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.

Working on the Orchard

My aunt used to call me a "frustrated farmer" - and maybe she's right!  I can't seem to stop myself from agricultural pursuits - even now when it is just the two of us and we don't even eat that much.  Our latest project is the orchard.  We decided that planting an acre of vegetables every year for the deer, slugs, raccoons, bear, etc. was probably a bit excessive.  And we are getting older - all that bending, heavy weeding, etc. takes its toll on an old body. 

We had a fair start on an orchard, but it had been neglected and heavy weeds grew around the base of every tree.  Over the years the trees had grown, making it harder and harder to till between them.  After one day of getting whacked in the head by overreaching branches as I drove the tractor through the rows to do the spring tilling, I decided it was time to either take out the trees or make it easier to work.
Coincidentally, the PUD had trimmed the trees along the power lines for miles.  We had offered them a place to dump their mulch, and they brought us about 10 dump truck loads last summer.

I enlisted Ron's help, and he hauled bucketload after bucketload of mulch.  I laid out shade cloth and all the accumulated newspapers after I weeded around the base of the trees.  (Hopefully for the last time!)

When we were done, we had hauled and spread about 100 yards of mulch and covered the entire orchard area with about 6" of mulch.  Being a math person, I pondered our project as I worked and figured that 50' x 40' = 2,000 square feet - at 6" deep, should be 1000 square feet of mulch - and if my math formula from memory serves correctly, divide sq ft by 9 to get sq yards - which is 111 yards.  Could that be right?  No wonder my back was hurting!

So now we have 5 apple trees, 2 cherry trees, 1 pear with 4 varieties spliced to it, 2 plum trees, and 1 fig tree.  We also added two varieties of black berries to go with our existing raspberry and strawberry rows.  We have found that it is a lot easier to give away fruit than it is vegetables, and fruit is so much easier to take care of!

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