Garden Update

 

Note, all these photos were taken about ten days ago. We have a series of guests that will be staying with us for a few weeks of July and with everyone home, our only spare bedroom is the Murphy bed in my office which means my time spent on my desktop, where I primarily blog from, will be limited. Thus I am writing a number of posts ahead of time just to keep things going. I can comment from my iPad in a pinch which short responses but I wouldn't want to try to compose a blog post using the same way.

Above was the state of our sweetcorn patch, planted far later than I have ever planted it. It is in need of mulching which I hope to do some cool morning in the near future. But it looks good and if things go right, we should have some home grown sweet corn near the end of August. I expect we'll have eaten plenty of other sweetcorn also grown and sold locally before them.

A friend of ours brought us a flat of eggplant so we stuck that in the ground. This is the Japanese kind which we find more tasty than the ones that are traditionally planted around here. To the left is a row of parsnips that I planted earlier in the spring. I have never planted them before so this is a learning experience for me.

Above is our red potato patch which is doing quite nicely. The variety I planted are supposed to store well so these we haven't been harvesting any just yet. The gold potatoes behind me as I took this picture, don't store as well and so we have been harvesting those as needed already. I didn't take a picture of them but their greenery is starting to die off already. I didn't pay attention but they were probably a lot shorter season than the red ones above.

Some cabbage plants and french style green beans. My wife already picked a large mess of those already and we've been eating them with our meals. None of our beans had a really good stand and I suspect it had to do with the soil temperatures being too cold when we planted them and thus had poor germination. It was warm when we planted them but then we got a stretch of cooler weather immediately following that. Had we waited another couple weeks to plant, I'm sure we would have gotten much better results. 

Some of my planted dry shell beans that also didn't have the best germination. But what pods are on them are nice and full so I'm not going to complain. Also towards the right is a yellow squash plant which has been producing squash already for our meals. I love this time of the year when we can go out in the garden and come back with a meal.

With the cool spring we have, this will probably be the lastest year for harvesting my first ripe tomatoes but there are lots of them out there and they are loving this heat that we have been recently having. I tried keeping up with them and training the vines through the staked wire cages but they eventually just grew out of control. Still, it will be much easier picking than last year when we didn't get them caged at all.

Finally, a blurry shot of our bluebird nest. Typically they always lay five eggs and sometimes six. For some reason, perhaps the stress of fighting off the sparrows to get these laid, we only ended up with four. The last one was laid probably on June 15 and typical incubation time is 13 to 21 days so as I write this, the first one hatching could occur in another four or five days. Fortunately bluebirds are very patient and aren't disturbed by me making daily trips out to photograph their nest. They mostly just sit in a nearby tree and keep and eye on me. Still, I try to time my trips by waiting until they fly off for foraging and then quickly snap my picture.