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

Thinning Fruit

After last week's warm up, it got cold again this weekend. It also rained...a lot. My rain gauge showed 3-1/2" of rain. The wind blew over several trees in the area and knocked out our electricity for a few hours Sunday night into Monday morning. No damage to the garden other than a few broken branches on the fruit trees and some of the asparagus is now growing with a slight tilt.

The peach, pear, and apple trees all have lots of fruit. Too much fruit. If the trees were allowed to grow that much fruit, the tree couldn't keep up. The fruit would be small and not very good to eat. Fruit trees need to be thinned to produce big, juicy apples, pears, and peaches.

peaches too close on the branch

The rule of thumb is to have one peach about every 6 inches on a branch. That means most of the fruit has to come off. It took me about 45 minutes to thin two peaches and two pears. I'll work on the apples on another day.

Thinned Peaches

Apples and pears grow fruit in clusters. To thin apples or pears, you leave the biggest fruit in any cluster and remove the rest. The picture is apples. Peaches look exactly the same, just a little more green.

Commercial growers thin fruit in different ways. Most thin flowers since they come off easier than fruit. Fruit tends to hold on for dear life. Flowers are weak. There are big machines that smack the trees with ropes to knock off some of the flowers. I saw one of these in action breaking branches and damaging trees. There are chemicals that will cause flowers to fall off. By being very careful how much you spray, you can only kill a percentage of the flowers. You don't want to mix too much. And some thin flowers by hand, often with toilet brushes. I was worried that frost might get some of my flowers so I waited until there was fruit to thin.

The garden greens are starting to really take off. I planted spinach, lettuce, mixed greens, radishes, carrots, and probably other stuff. I wrote the names in marker on plastic row marker stakes and stuck them in the rows. Apparently I didn't use a permanent marker and now I'm not sure what's growing where. No problem I didn't plan on eating anything green anyway.

garden greens

My wife's seen a groundhog hanging around the garden. It must be eying up the leafy stuff because there isn't anything else to eat yet. Last year she watched him steel tomatoes.

And finally, I've got red strawberries. Most of the berries look like the tiny green ones at the top of this picture but I found two that are getting red. I think I'll have strawberries next week. Finally something from the garden I like.

a lonely red strawberry

Salad Seeds

Earlier today I posted that it was just to wet to plant anything today. The sun and wind dried things out and My 8 year old daughter and I got a couple of rows in late this afternoon.




In my garden, some things get planted in distinct rows like corn and peppers. Other things get planted in swath's about a foot wide. That's what we did today with carrots, radish, spinach and several different types of lettuce. We raked out a flat, level row about 18 inches wide, stretched some strings across the garden to give us nice strait sides to our wide row and just broadcast the seeds on the ground between the strings. A pass with a rake to lightly cover the seeds with soil and we were done.

two new rows of spinach, lettuce, carrots, and radishes

When these come up, everything will be growing too close together and we'll have to pull most of the lettuce and spinach to make room for full sized heads. As soon as the heads get just big enough to harvest, they will be eaten by deer. When we want lettuce, we'll go to a restaurant and get the salad bar. The stuff there is going to be better than anything I could grow anyway.

The carrots, on the other hand, will not be eaten by the deer. Carrots are clever vegetables and they hide underground where the deer can't see them. The carrots will, however, be overtaken by weeds. You can't hoe or spray weeds in carrots because I grow them too close together to be able to weed between them. But the radishes will do great. They grow so fast and in cool enough weather that weeds don't get a chance to take over. Yum, baskets full of radishes.

After we planted today, I wanted to lightly water everything in. It rained quite a bit over the past couple of days but It's good to be sure. I pulled my customized sprinkler out of the shop and set it up for the first time today. Irrigating a garden this time of year is easy but as the plants get taller, they block the sprinkler from getting everything wet. A few dense rows of corn between the sprinkler and cucumbers means wilting cucumbers. The solution I came up with last year is to put the sprinkler up on a post so it can spray over the tall stuff.



Since my garden's twice as long as it is wide, I can irrigate with two sprinklers. One waters one half and the other waters the other half. But I've only got one sprinkler. No problem. I made up customized sprinkler support posts with a sleeve I can slide my sprinkler into. I water from one post on the first night and move the sprinkler to the other post the second night. A garden innovation brought to you by GardenerX. It saves time and makes watering easy. Let's be honest...gardening sucks... why make it harder than it has to be.