Belated Garden Update

 

With posts on our vacation and other things, I'm trying to clear my phone of photos so here is a belated garden update from two weeks ago when we returned home from our vacation and saw our garden for the first time in three weeks. Above was a picture of our harvest.

Above is where we dug the three buckets of potatoes that remained. We had pillaged about a third of the crop for fingerling or new potatoes earlier in the year. To the right are the row of strawberries which seem to be doing okay. In fact, before we left on vacation my wife cut the shoots off of them, as recommended for the first year, and now they are loaded with unripe berries. 

The heat and dry weather is taking a toll our our dry shell bean crop. These three climbing varieties showed so much promise earlier in the season but apparently didn't produce a lot of pods. We were so busy with other aspects of our garden we didn't inspect them closer so we'll see in the coming weeks when we are able to get a closer look.

The bush varieties of dry shell beans are almost dried out for picking and they have a lot more pods so I'm more hopeful about them despite the weeds that have taken over the bed in our absence.

Our old apple tree is absolutely loaded full of apples which I'm excited about. A friend gave me a recipe for canning apple pie filling that I'm wanting to try out to preserve our crop and reduce the load inside our small freezer.

Pay no attention to the weeds along the edges but my wife's experimental cut flower bed is really doing great. I had hoped to trim the edges with my string trimmer but the rest of my crew was wanting to leave so I ran out of time this go around. Next weekend!

More flowers. We've been filling up a lot of flower vases in our house and those of acquaintances.

Our raspberry patch is showing a lot of promise and there are lots of new sprouts coming up around the ones we planted this spring. Hopefully next year we should have some fruit to pick.

The grapes are still hanging in there but aren't growing nearly as fast.

We can grow okra okay even this far north but our once a week visits is problematic due to the rapid growing nature of the pods. We can only harvest the pods that started a couple days before our arrival. Any too small to harvest one weekend will look like the ones above by the following weekend, huge and touch as a brick.

We have two garden beds and the second one had a few rows of peas and the above row of okra but the bulk of it this year was planted in a variety of melons, squash, gourds and pumpkins. Despite the lack of moisture, due in large part because of our prior mulching efforts, it seems to be weathering the dry weather okay.

Walking around the perimeter, I spied a crooked neck squash

 

A couple Hubbard squash which in my humble opinion, make the best pumpkin pies

A melon of some sort, I'm not sure what kind though.

An already ripe and rather large pumpkin. This one probably weighed about 20 pounds.

Lots of mini pumpkin looking gourds

And these Turk's Turban gourds that my daughters picked out.

The orchard is doing okay though I gave them five gallons of water the last time I saw them and three weeks later I gave each one ten gallons of water and not a drop of it made it more than a foot away from the trunk of the tree. Even the sour cherry trees that I thought had died the last time I saw them still had small new leaves growing on just about every branch so perhaps they will still put away enough to survive the coming winter.

And just for Debby's sake, a picture of the asparagus patch awaiting late winter when we can burn the tops off to stimulate the new spring crop.

Finally the arched trellis where my MIL and wife grow some of their Filipino crops, namely this year the bitter melon and sitaw (a long string bean) seen in several of the baskets at the top of this post.

The small ears of sweetcorn that we didn't harvest right before we left were eaten and enjoyed tremendously by racoons which took more than their fare share this year. Next year, my wife might listen to my pleas and re-evaulate her position on growing more of it and instead just buy it from other local growers who grow more than than can eat.