Garden Check Upon Our Return

The day we left for our vacation, the area where our garden resides was labeled as being in extreme drought, the highest rating given out. Frankly, I wasn't sure much would be left of it after being gone for nearly 18 days at that point. But a couple of inches of blessed rain had fallen in our absence and it was looking quite good.  Above is a row of potatoes and another one of cabbage. The weedy spot to the left had been home to another row of potatoes and a row of onions. My brother-in-law had been wanting to harvest something so I told him to dig up a few potatoes and onions. While I was mowing the grass around all the fruit trees, he dug up an entire row of potatoes and all the onions. All were still lush and green on top and could have grown a lot more but weren't given the chance. My wife, still new to gardening, wasn't aware of this either and so didn't intervene. Thus out of an entire row of potatoes and an entire row of onions, we got one small basket of each. We still have another row of potatoes, the expensive ones from Row 7 that didn't get dug up so I'm not too upset at the loss. We hopefully will still have more than we can eat. This was our first year of raising onions since we retook up gardening and no salsa is being planned, so the loss of them prematurely isn't a big loss either. 

The tomato plants took over during our absence and are all way too big to stake so we will just let them grow as they wish this year. The earliest tomatoes have lots of green fruit and the later ones are full of blossoms so I'm hoping we will get a lot to can this year as we haven't canned tomatoes in a few years. We are short on nearly everything but salsa.

The one real disappointment was the old peach tree from our wedding orchard, full of peached for the first time in many years. Heavy winds and a weak spot in the trunk blew it over. It isn't snapped and there is plenty of bark on the underneath side of the week spot so I'm still hoping it will survive this year until the peaches, about the side of large golf balls, are ripe enough to pick. But I'm guessing the ravages of winter will kill it off even if it survives that long. I will be sad to see it go. There is another snag of a peach tree, in much worse shape and one apple tree, in decent shape that remains of the orchard we planted on the day after our wedding.

We planted some Asian cucumbers and a smaller American variety for pickling this year under our arched trellis. They had a half basket of cucumbers more than ready to pick when we checked on them. My wife is trying to train them to climb up the trellis but I have my doubts. Also is one of a few small cabbages that we picked.

Later, while our guests were otherwise occupied, I quickly turned what cucumbers we hadn't already eaten fresh into sweet pickles for our pantry. My mom always used to make sweet pickles and this was my first attempt at canning some. They are now melding and doing their thing on the canning shelves in the basement with more to join their ranks in the coming weeks. I hope to make some kosher dills out of some of them too.