Category: house

Lookin’ good, right?

While we were on vacation, the soup beans and green beans took off, so those are moving along well. The green beans have some flowers on them, so in a few short weeks, we’ll be out there picking. We haven’t tried digging up any carrots yet (left), but they should be ready soon, if not already.

The pepper plants are a mixed bag, with three of them looking okay and three of them looking…puny… Seems like it kinda always goes like that, but we’ll see. Off to the far left, you can see the pumpkin plant Calvin wanted Brooke to put in and it’s doing just fine. Probably going to take over the whole thing…and we’ll get 0 pumpkins from it…figures…

The lettuce plants have produced very well, but after pulling off leaves left and right, they aren’t looking great anymore. We’ll probably get another week or two out of it, but we don’t expect to get a ton more. In the background, Brooke planted sweet potatoes in that lattice box in hopes that we can keep adding dirt to it, filling the box (ish), and getting the sweet potatoes to grow up in the box rather than in the soil underneath. That way, when we lift said box in a few months, the potatoes should just fall right out. Considering there are holes all over that thing to leak dirt, I’m not sure how this is going to work, but oh well…we’ve got potatoes from last year, so we can afford to experiment.

Brooke also planted a round of spinach and some black beans next to them, but those haven’t popped up yet. Off to the far right, that’s where the cucumber is supposed to be, but that’s been coming on pretty slowly. We’ll see if we eventually cross the proverbial finish line on those…

In other news, the pole beans have all sprouted, the raspberries and blackberries are doing well (some blackberries are growing, but aren’t ready yet), and the strawberries have actually been producing! Only a few berries a day, but considering that we didn’t expect to get anything, we’re pleased. They’re also projecting out “runners,” so they’re spreading in the space we’ve provided for them.

The tomatoes are rockin’ it, as always. The plant sizes are pretty variable (also “as always”…), but we’ve already got some tomatoes coming on with the biggest plants. We tied them up tonight to keep ’em moving upward moreso than outward…

Brooke did some trimming of the oregano, lemon balm, and mint plants, so that’s all under control. Also, the milkweed we planted back in may is doing surprisingly well, but I’m having to keep it weeded to keep them happy. No flowers yet on them.

The bees also appear to be doing well in that spot. Brooke needs to get into the hive and check on them, as it’s been since before vacation when she did it. We’re assuming they’re ready for a super on the top, by this point, so maybe we’ll have some honey by mid-July?

The most recent project has been trying to fight off the evil Japanese beetles that we know are coming. Brooke found one in the neighbor’s yard, but that’s the only one we’ve seen. Thus, we’re trying to be more proactive about battling them, and we’re trying kaolin clay. Our understanding is that it should serve as a bee-safe pest control that should still allow the fruit to keep growing on the tree. We picked up a bag and tried painting it onto the fruit, but that was relatively inefficient. Seen above, Brooke picked up a spray bottle and she tried diluting it enough to work in that setting. Much faster, though in that concentration, it seems to work better on the peaches than the apples due to their fuzzy coating.

Speaking of which, the peaches are looking good! Getting bigger and smelling great. The apples are a bit smaller, but the seem to be progressing nicely, too.

Pears! We have pears! This is the first year we’ve had pears! Yay yay yay yay yay!!!

I think that’s about it. Everything’s moving along well! It’s been cool and rainy all week, so I tried seeding some grass where our yucca plants used to be. That’s working alright so far, too, but I bet I’ll need to water more after this week.

This’ll be a quick update, as I just posted something a few days ago, but we needed to pull out all the spinach so I wanted to record how much we got. Seems like we have multiple Aldi-sized bags-worth of them, so it was worth the effort! Brooke thinks this is substantially more than we had last year, and I agree. Thus far, we’ve clocked 4 gallon-size bags full of it. The lettuce is coming on pretty well, too, but we haven’t harvested any of it yet.

We’ll freeze most of the spinach to be used for smoothies. We’re hoping some of the spinach continues to grow for a few more weeks so we can have some fresh stuff for salads, but the majority of it will be saved for our smoothie habit.

Other than that, we’ve got a few more things moving along, including some little strawberry-lets, so hopefully we’ll get a few of those in the near future, too! We weren’t anticipating that we’d get all that many strawberries this season yet, but we’ve got at least 5 moving along. Fingers crossed!

We’ve also got some buds on the raspberries moving along, so Calvin’s excited to start going out every day and stealing them before I can get one…

Brooke also put the next hive body on the bees today. She saw plenty of bees in there and some new brood, so the nuc appears to be doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

And last but not least, Brooke spent the week working on macrame so she could hang up some plants on the front porch. She’s very proud of them. 🙂

That’s enough! Looking forward to fresh strawberries! …so long as the squirrels lay off of them…

We finally got some garden time in this weekend, between having an available day and also not having constant rain… It was kinda a “make or break” day for us to get things in, so we went by Orscheln to get some tomatoes, pepper plants, and some flowers for the front porch. This was after we visited the Birds & Bees festival in Arrow Rock to see some…er….birds and bees….but also to pick up some native plants and herbs. More on that later…

Regardless, the radishes and spinach are doing quite well! We’ve had about 3 rounds of radishes in the quantity pictured below. The spinach pulled is our first official harvest, but as you can see in the image above, there’s plenty more where that came from. Also, the open part of the plot pictured above is currently housing volunteer tomatoes, but is destined for cucumbers once we get around to planting them.

Otherwise, we also planted about 8 pepper plants (mostly green, one yellow), and a pumpkin plant that Calvin wanted (I said “no,” but was overruled…). Next to that set of peppers, we will be planting green beans, probably mid-week when the ground dries out a bit more.

The carrots are doing dramatically better than last year (which is to say, we have more than one carrot plant). They’re pretty small and took forever to pop up, but so long as it continues along this vein, we should end up with a decent number of carrots…er…eventually…

Again, the tomatoes end up doing well for us usually, but this year, we didn’t end up with freebies from the Botany class on campus. We grabbed mostly “beef-type” slicers and some Italian roma varieties. We didn’t plant many (any?) cherry tomato varieties because we always get volunteers, and lo and behold, we totally do.

We spent a decent amount of time cleaning out the herb garden, as there were tons of weeds and waaaaaaay too much mint growing. We think we left the flowers that have been growing from year to year, and also bought a few milkweed plants from the Birds & Bees festival to help the butterflies and bees. The kids also scored a free shining blue star that should do well in that spot in the coming years. Regardless, the mint, lemon balm, and oregano (that I forgot was even in there…) are all doing crazy well. I’ll probably need to pare those back a bit as the summer continues…

Lastly, the lettuce is finally getting to the point where we may be able to pick some of it. Brooke moved the chives to the raised bed, and also planted some sage and basil. Brooke dug in the raised bed a bit and we can’t say we are particularly impressed with the dirt we laid down awhile back, as it’s become kinda compacted and “layered” in the bed. It sure seems like the dirt in the garden is far blacker and healthier than what the raised bed has, so we’ll have to see what ends up happening in the next few years.

And last, but certainly not least, we’ve got some peaches and apples growing in our trees, which is in keeping with what we got last year (minus the Japanese beetles…), so that part isn’t all that surprising. What is exciting is that we’ve got about 6 pears growing finally! Our first crop of them! Woo hoo!!

That’ll do for now!

Relative to 2018, we’re a bit behind. We’ve had so much rain, freezing rain, ice, snow, blizzards, and glaciers this year that it’s been too wet to till up the garden, let alone burn the brush off of it from last year. In the meantime, we’ve had it in mind for awhile to add a raised garden bed between our new patio and the rest of the garden, so we took advantage of one of the first nice days we’ve had in 2019 to get started on it.

We went with cinder blocks to get it started, along with PVC pipes to not only lock it down to the ground, but also serve as places to stick some re-bar hoops in to let us cover the plot in winter. Brooke also saw a post online where we could just put down cardboard to kill off the grass, while letting it biodegrade slowly. We also had some leaves and brush around so…we threw that in there… Why not…

Brooke had me pick up quite a few bags of dirt to throw in this plot. We put 5 bags of topsoil on the bottom layer, directly on top of the cardboard.

This was followed with a layer of peat moss. That stuff was a bit more “solid” than we expected, likely because it was so compacted in those giant bags. Believe you me, that 3 cu. ft. bag took up more space in the car than the 5 bags of top soil did…

Lastly, we put four bags of compost down, followed by a final layer of 5 more bags of top soil.

Finished product! The plan is to put lettuce and some herbs in it as soon as we can. We’ll put the re-bar in the PVC pipes this Fall and then find some thick plastic to cover everything, hopefully to keep things growing into January 2020. As I’m sure you know, more pictures to come as 2019 continues!

The garden has slowed down to a degree, mostly because rain has been very scarce.  I’ve watered as best I can, of course, but there’s only so much a sprinkler can do.  The temperatures this week have been great: the A/C has been off for a week and will remain that way into next week!

The green beans are “done,” it seems.  You can see in the picture above, but the middle of the crop just died off all the sudden and we aren’t sure why.  Regardless, Brooke canned 28 pints of beans, plus another 2 pints that didn’t seal correctly, and the 3+ quart-size bags we’ve given away to others.  Brooke has also canned cucumbers as lime pickles and ended up with 7 pints of those, but the cucumbers are still coming so she’ll end up with more.

The tomatoes have taken off and have tons of green ones on, but we have relatively few that have actually ripened.  And by “relatively few,” I mean “two.”  We’ve stolen a few from the Gault’s next door, as it always seems like theirs ripen a month before ours do.  I’m not sure what black magic their casting, but whatever it is, it works.

The soup beans are also vining out substantially, though the ones furthest from the trees are doing better. I’m sure it’s the excess sunlight they get over there, but still, worth noting.

The berries aren’t doing much right now.  The Japanese Beetle War of 2018 spilled over to them for a little while, but I’m not sure they actually did much damage.  We did lose all the peaches except for four that I picked early.  After the beetles were done last week (seriously, it took a month this year…), there were still 3 or 4 peaches out there, but when we looked this week, we couldn’t find them.  We suspect the neighbors stole them…grrrrrr…

The pole beans have some nice looking pods on them, so we think we’ll be able to pick some soon!

The peppers keep truckin’ along.  We’ve got Margaret Peppers coming off the plants, as they’re starting to turn red.  They’re bell-type peppers, but they’ve got an ever-so-slight “kick” to them that Meg doesn’t seem to mind.  The other plants are mostly hot peppers of the Coyame variety (I think…they at least look a lot like those from last year…)

Last but not least, we added to the walkway over the past few weeks!  Meg and Calvin helped a little bit, but weren’t as interested this year in concrete work.  I think I ended up getting something like 20 or 25 bags (80 lb) of concrete mix to finish this up, though I’ve got a few extra I didn’t use.  The intent is to put a few patio chairs out there and move the chiminea onto the platform, but I’m waiting a few more days for the concrete to harden more fully.  I put sand and pea gravel on today, but I still need to get some more to fill in the gaps a bit better.

We’re happy with it, but may need to add a few more segments depending on which chairs we end up settling on.  We’ll probably landscape around the patio a bit, but as it’s so shaded there, we need to be careful what, exactly, we plant nearby.  Brooke has a large pot she picked up to get something started for next year already, so that’ll make an appearance once she gets some time.

Ultimately, we want some nice old metal chairs, or something similar, but they’re ridiculously expensive and you kinda need to run into them at antique malls, so we’ll get something for the meantime and keep our eyes open for “just the right chairs” to go there.  It may be a bit before we find exactly what we want.

Also, in the space between the patio and the tomato garden plot, we’re going to put in a raised bed and a make-shift greenhouse for some lettuce.  We want to get that going in the next few weeks so we have time to plant lettuce for the Fall, and perhaps a few other things.  I think Brooke’s going to plant some herbs there, too, but we’ll need to wait until next Spring for those.  We’ll see what she picks, I suppose!

The garden mostly took off while we were on vacation.  We had some weeds to clear out, mostly from the pepper and tomato plots, but we have everything generally back up to spec after a week.  The corn has gotten taller, though no tassels have appeared.   I feel like they’re doing better than last year, but that’s probably because we planted them late last time around. There were flowers on the green beans when we left and they turned into full-fledged beans in that period of time.

Brooke’s canned 9 pints so far and we’ve eaten on and given away others.  As usual, we can just toss green bean seeds into dirt and grow a ridiculous crop.  You can’t not grow green beans, folks…

The tomatoes have been tied up and flowers are showing up all over.  There aren’t all that many actual tomatoes on yet, but we’ve seen some tiny ones on there, and some romas that are getting within striking distance.  The plants are looking healthy, but rain has been sparse, so we’re having to water them quite a bit.

The peppers are similar.  We’ve actually got multiple bell peppers that are nearly ready to pick, as well as some hot peppers (no idea what they are…some assortment Brooke planted) that are nearing full size, and on those plants, we’ve also got more on the way.  In the picture below, you can see the remnants of the lettuce in the background that’s getting taken over by weeds, so I need to flip it all over in the next few days.  Brooke’s thinking she’ll plant some more spinach and eventually some lettuce for the Fall crop.  One step at a time…

The pole beans and sweet potatoes are still truckin’ along.  The raspberries are still coming on a few at a time, and we had Sam’s cat sitter eat on them while we were on vacation, so I think she probably got the bulk of them.

The trees are another story.  The peaches are looking really, really good, but the Japanese beetles are terrorizing near everything else.  They’re really hitting the apple trees, cherry tree and almond tree and we’ve been waging war as best we can.  Brooke’s got two traps up and emptied one already, and I’ve been spraying the trees with an organic pesticide that shouldn’t affect bees or other pollinators.  Hopefully this ends quickly, but until then, it’s a headache (as it was last year…).

Lastly, Brooke spent some time watering the front porch plants today and pulled down a hanging fern only to find some stowaways.  🙂