ago I was hoping that the 5 or 6 pears on the tree survived until they were ripe. Now I'm hoping the tree survives.

I can spray some preventative chemicals next year in early spring but it's too late to do anything now and it can spread into the rest of the fruit trees.

fire blight

Something's moved into my grapes. I don't know what it is yet. My wife thinks it's a Mocking bird.

squatters

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.

Asparagus: Not completely Awful

We had our first batch of asparagus this evening with dinner. Actually, it's my first asparagus ever. I've seen it on the menu before but with stomachs having limited room, it never made it high enough on the list to actually be tried. It's a fern and I'm not sure people are supposed to eat ferns. However, the same kind of thinking would have kept me from enjoying mushrooms on my pizza since fungus seems like it belongs on the "do not eat" list too. So, being an open minded kind of guy, I figured that after 37 years of avoiding it, I'd try Asparagus.

Wow, it looks like a picture in a magazine!
(until you notice the plastic disposable cup
in the upper right corner.
I moved the Styrofoam plates and the
Bounty paper towel "napkins" to make it look
more classy.)

I followed a simple recipe I found online and blanched the asparagus before cooking on the stove with a little butter and garlic. My wife said they were the best she's ever had. My 8 year old daughter had a second helping. My 15 month old son once ate a cricket so his opinion on food should be considered with skepticism but he ate it too. I didn't hate them as much as I thought I would.

Now, I went into this thing understanding it wasn't going to taste like a bacon cheeseburger, so in all fairness, the bar wasn't really set very high. Taking that into consideration, the asparagus really wasn't that bad. If they were served to me when I was a guest in someone's home, I could probably eat them to be polite and not even make yucky faces.

A few more garden notes: My strawberries are starting to flower. I put in the strawberry patch last spring and pinched off all the flowers last year so they'd put out runners and new plants instead of making fruit. This year, I get to have strawberries. This is another thing I've never grown and I'm curious to see how it pans out.

strawberry flowers

My grapes are starting to get some leaves. The vines are 4 years old this year. I had 3 vines last year and got grapes for the first time. I have a red seedless, purple seedless, and green seedless variety. The red seedless has seeds so who knows what that really is. We had more grapes last year than we could eat and I added 3 seeded varieties last spring so we should have even more this year.

grape vines getting leaves

The problem with grapes is they're only good fresh. I've never heard of freezing or canning grapes. Since you eat them fresh, you have to eat them when they're ripe and grapes ripen over about 2 weeks. If you only end up with 10 lbs of grapes, you've got 2 weeks to eat them so you better like grapes.

And finally, my apple trees are in bloom. These are the two 5-in-1 apple grafts that have 5 different varieties grafted onto one trunk and are supposed to produce 5 varieties on each tree.

Apple blossoms

Last year, only the golden delicious branches had any apples. This year it looks like almost every branch has flowers. Maybe I will get more than one variety. I was pretty skeptical about this working out. In fact, I was so skeptical that I put 2 regular apple trees in this year in case my 5-in-1's turned out to be a dud. We'll see.

Boring Garden Layout

Here's a sketch of the layout of my permanent plantings. I started putting this stuff in in 2005, adding a row or two each year. I think I'm done now. I can't think of anything else to put in.

I hate gardening (I know...I don't know why I do it either) so I have tried to make my plants as carefree as possible so I don't have to do much work. To achieve that I've been putting in drip irrigation. Underground water mains feed riser pipes that poke up through the ground. At each riser pipe, I can attach drip lines for each row. It's a lot of work in the beginning to install all of this stuff but it lasts for years and now I don't spend much time watering. I just turn a few valves and the next morning every thing's been watered.

Here's the layout of my permanent plants that produce (or are supposed to) year after year. I also plant a garden of the traditional garden vegetables each year. (click the picture to enlarge.)