Category: Gardens

We rented a cherry picker and Son 1 came to work on staining the parts of our home that didn’t get done two years ago. The plan had been to finish last summer, then COVID happened. Hubby and I managed the garage doors just before he and the cherry picker arrived within an hour of each other, but neither of us can go up on the scaffolding or the cherry picker and paint higher than our shoulders. It was brutally hot up on the roof areas where he was working and I know he is exhausted. The house looks so much better. There is still some to do, but it can be done with ladders or scaffolding.

My main jobs are keeping him fed and hydrated and being a gofer, opening windows, gathering items he needs. I know he knows how much we appreciate his work, but I want it said out publicly.

He loves this area and helped build this house, doing all the stone work with stone from our farm, doing all the interior carpentry, laying floors, building cabinets, and all of the interior doors, grading and yard work, and started the area that now has my garden, and it is a much loved home.

Last night and tonight, we drove down to get ice cream after dinner and both nights we saw black bears. This is on top of having the bear damage to my bird feeders a couple of weeks ago. There must be a lot of them this year in the area.

Coming in from gathering eggs this afternoon, I spotted my first Day lily of the season.

My little anniversary rose bush from year before last has dozens of flowers and buds.

It is a miniature bush that was thimble sized when he gave it to me. The scent is light and I am saving petals in a bowl.

Well, it turns out that this Olive Egger isn’t a pullet. HE discovered his voice over the weekend. It is like an teenage boy with his changing voice, but I won’t keep a rooster here. That will leave me with 14 egg layers soon to be. Ms. Houdini continued to escape, but two more escape holes have been blocked and she stayed in today after spending last night out in the wild AWOL.

With Son here, I cut lettuce for salad and greens for dinner from the garden. There are lots of pea pods that will fill in and provide us with goodness. The greens were sauteed with a green garlic bulb from the garden as well.

There is a feeling of success when harvest begins to provide for the table, but more so when some of it can be put away for future use. Lettuce and asparagus have been coming to the table fresh for a couple of weeks now, but they must be eaten fresh or in the case of the asparagus, lightly refrigerator pickled. I don’t care for frozen or canned asparagus, so they are enjoyed in season, then replaced with other green vegetables.

In the fall, the garlic is planted. Last fall’s planting was a block of an unknown variety of soft neck and an unknown variety of hard neck, plus some Romanian Red and German Hardy hardnecks. The unknowns are because I didn’t save the tags from the prior year, but they were good flavorful garlics, so I planted from last year’s harvest. Yesterday afternoon when I was moving the blackberry barrels to the garden, I noticed that the hardnecks were producing the scapes. Scapes are the flower bud of hardneck garlic and though pretty if left to open, they take so much energy from the plant that the bulbs don’t produce well. I would rather have good bulbs of garlic than the flowers, plus the scapes are good eating. Last weekend, a friend who’s garden is always ahead of mine, gave me a handful and we enjoyed them chopped on the pizza I made on the weekend and the next night in stir fry. When I first started growing garlic, I read to remove the scapes when they curl over, but didn’t know you could eat them, so they were sent to the compost. Now I await them almost as anxiously as the first asparagus tips. This morning in the cool, drizzly early day, they were clipped off and brought into the house.

Thirty six garlic scapes found this morning, fresh and plump. They were snipped into 1 to 2″ pieces and put in a container for the freezer. They can be used anytime I would use garlic, roasted, in a recipe, or to make pesto. They are the first food put by from the garden.

While doing some weeding last evening, I noticed that the older blueberries are full of fruit. I should probably get some bird net and tent it over them before the berries ripen. It looks like a good harvest from the original bushes. The two new ones, planted this year have put out good foliage, but they won’t fruit until next year or the year after. It will be great to have a succession of berries coming from the garden where I don’t have to fight the ticks and thorns and where the deer can’t help themselves.

With the onset of late spring showers in the forecast, the hay may still be standing when the wineberries (thimbleberries depending on where you grew up) are ready, they are the first to ripen of the wild berries. Berries will be harvested as they appear and frozen, a single batch of mixed berry jam will probably be made and the rest saved for smoothies and to top oatmeal next winter when berries in the grocer come thousands of miles and cost your soul to purchase. Strawberries are coming in at the Farmer’s Market, but I rarely get there early enough to score any and no one I pre-order from has them.

The grapes have tiny clusters of potential fruit. I will have to figure out how to protect them. Last year, though I got some grapes for jelly, the chickens and the deer discovered them and I had to compete with them for the harvest. I am toying with trying to make some wine vinegar from the grapes this year. Other than the Asian pear marmalade and Fig preserves, I don’t use much jelly or jam so I still have jars of grape and raspberry from last year. Son 1 doesn’t use much, daughter likes fig that I offer, and blackberry but makes her own, and her son will only eat commercial strawberry jam. Son 2 and his wife buy them at their farm market and I think may make some of their own. Some fruit vinegar’s would be a nice addition to the larder.

Soon there will be peas, then green beans, potatoes, onions, garlic bulbs, kale, later tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, cucumbers, ground cherries, and cabbages. Beds will be replanted as harvests are made with more beans and peas, and the potato bed with it’s deep sides will be a fall garden that can be covered and protected from frost to maybe extend this year’s garden into early winter. Hopefully, the hydroponic systems will provide herbs and salad through the winter. I’m working towards a year round system of fresh food in our home.

We wandered a bit farther afield for our walk today which took us by the nearest Rural King store. A stop there was made to check for the resin half barrels as they had lots last year and they had several tall stacks and a good supply of potted thornless blackberries that are good to -10 and -20 f which is way colder than our region every gets. Since the blackberries were potted, not bare root, and already leafed out, I felt safe buying them for transplant into the half barrels, so 3 of each came home with us along with 6 bags of container soil.

I had the idea that I would pot them up in the shade of the garage, move them one at a time in the wheelbarrow to the garden and lift them into place. I have moved many of the half barrels around before, but the soil was heavier than I expected and though I could get them into the wheelbarrow, it only fits on some of the garden paths and I couldn’t get it close enough to place the barrels above the in ground asparagus bed as originally planned. The edge of the garden where the compost pile is building had a large mulched area below it and my decision was that the blackberries would be just fine there.

The tags on both varieties said they were strong upright canes that would get 4 to 5 feet tall, but they weren’t too erect in the pots, so I staked them at least for now. They are currently getting watered in along with a good watering on the rest of the garden.

You can see that the pile of old garden boxes still haven’t been dismantled and burned, but while Son 1 was here last weekend, he found and ordered two rechargable batteries for my cordless drill, so I can now get that task accomplished as well as building the compost bins. The garden is just a bit too far away from the house to use the corded drills without connecting two together which I don’t feel is a safe practice. Those batteries arrived by UPS today and fit the drill and charger.

What a difference a couple days makes in the growth of the bush beans and the rows are filling in nicely. Soon they will shade the soil and weeding will be an easier job. In a month or so, we will have fresh green beans to enjoy.

This morning when I went over to release the pullets, I carried a bucket of water to fill their in the coop container. It was still about half full and as I have to step up into the coop to move it, I decided to just fill the small black rubber tub in their run. I haven’t yet been putting water out there this spring. When I picked up the tub to dump the hay and dirt out of it, I disturbed a field mouse who was building a nest with hay and chicken feathers under the edge of the tub. She hightailed it across my sandalled foot giving me a bit of a start. I didn’t look to see if she had “micelets” in the nest, I don’t want to know, but I didn’t see the velociraptors fighting over anything, so I think it may have just been nest building.

Each day, hubby chuckles at my attempts to corral Ms. Houdini. Lately she has been the only escapee and I still haven’t found her hidey hole. The mature hens are only producing 2 to 4 eggs a day, so the loss of her one is important. He says it is a battle of wits between me and a chicken and she is winning, though so far today, she hasn’t escaped.