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!