Fruits of Our Labor

 As you read this, we are hopefully mid stay in a VRBO rental in Maryland visiting our nations capital day and swimming in the pool out back in the evenings. But this picture was taken a little over two weeks ago when I made a trip out to the garden with the sole goal of picking peas and seeing how things grew in the week since mulching. Above is our two rows of potatoes split by a now partial row of onions. All are looking really good.

Behold a literal field of tomatoes, though there are some kohlrabi, cabbage, peppers and perhaps a few other things out there. The second planting of tomatoes, the ones that were our backups after the first planting died of thirst, grew so much over this last week, they have overtaken the bigger ones we planted just a couple weeks back that were given to us. They just need a couple weeks to acclimatize and grow some roots and then it is off to the races. 

I think those are cucumbers that my wife planted in hopes of trellising them later. 

Last week (as I write this) on our way home, a gardening show plays on the radio station I listen too and a caller wrote in about how to improve her peach crop. The advise given was to thin out the peaches to allow the remaining ones to receive more energy and become bigger. The suggestion was to shake the branches to allow some of the weaker ones to fall off and keep the more robust ones. I did that and some peaches did fall off but certainly not enough to notice. The branches are absolutely loaded. 

Above is the thing that tickled me most this trip, grapes growing on our grapevine that we planted a couple years back. It has never done well, always getting eaten to shreds by some bug. But this year, earlier this spring when it was still healthy, I tied some of the longer vines up and it has really liked that. Thus far, the bugs haven't found it this year and I hope to maybe harvest my first grape ever!

Also exciting is that we have a blackberry crop growing too. We've had access to the wild ones but have always had to fight the birds, thorns and weeds for them and then the small fruit they produce are very seedy to eat. These are supposed to be thornless, not as seedy and have much larger fruit but we still may have to fight the birds for them. Not pictured are some golden and red raspberries that are also producing fruit but they weren't very photogenic yet.

Finally is a picture of our apple tree which has lots of apples in it again. I canned a lot of ready to bake pie/cobbler filling last year so probably won't can any this year. I'm not sure what we will do with them at this point other than eat ourselves silly when they are fresh picked. Maybe we can find a home for them elsewhere.