Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Garden Update July 5, 2017

The old saying is your corn should be "knee high by the 4th of July".  Some years that's tricky, but this year, we are well beyond the knee high mark!
It grows dramatically when we have sunny days.
We use a lot of onions so it's nice to have them ready to use. 
Cucumbers are starting to bloom
The dill will be ready when the cucumbers are ready to be made into pickles.
I'm leaving the tomatoes in the greenhouse, and they seem to be doing well - no ripe tomatoes yet, but lots of green ones.
Raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries are producing lots of fruit.
The apples are really looking great!
Both edible pod and regular peas are producing nicely.
I have a bunch of small kohlrabi ready to pick.
And squash and pumpkins - if all goes well, I should have a huge surplus of many different kinds of squash.
The green beans and I have been fighting off the slugs, and I think we are finally ahead of them.
Today I trimmed about half of the grapes.  I hate that job as I know virtually nothing about how to prune them.  My late friend, Steve Smith used to prune them for me, and he painstakingly separated every single vine and had a formula for leaving buds.  Ron watched a movie where they had a vineyard and he said they trimmed all the leaves once the grapes had formed.  I had a real estate client one time who owned a grape orchard and he said "it's easy, just trim them to where a harvester can pick them at 36" height.  So I use a mix of all those methods - basically pruning them savagely where they intrude into the driveway and the garden, chopping off every vine that points down, and clipping the ends off every vine to leave visible grape clusters at about 36" height.  I think the key for me is to have enough that it doesn't matter how I prune them, there will be grapes!
The flowers are mostly either in bloom or budding and ready to bloom.  It will be very colorful around here in about another week.

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