Mid August 2019 Garden Update

While August has been cooler than the past few years, it is certainly not the coolest August ever. On the other hand, it is already the wettest.  Thunder clouds and lightning moved in just before the the weekend, then a downpour of rain. Lightning struck near our place on Friday night, August 10, and when the wireless router started smoking, I knew we were in trouble. Even though we use a local Internet provider (based on our region) there are no stores nearby. The two closest stores are both over a four hour drive away... one to the southwest on the coast, and the other to the east, each over 230 miles away; just to pick up a replacement would have meant an 9 hour drive round trip. So, the replacement was sent out Monday afternoon and arrived this afternoon. Thank you, UPS! Then, the tech support needed to reset the FiOS box (I don't know what they called it). While on the phone, I had to find the FiOS box, unplug it from the power, they did something to cause a "reset" and then I plugged it back in. So, let's just say that even when electronics are plugged into surge protectors, that's not always a guarantee that a huge bolt of electricity won't end up frying the electronics.

On the plant front, the cooler temps and rain over the weekend switched over to 80+ temps on Monday with lots of sunshine, which resulted in a lot of plants ripening up right quick.  The corn is on the edge of ripe. Most of the carrots are done, and I planted spinach seeds in that area of the garden. I replanted lettuce for the next round. I harvested the thyme before the rains hit. I picked six nice sized cucumbers and forgot to take a pix before they were all gone. Radishes are mostly done. Beans are still producing like crazy so we are eating fresh green beans every other night. Real sized Tomatoes are finally starting to ripen.  The Sungold cherry tomato plant is so heavy with fruit, it keeps falling over.  We cut a lot of the tops off to help it from being to top heavy.  Threw away about 25 green cherry tomatoes because, in truth, there are just way too many.

Trying to stay ahead of the garden so that we don't end up having to throw away too much.

Purple Cherokee almost ripe	Nice Sized Purple Cherokee
Blurry Purple Cherokee Tomato	Huge German Tomato
Almost the last of the radishes	Almost the last of the carrots and the start of the corn

UPDATE - August 15

The bumble bee in the dill was an nice thing to see this morning.  Also, took some updates on the cucumbers. There is one bee that seems to have adopted the task of pollinating for me on the cucumbers, so that's a nice bee to be thankful for.

Remember the corn tillers (suckers) that I left on. Well, it turns out there are a bit hermaphrodite-ish on the tassels.  Although many of the tillers have tassels now, and several have ears of corn on them, a few of the tassels on the tillers also have two or more kernels on them. None of the main stalks' tassels have kernels of corn (and silk). Just a few of the ones that are are tillers are that way.

A little more reading from corn experts, this is known as Tassel Ears and sometimes a whole ear of corn forms on the tassel which typically occur on the tillers.  They nothing more than "bird food" so to speak and if they occur on the main stalk, it is because of damage to the stalks, or field.

11 weeks after planting, we have ripe corn and we pulled three tonight for dinner. Sweet corn on the cob!

Square garden beans did much better this year, than last.  So I will need to freeze beans to keep from wasting them. Carrots also did much better this year.  Despite the crazy summer weather, the plants seem to be working through it. In about a month, mid September, I should have cilantro and spinach. My favorite fall plants.

BumbleBee in the Dill	BumbleBee different angle
Baby Cuke	Pickle sized Cuke
Salad Cuke	And All Three Sizes Together
Square Garden Growing	Green - String Beans
A handful of ripe Sungolds	Corn Mostly Ready
A few Kernels on Tassels	Tassels, kernels with silk

It's Wild Blackberry Season 2019

We will have a series of hot days that started with today. I waited until twilight to traipse across our field to the neighbor's fence and picked as many berries as I could get in 15 minutes. Two pounds worth and are now in the freezer for yummy eating later this summer. I will attempt to do that again tomorrow evening.  It's right at the time that the day is starting to cool off and before the mosquitoes are buzzing. 

2 lb of wild blackberries I just picked.

On other gardening updates, it was too hot in the sun for the tomatoes and the bell peppers, so they have been moved to morning sun and afternoon shade to keep them from burning their fruit. Cucumbers continue to pollinate. We have three cucumbers that are five inches long and one that is four inches. Soon!  Pulled more carrots today.  Nice and sweet. They make a great evening snack. 

Thinned out the lettuce. I counted 19 broccoli sprouts. I have five Romaine lettuce starts now. Keep pulling about three to four ripe Sungold tomatoes every day. Cute little orange round orbs. Still waiting for the Chocolate cherry tomatoes to ripen. Boy are they slow! Pulled off some of the Purple Cherokee.  Any branch that has more than three on it are getting thinned because those tomatoes are huge and two tomatoes are plenty per branch. 

Corn ears continue to fill in. Picked about 1/2 pound of green beans yesterday for dinner. Just perfect. Still nice and tender although they are about five to six inches long. I will try to get my radishes pulled tomorrow morning and get them pickled.

August 4 - Update
Rather than creating a new post - I'll just add to yesterdays. Today, I whipped up a pint of sweet pickled radishes and a quart of dill pickled cucumbers. Both are refrigerator versions and should be ready to eat in 48 hours. I also picked another 2 lb 3 oz of blackberries tonight. If I do this every night for the rest of the season, I could, conceivably have a freezer full of blackberries! The first frozen batch of berries filled a 2-quart freezer bag! If I am so inclined, I can make up some blackberry jelly or a pie for some event. Or, just eat them! 😋

Temps were over 90 today.  Thankfully the dewpoint & humidity were a little lower today. Put the sunshade over the greenhouse and hung another shade over the back deck to protect the tomato plants from the hot early afternoon sun. 

One Week Chick Update Summer 2019

The chicks are approximately nine days of age and today we changed out the sheets and threw in some aspen shavings.  I am very particular about the type of shavings. Pine is a little too acidic, and of course, cedar is too strong an odor for the chicks. The Pine shavings get too smelly too quickly, and we would end up using up more than we do with the aspen. Although, in truth, we do go through a lot of shavings, regardless, with the chicks. Raised up the warmer again, and if they cuddle close, they all fit under it still.  I will keep the divider in the pen for now.  As soon as they start spilling out on the sides of the warmer, I will take out the divider and turn on the other warmer for them.  Today, they were pretty rambunctious. They were stretching their legs and wings, running fast across the cage, and darting all around.  That won't last too long. As they get larger and heavier, they move less and just want to eat more. Thankfully, we can get them out into the run/coop sooner this year because of the warmth.

King of the Feeder + 7 more	Scatter after the camera flash
Some Head for Safety	Others keep right on Eating

Day 62 - Corn is as High as an Elephant's Eye

Yep, the corn sprouted with that last batch of fertilizer that I added. Now it's just bone meal till the end. The corn is at so many different heights, that in truth I'm not certain what to think. I am hopeful that will prolong the corn season. The tallest with tassels are over eight feet high. Some are still about three feet high. Shrugs. Not sure what to think.  I just know that I planted my corn at the same time as one of my neighbors, and mine looks much taller and thicker, but the neighbor planted a lot more than I did. I think this year will be another good one for corn.  I counted over 50 ears which is good considering I planted 40 seeds. About four of the replants never caught up and are too insubstantial to count. Factoring that, I have 36 viable stalks of corn with 50 ears being produced, already and some may also be produced on a few of the tillers. This could be our best corn harvest ever, if we are lucky.

Thick and Tall corn
Back side Lower portion	Back side Upper portion

Final Spurt before August 2019

Some of these sections will be linked back to earlier posts. For example, I planted the broccoli on July 24 and they have sprouted.  I needed to move them around, because watering had moved the seeds to all the weirdest locations possible. But I had 13 come up and hopefully, now that I have moved them back to where I wanted them, they will grow.

Tiny Broccoli Sprout #1 of 13

Tiny Broccoli Sprout #2 of 13

Remember when I talked about the best way to pollinate a cucumber plant when there are not a lot of bees around? On July 20, I took pix of two female cucumber blossoms. These are the two from that post.

One of Two Cukes Pollinated on July 20	Other cuke pollinated that day
Cucumber Sprawl off deck and over grass

Square raised garden bed continues to thrive. The basil are doing well. The thyme is becoming more like bushes but not very tall. The dill continues to get taller. The carrots and radishes are getting ready to pull. I pulled four mature carrots today (no photos of them). The beans are quite long, and I tied them back against the wire fence to keep them up out of the dirt. July 20 I took photos of the beans when they were about 1 inch long

Row of 4 Basil	Row of Radishes
B-F Beans, Dill, Basil, (Thyme is hidden) and Carrots
Green Beans Growing	More Green Beans

Bell Peppers are now growing fast.  On July 11, I took photos of the scraggly looking peppers that had started to bloom. Now look at them!

Nice Sized Pepper in Orange bucket plant

Two Peppers on another plant.

No link backs on this one. The German plant has eight tomatoes as of today. Slow to grow and ripen. This plant was topped at about four feet because it will try to grow to eight feet tall.  To help encourage fruit growth a bit faster, we topped it and pruned it.  The Sungold is full of cherry tomatoes.  No way to truly count. The photos, while out of focus, allow you to see up through the plant at dozens of little tomatoes. The photos were actually taken in two different locations even though they look similar. The Chocolate Cherry tomatoes are more spread out and not as many on the vines. Then the Purple Cherokee also has a lot of full sized tomatoes. It was so heavy that we pruned it back as previously mentioned and tied up a lot of the lower heavy branches.

Heirloom German + 8
Sungold Thick	More Sungold
Chocolate Cherry
Find the Purple Cherokee Tomatoes Yellow Arrows	Purple Cherokee Tied Up

Now that the Rain has Passed - Last Weekend of July 2019

We dug out/dumped out the potatoes.  Only the very top of the soil got wet with this morning's rains. Despite the extra attention we paid to them this year and planting more, the yield was only marginally better between the three barrels, we received about 13 pounds of potatoes.  The white were better in size and we should be able to have a few days of baked potatoes with them. The Red Pontiacs, unfortunately, were not as big as last year's crop.  We had Red Chieftans last year, so perhaps we should return to that version. 

Next year we plan to rely more on using a sandy loam blend with compost and peat moss to see if that helps with production.  If not, I'm going to give up on the barrels, and revert back to planting in the ground. One more year to try the barrels with a different soil type to see if that improves the production. I was very disappointed with the Red Pontiacs as they didn't even seem to start growing in the first layer of soil, and a least a foot of the bottom on both barrels were devoid of red potatoes!  On the California Whites, this year, we had a slightly better crop, and the potatoes were on the vine clear to the bottom of the barrel. Nonetheless, the soil will be added to the other two gardens and/or buckets for other plants to grow in.  We are never lacking for uses for the soil we have in the Potato Barrels.  Comparing potatoes with last year. They look similar to last year's crop. The reds are a little smaller but the whites are a little larger. I just piled them all on top of dry straw in a small box in the pantry for use over the next few months.

2019 Pontiac and California

2018 Potatoes

Harvested a lot of basil today, a few cherry tomatoes and three radishes.  The radishes look much better than the first few. But we had better temps in July for radishes. 

The Purple Cherokee was blown over yesterday in the wind.  It is so top heavy with tomatoes (close to 50) that we ultimately staked the cage to secure it better, then started tying branches to the cage. I cut off about three long branches and with those went about five small tomatoes.  I don't think the guys will miss them since it looks like we are going to have plenty of those tomatoes.  We have about five tomato fruits set on the German plant.  Not sure why there is such a difference, but I just hope that the Purple Cherokee are as tasty as the German. One of the Chocolate Cherry (CC) tomatoes is just about ripe.  There are about 40 - 50 little cherry tomatoes on the CC, while there are about 100 cherry tomatoes on the Sungold plant.

The bell pepper plants are starting to look much better.

Bell Peppers on the Mend

Cucumbers seem to be producing a better yield this year, as well.

Blurry Cucumber Blossom

Raindrops on Cucumbers - is that a Song?

The Carrots are thinned out and should finish up this next month. I put the baby carrots in a glass storage container filled with cold water to see if they last any better that way. I never seem to be able to get the Nantes to store very well. But I like the Nantes' carrot flavor better than other versions that store well.

Carrots and Radishes

Dill are starting to flower. Thyme is becoming bushy (like oregano). Basil are close to bolting.  I keep cutting back the larger basil leaves to try to stave off the bolt.

Dill is Flowering	Thyme is Bushing
Beans, Dill and Basil keep growing

Corn is anywhere from three feet to eight feet tall.  Most of the three foot version are just starting to send out their tassels, so they will probably bolt up over the next week or two. We have a LOT of ears forming.  I counted almost 50 ears with silk formed on about 35 stalks.  I just hope that they are super sweet ears this year. The corn silk is always fascinating to watch form and grow. I was able to get an almost clear close up of the rain drops on the silk from the yellow and green stripped corn plant.

Ears, ears and more	Rain Drops not close up
Raindrops close up

Last but not least, Let Us talk about Lettuce. So, ants are bombarding my lettuce plants.  I sprayed a little oil around the base of the containers to keep them out, and it was working until I was silly enough to put another (non treated) pot close to the lettuce.  The leaves were resting on the other pot, and the ants took advantage of the opportunity.  We thinned out the lettuce again today and tried to pull off as many rascal ants as we could find. Oy Vey!

Grand Rapid, Red Sails, Buttercrunch