I’ve been pretty lax on getting things posted this season, but honestly, there’s been a lot going on between going on the Field Biology trip in May and preparing for the vacation Brooke and I are about to go on (more on that eventually!!). The garden’s looking pretty good, though, so I wanted to get something on record while it’s still June!
Brooke planted a few new things this year, including eggplant (upper left); acorn squash (middle); and zucchini (not new, but oh well). We’ve also got sweet potatoes in this plot this year.
The rest of this plot, though, looks mostly terrible. Brooke planted popcorn this year (it’s been a few years since we planted that!) and sorghum, but the latter has been pretty slow to establish. She added a few more seeds to fill some gaps, but even they’ve struggled to come up. We initially thought it was because of the unseasonably cooler weather we’ve had this “summer” thus far, but the longer it goes on, it seems like we may just get nothin’ from the sorghum. The popcorn isn’t perfect, but at least it’s doing something!
The beans appear to be doing alright. She’s got green beans and soup beans mostly in this plot, though we didn’t plant very many green beans this year. We didn’t get as many soup beans as we expected last year, so Brooke’s kinda “flipped” the proportions a bit for this one.
For that bottom row, Brooke put in cantaloupe. We don’t usually have much luck with melons, but hey, can’t win if you don’t play, right?
I also want to note that the edging looks good, right??? Calvin helped a bit with weeding, but I’m trying to keep on it more than I usually do to keep it looking nice. We’ll see how long this lasts….
I need to tie them up still, but here we’ve got 9 tomato plants and a series of pepper plants. This time, Brooke’s got four plants per spot for the peppers (left-hand side) and multiple tomato plants in two rows on the right. I’m a bit curious as to how this will go, as this plot frequently is used for things like kale and lettuce because it stays relatively shaded for most of the morning. We’ve had tomato plants here before, though, so hopefully we have a good year!
In other “planting new things” news, we’re trying asparagus! These are just south of the strawberry plot, currently outside the official confines of the strawberries (not that they ever stay within said confines….). It’s going to take a few years before these really take off, but again, gotta start somewhere…
Speaking of strawberries….. we had another good harvest from them this year! Probably three or four of these containers’ worth of them? They were kinda small, but there were some good-sized ones occasionally, as well. Brooke made some jam and froze quite a bit of them for smoothies in the fall, or whatever else she thinks of! Not a ton of slugs this year on them, but something definitely ate on them a bit.
The potatoes are looking pretty good! Given all the rain we’ve had, some of the leaves have “yellowed” a bit, but there’s plenty of greenery on there. Like last year with the above-ground bags (pictured to the right, yet unplanted this year), we’ll just tip over the soil to get the potatoes out rather than having to dig them up. “Work smarter, not harder”….
The big story in June is definitely the cherries. We chopped down the peach tree and most of the pear trees in late-winter 2024, so the cherry tree has been mostly unencumbered by other trees for a bit now and, behold, a metric ton of cherries.
Not a literal “metric ton,” but we picked at least 10 gallons of cherries. And there are still cherries up there I can’t reach with a ladder. Tons more. So many more.
For whatever reason, it seems that the birds just don’t like them? We’ve never really had a problem with birds going after them like they did my parents’ tree back when I was growing up, so that’s helped get us a good harvest, I guess.
What did we do with all of them (at least, the ones that didn’t mold? We had to throw a bunch out that I’d picked because they went bad too fast…alas, we’re doing fine on cherries……)? Brooke made some cherry preserves, froze a lot of them (again, for smoothies), and she dehydrated a bunch of them to add to salads or otherwise snack on. Pretty versatile uses, honestly! We’ll see what next year brings, but this was definitely the most we’ve ever gotten!
One last “new addition:” gooseberries! I don’t even like gooseberries, but Calvin, for whatever reason, found out he loved them when participating in Missouri River Bird Observatory’s Young Explorer’s Camp last year in Arrow Rock. Brooke and Calvin started a plant from a single berry and it took forever to establish itself (remember Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree? That’s what it looked like after sitting in our house for almost a year…). Calvin and I went to Arrow Rock for a festival in late April and bought a more established plant (pictured) and we put it in the back yard behind the clothesline. We also planted his “from seed” plant and that thing has taken off since being moved outside. It’s looking a lot better!
Like the asparagus, it’s going to take a bit for these plants to get big enough to where Calvin can get a bunch of berries, but again, gotta start somewhere!
And last, but never least, the bees. Soooooo, the southernmost hive survived the winter, so they’re the most established of the three hives we currently have. The other two came from swarms! Funny story about that…
In late April, I got a text from someone we know over on Eastwood that said they had a swarm. She asked if we wanted it, so Brooke went over after she got home (an hour or two later?), and by then, they were gone. Shucks… Well, that following Sunday, Meg and I are at our Philharmonic Concert and Brooke and Calvin are about to start walking over when they notice a swarm in our apple tree! They quickly grab their gear and get it put into a hive box. A few days later, there’s another one in the exact same tree! So yeah, she’d never caught a swarm before and this year, she caught two within a few days of one another. Crazy!
Thus far, the bees appear to be alive, but Brooke and Calvin have hopped in a few times so far and have struggled to find brood….and yet, there are still bees in there, suggesting that they’re sustaining themselves somehow?? We’ll see how this progresses, but we’re not in the time of the year that we’d expect them to go anywhere. Fingers-crossed they like their new home and share some honey with us!
<whew> Big update for June! I may do another one before we take off on our vacation…we’ll see if I have time… I don’t expect things to be radically different by then, but honestly, I kinda want a record of what it looked like before we left….so I can blame Calvin when things fall apart in our absence…. 😉