Author: andy

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…

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…. 😉

So it’s, uh…been a minute, eh?

Things got pretty crazy between November and March. School got busy, with Meg being in High School and Calvin being in 5th grade, meaning that both kids have orchestra concerts and piano lessons/recitals, Meg has band and musical, and Calvin now has robotics with GATE. Maybe I’ll circle back to the winter months, since we actually had a decent amount of snow and cold.

For now, though, we begin with this year’s garden plot! We’ve had some weird “heat waves,” of sorts, on and off these past few weeks. We were up to 77 F yesterday, so we took the time to get some yard work done.

I went and secured the burn permit for the garden and Brooke got started taking care of the plots. She and Calvin raked the leaves and detritus up from the yard last week and got it ready to go, but it’s been so windy these past few weeks, we weren’t sure when we’d be able to actually burn. Thankfully, we hit the sweet spot: an overcast Saturday with low wind and somewhat elevated humidity.

The burning itself was done by 10:30ish, so we took a break and went outside to hit some of the other plots, pulling up some weeds and cutting some small trees that were going to create problems in a few months. Our neighbor was outside and we chatted a bit, and he reminded me that he bought a tiller for his tractor that he had offered to share (really, I think he bought a toy that he doesn’t have many excuses to actually use, so we present an opportunity for him!). He kindly came over, we moved the edging bricks out of the way, and he went to work! We used Brooke’s Dad’s rear tine tiller years ago to establish the gardens, but since then, we’ve used our other neighbor’s front tine tiller to reset the gardens each year. The rear tine variety just goes deeper than a front tine, so it’s been a few years since we got a really good turn-over of the garden. We were very appreciative!

Regardless, the plots look really good now! Brooke went ahead and planted some kale, lettuce, and parsley to get the season started, but we’ll wait to put beans and such in. I don’t think we’re going with anything “exotic” this year, but Brooke’s talking about putting popcorn in the ground again. It’s been since 2017 when we last planted it, so excited to see how it goes.

In other news, Meg got her driver’s permit a few weeks ago, on account of her turning 15 this year (!!!!!!). Calvin is starting to run an engine of his own, now tall enough to move the push mower around! Granted, he isn’t quite tall enough to maneuver the mower around the yard, but he’ll get used to it as he gets bigger. We aren’t planning on him making this a regular chore or anything this year, but we’re moving slowly in that direction. He’s at least showing some interest in helping out!

Onward, 2025!

Turns out it’s been a minute since I updated on the garden. I got the mowing done and Brooke did some weeding, so figured now was a good time. Overall, it’s been a “good” summer for the garden, but not its most spectacular year. We’ve had produce all year, but despite getting a pretty reasonable amount of rain, strangely, the product coming out of it has been kinda limited.

First of all, zucchini and cucumbers did pretty well! We’ve gotten enough zucchini: there’s only a few things we like to do with zucchini, anyway, so we got what we wanted out of it (gotta get some fried zucchini in, like, once a summer…). The cucumbers we ate on as they appeared, and Brooke tried pickling them, but they shriveled up more than we were expecting in the canning jars. Not really sure what happened there, but maybe they’ll be good??? She sliced and pickled some, as well, and those seem to have turned out better.

What you’re seeing above is mostly sweet potatoes, which we’ll dig up in a month or two. Given how much foliage is on there, surely they turned out alright!

The kale and the green beans are done, as well as the corn. We ended up with almost 20 cans of green beans, but again, it was kind of a “down year” for them. Usually, Brooke will can 20 jars of them and we’ll eat on the rest, and give some away, but we didn’t really have excess this year, for whatever reason. She got some dried beans, as well, and the soup beans are trailing up the corn stalks, so we’ll get that harvest over the next month. Those always do well, and this year’s no different.

The tomatoes are another thing. None of the paste tomatoes really took off, and while we got a few good slicers, a lot of the are more of the heirloom-type tomato that ended up going well. As usual, cherry tomatoes (two varieties this year) always are very productive, but those aren’t as good for making tomato sauce (though Brooke throws them in, anyway….you just don’t get much from a small tomato…).

The pepper plants are doing pretty well, though. The red ones above are kind of a sweet jalapeño, so we’ve tossed those onto nachos all summer. They aren’t very hot: mostly sweet with a slight “kick.” Also pictured above, the heirloom tomatoes and a zucchini (again, like, one a week? “Enough” of them…).

We’ve also got bell peppers like these doing pretty well. Nothing too fancy. Our bell peppers are usually kind of “gamey,” for lack of a better word, so they aren’t as good to eat sliced for lunch, for example, but they’ll still go in mixtures of other things well. Grilled kielbasa, peppers, and potatoes have been a summer favorite of ours this year.

Pretty good harvest of “rattlesnake” beans this year! Last year, we didn’t get all that many, but the pods this time around are pretty substantial. Still not enough to have for a meal, but fun to throw into something this winter.

The bees are doing their thing, too! Calvin’s been really helpful with the hives this summer. The “north hive” has two supers on it, and a week ago when Brooke and Calvin got in there, the top super didn’t have much, but the bottom was full, yet uncapped. Today, it was 93 F, so they were “bearding” quite a bit.

The “south hive” is also doing okay…we think? We got a package to establish the hive months ago, and we think the bees killed their queen. They slowly kept building, but never really left, so we tried to “re-queen” with one we ordered to see if it would work. Brooke got in a month ago and couldn’t find much evidence of the queen we had put in, but when she and Calvin got in last week, they found some younger bees in there (still didn’t see a queen, but they didn’t want to disturb it any more than they already were). There’s hope for that one, but we won’t get any honey out of it this year. The northern hive will do the heavy lifting this time around!

And last, but not least, Brooke’s “cut flower” bed. We put some bricks to help block it off from the rest of the yard and it’s really taken off this year! The zinnias have been going all summer long, and in the past few weeks, the mix of sunflower varieties has been fun to watch grow. They’re rather annoying to mow/trim around, frankly, since they’re tall enough that they bend into the rest of the yard, but that’s a minor complaint. It’s been nice having fresh flowers around the house all the time!

No promises on when the next post will be about the garden, but it’s clearly waning into its twilight. Probably one more as a wrap-up, of sorts, but now that school has started, the garden will become an afterthought. Until next year!

As the date above implies, I took these pictures awhile back, but given that I was still working on vacation posts, I waited to put this one together. Ah well.

Overall, the garden’s looking pretty good! These pictures are taken from after we did some weeding of the middle of each plot and the edging, as well as mowing the lawn, so things were looking good at the time. Since I took these, the plants have just gotten larger!

The kale is starting to slow down, but Brooke dehydrated and powdered about a pint of it this past week. We’re still working on it, and Calvin’s going out and grabbing leaves occasionally for Barnaby. There’s quite a bit out there, yet, and as of now, it hasn’t “gone to seed,” so we probably have a few more weeks left.

It helps that we had 5″ of rain last week. I only had to water the garden a bit in mid-May, but since then, we’ve had some consistent rain that has helped maintain the leafy stuff longer than we’d normally get.

Brooke’s also been picking some green beans this past week, though we haven’t gotten a ton of them yet. If anything, it’s been rather disappointing, only a few handfuls thus far. She noted that one of the rows she planted appears to not actually be green beans, but some other kind of flat-pod variety? She’s probably going to plant some more next to the sweet potato plants, in another plot, to extend the growing season and get us some more.

The pepper and tomato plants are bigger now, though we don’t have a ton going on there as of the past few days. There are a few good-sized green “slicer” varieties, but nothing that’s been ready to pick. The cherry tomatoes look pretty close to being ready to pick, so within the next week or so, we’ll probably start working on them.

A few days ago, I had still only seen some flowers on these. Again, we probably planted too many of these in close succession, but at the time, we figured a few of them would probably die off and we wouldn’t need to worry about it. Apparently we were wrong?

This is the plot that looks the most different from the pictures taken on June 24 and what they look like today. Those zucchini plants are gigantic and flowering, so we’ll have some zucchini as soon as this week. The sweet potatoes are also quite a bit bigger than that. Just beyond them, there’s dry grass clippings trying (poorly….) to limit growth of weeds, and that’s where Brooke’s probably going to plant some more green beans.

The potatoes look pretty good! I’m still unclear on whether the carrots are doing much in these bags, but the leaves on the potatoes portend good things to come. Brooke was thinking that they’re probably close to done, already, so we may be digging those up in the next week or so, as well!

Aaaaaaaaaaand, the bees… The middle hive died, likely with the bees within not accepting the queen they were given. The northern hive looked good enough last time Brooke got in there that she added a super, and last time she looked, it seemed as though the super was getting pretty full, so we think <fingers crossed> we’re actually going to get some honey from it this summer!

The southern hive, on the other hand, still had bees, but when Brooke looked, she couldn’t find much evidence of brood. She ordered a queen (and a few “attendants”) for around $50 that were shipped via USPS to us, and she added the queen to that hive. If the existing bees “accept” her, then hopefully that hive will turn around, though given the state of it, the likelihood we’ll get much honey from that hive is minimal.

Still, if this works, it’ll give us more confidence to try similar things in the future, adding new queens to existing hives in an effort to revitalize them.

The “herb garden” is doing its thing, especially with bee balm that’s attracting mostly bumble bees. The chives continue to come back (year after year) and the basil that Brooke planted is doing its thing.

You can see a stalk of lettuce growing upwards in the background. It’s really the only plant we’ve had successfully take off this year, so that’s the one we’ve been relying on for ham and turkey sandwiches. Still, always nice to go outside and pick something fresh before adding it to lunch!

And last, but not least, Brooke’s “fresh cut” flower bed. We’re still fighting with the weeds growing in this raised bed, but it’s been a bit more manageable with the bricks we added to separate it from the rest of the yard. The zinnias are lovely and Brooke’s been getting bouquets each week. She also planted some sunflowers in the beds – they aren’t ready yet, but they’re getting taller every day.

Pretty typical of our “mid-summer” garden status, with the exception of the green beans. The weeding is in full swing because of all the rain we’ve had, but that’s a good problem to have!