Our First Harvest of Summer 2013!

It wasn't the most exciting or enormous haul, but I'm still glad to be growing (and eating!) my own food again. :)

Today's Take -

French Breakfast radishes, greens included - 5 pounds, 2 ounces
Cherry Belle Radishes, greens included - 6 pounds, 9 ounces

My mighty haul!

The biggest single radish of both varieties weighed in at 7 ounces! These babies were beasts, I tell you!

Garden Update - 6/18/13

Well, things are finally getting going out there!

The radishes are ready to harvest, in fact we had a few in our salad this past weekend. The flavor difference from a packaged salad radish (or for that matter, any grocery store radish) is insane. They are crispy and sweet, and even the greens are good in salad. Hooray for tasty veg that grows in just 3 weeks!

Our lettuces and red kale also are really filling out. It's hard to believe that just a few weeks ago I was fretting pretty hard that we wouldn't get much of anything this year. I'm very glad to have been wrong.

The corn and sunflowers are both about 6 inches high, and still need to be thinned. Same goes for the tomato bed, I need to reduce the plants in there by about half. The zucchini also need spacing out. Somebody went a little nuts and planted like 20 plants. I sure hope the pigs like zucchini!

Several of the purchased tomato plants have started setting fruit, but none are ripe yet. I'm drooling over those Sungolds though - can't wait for them to color up.

Our beets - golden, bulls blood, cylindra and sugar (fodder) - have all grown exponentially in the past week. Which means that I'm going to have to make some goat cheese soon so that we can enjoy a whole lotta beet salad this Summer.

The cantaloupes are still on the fence. They may make it, they may not. I still don't know why they took the transition so badly, but oh well. Maybe next year I'll just wait and direct sow them.

Anyway - overall, things are looking really good! Man, have I missed having a proper garden. Thanks to my boo for busting his booty to build us one this year. xoxo

New in the Garden Today - 6/8/13

Mostly stuff that I bought at the school plant sale that I have had sitting on my back deck for about a month. Oops-a-daisy!

Just planted -

Scarlet's bean tee pee, the structure of which was with some hazelnut bush/shrub prunings. Climbing up the side, soon to provide us with beans galore -
Blue Lake green beans - 2
Scarlet Runner Beans - 3

Elsewhere in the garden -

Garlic Chives - 1
Sea Holly - 2
Daylily - 1
Rosemary - 1
Rhubarb (Victoria) - 1
Lemon Balm - 1

Needs thinning and dividing -

Yukon Chief Sweet corn (2 beds worth, soon to be divided among 3 beds)
Cocozelle Zucchini (1 bed, soon to be 2)
Sugar beets (thinned)
Carrots (thinned)

Slowly but surely, it's coming along! :)

In other happy news - our Guinea hens are finally laying! Or at least one of them is. Bill noticed a couple of smallish, pointyish eggs scattered hither and yon, just outside the run where our beautiful but misunderstood rooster, Sir Roscoe Peckins used to live. The Guineas have had a major crush on Peck since the first day they arrived. Alas, their dreamboat left today for a happy new life at A Stones Throw Farm. Bon voyage, Pecky-poo, and - be nice.

And now for something completely different, for my last outdoorsy chore of the day, I am going to go and attempt to draw something magically beautiful on our new, coop chalkboard.

Scarlet says that we should write "Welcome to Boggy Hollow", but I think it might be nice to write a welcome note to our soon to arrive house guests. I guess we'll see who wins! ;)

How Does My Garden Grow? Organic & Slow!

Being under-experienced and a little slow on the draw in terms of getting the garden infrastructure in has pushed back our garden progress a bit this year. Nonetheless - we do indeed have some progress to report!

New in the garden this week -

*Everbearing Raspberries - 2 (The deer always eat these, so I don't know why I bother. They were an impulse buy at the school plant sale.)
*Scarlet Runner Beans - 6

Just popped up/now in bloom -

*Pumpkins, Zukes, Cukes, Carrots & Sweet Corn
*All 4 apple trees have teeny baby fruits on them, as do the pear, the plum and the sour cherry trees. Yay!
*Marion berries are just now blooming.
*Roses are all in bloom.
*Columbines

About to bloom -

*Blackberries
*Hidcote (English) Lavender

Still need to plant -

*Rhubarb - 2
*Sea Holly - 2
*Bald Hip Rose - 1
*Lemon Balm - 1

It remains to be seen if any of those will get into the garden before the houseguests arrive. We have a crap ton of cleaning to focus our energy on first!

April/May Crafting Totals

Dishcloths - 11 ($4/ea)
Baskets - 1 ($4/ea)
Re-milled, homemade lavender goats milk soap - 4 bars ($5/ea)
Key hook - 1 ($15/ea)
Coat hook - 1 ($18/ea)
Engraved silver spoon plant tags - 18 ($3/ea)

For a grand total of.... $155. Not bad, but still just barely half of what I'd hoped to knock out in 61 days. What can I say? The garden took every spare minute we had. Maybe when things settle down again after the early Fall harvests I'll finally get my soap-making, dishcloth-knitting, spoon-whackin' booty in gear?

New in the Garden - 6/2/13

After a long day spent up in Puyallup at the Mother Earth News Fair learning about farming and gardening, we came home and... farmed and gardened. Here's what we got in the ground today -

Cantaloupes, Minnesota Midget Melons - 14
Borage - 1 seedling, plus 1 pack of seeds
Hungarian Blue Bread Poppies - 1 pack of seeds
Yarrow - 1
Coneflower - 2
Calendula - 1/2 packet of seeds
German Chamomile - 1/2 packet of seeds

Planted last week-

Yukon Chief Corn - 2 beds
Assorted Carrots (Atomic Purple, Nantes Scarlet, Little Fingers, etc,) - 1 bed
Assorted Squash (zucchini, Burgess Buttercup, Yellow Crookneck, Lemon Cucumbers) - 2 beds
Assorted Pumpkins (Small Sugar, Cinderella, Williams Naked Seeded) - 1 bed

Just popped up -

Sunflowers, cylindrical beets & sugar beets.

Newly murdered -

3 radishes, 1 pea plant and one red kale, courtesy of Blue, the pigheaded goat. Grrrr...! : (