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Long time, no post, eh? Gotta say, it’s been a crazy (checks notes) 6 months. I’ll post an update on what has taken up so much time, but figured I should get something up about the garden before we get too far into June!

Our neighbor was kind enough to use his pull-behind tiller again on the garden. We have had a shockingly large amount of rain this Spring, so it took a bit to even get much going. We burned the regular stuff in March, but didn’t get the tilling done until mid-April, and even then, it still took a few weeks to get things planted due to weather or us being busy with various other things. Really, though, due to the other “project” that I haven’t posted yet, we had to spend most of our extra time inside the house working on it.

We got kale, spinach, radishes, and a lettuce assortment planted the first week of May. Tomatoes didn’t go in until a few weeks later when Brooke’s Dad brought some tomato cages for her birthday (she’s wanted them for years). This picture is from a few weeks ago (more recent shot down below).

Calvin and Brooke picked the radishes on May 20th, so it didn’t take all that long for them to be ready – and they were pretty good this year, too! Not too spicy, but still had some flavor. Calvin and I are the only two that really eat them, though we did include some in a wilted spinach salad one night.

So yeah, we’ve been picking lettuce for sandwiches, salads, and Barnaby for a month now. It’s started getting warm, though, with some days reaching 87 F. It’s relatively cool today, but it’s supposed to start heating up this weekend and continue into next week. We’ve already had some of the lettuce bolt out to seed, so the days of picking fresh lettuce are probably numbered. The kale is still looking pretty good though, so hopefully it continues for awhile longer.

We ended up with a reasonable strawberry haul, though they were ready earlier than we’re used to. Brooke has some frozen downstairs for tossing in drinks sometimes. She also made some jars of strawberry jam. And of course, Calvin just went out to the patch to pick some from time to time!

The asparagus took off pretty well, too, but we’re told we shouldn’t eat it in the first year after planting, so we just let it grow outside the strawberry patch. More on that next year, maybe!

And unfortunately due to a freeze, we didn’t get any cherries this year. Around now, we’d have buckets full of them, but alas, not in 2026!

Here’s what the lettuce looks like today. More overgrown, but still some good stuff in there. Brooke will probably pick this weekend to do something with it. She already dehydrated some kale for making more powder since she’s out, but there’s clearly more where that came from! The tomatoes are liking this hotter weather, too, so they’re just truckin’ right along. But yeah, maybe another week or so of lettuce left, if I were to guess.

Brooke and Calvin made some mounds this past weekend for planting watermelons. We’ve never really had good luck with them, but Calvin insisted, so there are some planted. I think Brooke’s also putting garbanzo beans in this plot. It’s our “catch all,” or “plant weird stuff” plot for 2026.

The bean plot has started, though only the soup beans are up. The rows are marked for the green beans, but I didn’t see many pop up yet in my cursory look. Once they’re up, I’ll work on putting grass clippings between the rows, but we’ve got a long way to go on them.

As far as the bees go, like last year, on April 19th, one of our hives swarmed, and yet again they went to the apple tree. I think it took three tries(ish) to get them to stay in a hive body. It was difficult to figure out if they had the queen or not. I don’t think Brooke or Calvin ever confidently found her, but after multiple tries, they got the swarm situated in a new hive body.

We’ve got three supers on there now and Calvin took a peek yesterday. The swarm hive is the unpainted one to the north of the “bee plot.” That one doesn’t seem to have much going on, but there’s a solid amount of capped honey in the bottom super on the south hive. There’s a lot of stuff flowering right now and it’s still been raining at least once a week, so I’m not sure what the holdup is. Brooke will probably need to get in there with Calvin sometime in the next few weeks to get a better sense of where we’re at, but it looks like a promising year for honey!

That’s good for now! Stay tuned for another productive garden year!

I didn’t get anything posted in August (a lot was going on!), and since the garden is dying down, I figured I’m running out of time to talk about it. There are only a few things left to focus on, at this point, but overall, we think it was a solid year!

It hasn’t rained much in the past few weeks. It has also been unseasonably mild, temperature-wise, so I think the plants just know it’s time to wither away. There are still some green tomatoes on a few vines, but they’re pretty small and don’t show any sign of developing further.

A few weeks ago, though, we were getting some good hauls! We had a lot of good slicers this year, so we had our obligatory BLTs for a few weeks in mid-August. Brooke thinks we got at least 3 bags of tomatoes processed and frozen, so while more would have been nice, we still did pretty well.

The sweet potatoes are just about all that remains of the big plot. The zucchini died off about a month ago, and the squash never amounted to anything. I think we ended up with two squash, but beetles got to them both pretty quickly, and they didn’t get much larger than an apple, so not as successful as we’ve had in the past.

The eggplant, though, did alright! We probably ended up with 8 or 9 eggplants about this size?? They all looked pretty good! Brooke made baba ganoush once, but otherwise, she dehydrated them and mixed them in with various ground meat meals in the past few weeks. We’ll probably plant them again in the future, since they didn’t take up much space, and we actually got some fruit out of them.

Brooke processed the sorghum two weekends ago, just like she did the last time she grew them. She ended up getting about a quart and a half of sorghum extract. Not really all that much, but it’s still in keeping with our quest to make sweet things off the land.

Peppers are also one of the few remaining things we’ve got growing. The “banana peppers” ended up being hotter than we’d anticipated, so Brooke is letting them all turn red and then dehydrating them. We’re going to smoke some of them so we can make smoked paprika, which sounds pretty good to me!

The soup beans are the other thing that took over the bean plot. Again, we didn’t get much from our green beans this year (we got enough, but it wasn’t exactly a bumper crop here in 2025…). The soup beans, on the other hand, are doing just fine as always!

In that same plot, we had some cantaloupe growing. Of the 9 or 10 that ultimately grew, only one of them was viable (the others rotted or never really got big enough to ripen). The one we got was pretty good, though I’m not convinced the space those plants took up was worth the one cantaloupe.

And last, but not least, Brooke dug up (dumped out??) her laundry basket of potatoes and….this is what she got! We ate these last week and, honestly, they were pretty good! Again, was it worth it to use a laundry basket for what amounts to a dollar or two of new potatoes? Meh. Still, the process worked! Maybe I didn’t water them enough, or maybe they were so deep down in the soil that the water didn’t percolate down far enough?? We’ll try potatoes again next year, but probably without as deep a path for the water to take.

There’s a chance I’ll post one more thing for the end of the season sometime in the next few weeks, but there isn’t much more to develop for Summer 2025’s garden season. Here’s to looking toward Summer 2026!

As usual, it’s been a bit since I updated things here, but figured I should hop on the garden before I take care of a vacation and a house project! We’ve had pretty consistent rain this summer, so the garden is in full swing, and we’ve had to weed it more than we’ve had to water it.

Rain/storms have been pretty consistent, seemingly one a week, so it’s somewhat surprising the sorghum has survived without being completely blown over. Brooke also planted popcorn, but it hasn’t really taken off like we’d hoped. Those did blow over and haven’t really recovered, but they never got all that tall, anyway, so we aren’t all that hopeful that they’ll turn out in the end.

Brooke planted eggplant this year! Who knew that they grow down like this?? I thought they grew like zucchini, but apparently not! This plant has about 5 or 6 more fruit (??) on it right now in various stages of growth.

Two picked so far, though we don’t really know what to do with them. Eggplant wasn’t really a staple of either of our families growing up, so we don’t have much of an idea of how to prepare them or what to use them for. Apparently we can grow them relatively well, though, so we’d better figure something out!

As usual, the zucchini are doing pretty well. This year, we didn’t have a plant just shrivel up and die like we frequently do (likely due to fungus?). The leaves are all pretty healthy still and we’ve got maybe 6 of this size so far this year, with a few more smaller ones on the way. Maybe not as prolific as we’ve had in previous years, but one of these things is enough for us (fried, preferably, though I hear we may be having zucchini lasagna this week?), so we aren’t disappointed.

The bean plot is doing alright, though we planted more soup beans than we did green beans this year. Those two rows in the front are the green beans and we didn’t get to picking them as soon as we probably should have. Around now, we’d expect them to flower and start a second round, but as of today, flowers are few and far between on them.

Incidentally, though the soup beans look good, we aren’t seeing many flowers on them yet, either. Some buds look like they’re ready to pop though, so we’re hopeful!

Brooke canned three pint jars today of beans, so we’re making progress! We still have some from last summer, so we aren’t in dire need quite yet, but it would be nice to pad out our stock a bit…

Cantaloupe! We’ve got, like, six cantaloupe growing in there! No telling whether they’ll all make it or not. This one is the largest of the bunch, but there’s more coming on, so hopefully we’ll actually get some melons this year! I’m not sure we’ve actually ever successfully grown a melon…I’ll have to go back through the blog to see if I can find an instance…

Not much to tell about tomatoes yet, except that we’ve got them and they’ve just started turning. Since it’s been so rainy, the leaves are starting to yellow a bit and Brooke had to pick some non-ripe tomatoes because they already split, due to the excess rain. Hopefully we get some dry days to let them turn before splitting, for once… More updates on these in a few weeks!

The peppers, though, are looking good! We’ve been picking some green bell peppers, but haven’t done much with the banana peppers yet. Brooke thinks they may turn colors yet, so we’re leaving them on, but they’re getting pretty big, so getting about time to pick one and see how it turned out. Since we got a new outdoor pizza oven, some pepperoni and banana pepper pizza sounds pretty good (more on that in a future post!).

Last, but not least, Brooke and Calvin got in the hives today and harvested 10 frames of honey! Only two came from one of the swarms we caught a few months ago, while the others came from the hive that survived last winter (against all odds). We’ll extract tomorrow, but this bodes well for having some honey available! There are two supers on the south hive, and the top one had tons of honey, just none capped. Brooke’s hopeful we’ll get another round of honey in September before it’s time to treat for the winter.

That’ll do for now! I’ve got a backlog of other posts I need to work on. It’s been a busy summer, so I haven’t had a lot of time to compile everything we’ve been doing, but hopefully I can get a few more posts going in the next week or so.

We went to Alaska last month! Crazy!

One more quick update before we leave on our trip, as I suspect the garden will…er…not look like this by the time we return… I spent awhile weeding and tying up the tomatoes today, let alone mowing and trimming. It’s looking good, so figured some evidence wouldn’t hurt!

The big deal for the day was getting the tomatoes and peppers prepped (see what I did there?) and ready. I put in the posts, one per tomato plant, and one per shared grouping of peppers. In the past, we’ve used twine and “rope” made from old t-shirts to get the tomato plants suspended, but this year, we’re just going to try one plant, one post, and see how it goes. I’m pretty sure I only snapped one tomato plant (and only one branch…nothing too crazy….), so not bad, overall!

The weather has been especially good for the eggplant, acorn squash, and zucchini plants. They’re spreading their leaves wide, but no flowers on them yet. A bit early, I suppose, but again, we’ve never grown eggplant, so I don’t have a good sense of what to expect on that one. The popcorn and sweet potatoes keep truckin’ along, too.

The sorghum….may just be a lost cause, at this point. The plants are getting taller, so that’s a plus, but there just aren’t many of them. Some seeds were planted in the holes between larger stalks, but I’m just not seeing a lot of evidence that they’re doing very much. Hopefully this is one of those things that turns around substantially while we’re gone!

And last, we’ve got the beans. They look really good! By the time we’re back, they’ll probably be gigantic. No flowers on them just yet, but July is typically when we’d expect them to really get going, so it’s somewhat soon.

Regardless, we’re leaving the garden in good shape. The sorghum has quite a few weeds around them, but most of the rest of the plots are looking pretty good. Was this post necessary after the last one a week ago? Probably not….but again, I wanted some evidence of how it looked before we were gone for over a week. I suspect I’ve got my work cut out for me upon our return…