Garden is Looking Good

JUNE 30TH:
 POTATOES:  This bed is the best looking potato bed I have ever grown. It is weed free. Plants nicely hilled up and almost bug free.  Yes, for the first time I can easily walk the rows in ten minutes and squish any potato bugs I happen to find. The red potatoes are in the first two rows and are starting to bloom nicely. The picture doesn't show the whole bed but there are seven rows. Helen from the SBGC has helped with this bed a lot and Jennifer and 4 year old Jack from next door help remove bugs.

 SWEET POTATOES:  This long bed has 100 sweet potato "slips" planted in early June. The plants are doing well and it is fairly easy to pull weeds close to the plants and hoe the rest of the bed. In another month the plants will completely cover the entire bed. Sweet potatoes need a long growing season so won't be harvested until late September or beyond. I have had good luck with them in my garden and really love having a supply for much of the winter. Unlike regular potatoes you poke the slips into hole in a high ridge of soil. Other potatoes are planted as pieces of actual potatoes with "eyes" showing and placed in  a trench and over time as the plants grow you fill the trench and then hill up the soil around the plants. Sweet potato plants don't suffer with  potato bugs but last year near harvest time all the leaves were eaten by deer!

 ONIONS & POLE BEANS: This bed has two long rows of onions on the outside edges. I buy onion plants and the total number planted this year is approximately 300. I have had mixed results as to the size of the harvested onion. Usually they aren't very big but last a long time in storage. This year I am determined to keep the bed as weed free as possible and that should improve the size of the onions considerably. In the middle of this bed I have made a climbing structure for pole beans. I am sure they will be climbing well and heading to the top in another month.  Pole beans tend to be much longer beans than the bush variety so I am looking forward to this crop. In the other garden I have bush beans growing and also a pink tip yellow heirloom pole bean. Green and yellow beans freeze easily and so are a winter long treat. I also make Dilly Beans, a pickled canned product.

MORE BEANS & SUNFLOWERS:  This picture doesn't give you much to see but what is visible is the growth of the seeds planted less than two weeks ago. There are fourteen rows planted in this bed. Four of them are various varieties of sunflowers. The rest are various beans. The varieties include lima; black coco; pinto; cannellini; and red kidney beans. The limas will be eaten fresh but the others will become dried beans for winter use. Some friends wonder why I do the dried beans as it is quite a workout to process them. You let the beans stay on the plants until the whole plant is dried up and then pull the entire plant out of the ground. Then you have to, at your leisure, pull the bean pods from the plants. Lastly, you have to separate the dried beans from the pods. This is a good indoor project with friends or family helping though. I love having the varieties of beans and colors in old canning jars sitting on my book shelf. It is also a real treat to decide what bean to soak and then cook on a snowy winter day for a pot of soup or chili. Hence, I don't mind the work involved growing and harvesting them at all. I had a lot of help weeding and planting this bed from another Jennifer...Jen Comeau from my Union Church family.

Let The Harvesting & Canning Begin!

June 13, 2012
The mild winter and good spring weather has pushed vegetable, fruit and flower growth ahead by a week or so this year. No late frost hit my gardens either so all looks very promising for a bumper harvest.  I have been picking 1-2 lbs. of asparagus every other day for a few weeks now.  It is delicious and a few lucky friends and family visitors have gone home with some to cook if they weren't here for a meal.  The rhubarb is growing like gangbusters as well and that means PIE MAKING.   Twice I have made my big sheet pan of rhubarb squares for sharing, one for the Union Church coffee hour and then at the June garden club meeting. Each sheet pan is th equivalent to four pies. A few additional pies have been made for home use.  This rhubarb harvest may well continue all summer.  The asparagus will go on for a few more weeks and then I have to resist and let it all go to seed so it is rejunivated for next year's crop. Two years ago I added a third bed of asparagus to my gardens and so next year the crop should be larger expendentially when I can first harvest from that new bed.

In addition to the beginnings of lettuce, radishes and garlic scapes harvestings, the big garden news is the world of strawberries.  This crop looks like the best even and began about ten days ago...a week earlier than last year. I have now harvested over 22 quarts of them and there is no end in site. About seven quarts have been given away to lucky neighbors and friends and the jam making and fresh berry eating is going strong at home. I have made 15 jars of strawberry jam and 11 jars of strawberry-rhubarb jam to start the canning effort. I have six quarts on the counter from yesterday's picking effort so need to get busy making more jam.  Last year the harvest reached 40 quarts and I made over 40 jars of strawberry jam.

So far this gardening season I have been blest with some extra hands in my garden thanks to some garden club colleagues and neighbors, the Squires family. They are all going to share in the bounty and their help is so greatly appreciated!  Even with the various additional challenges facing me this spring, I feel I am on top of the gardening situation thanks to this help.  My challenges include the cataract surgery process I am going through.  Both eyes are being done and there must be a two week gap between surgeries. The second one will be done tomorrow.  I now have 20/20 vision for distance in my left eye and hope to have the same in the right eye after surgery.  I will need reading glasses for all work within a couple feet of my face but no glasses for beyond that point. I can now read the scroll line and scores on the TV from across the room...with my left eye. It certainly has been strange and somewhat limiting to have one good eye and one lousy one for the past two weeks but a burden worth bearing. I have worn glasses since I was a little boy so it will be quite a change for me.

The other challenge is also a long range blessing.  As reported in the last blog entry, Julian, Roxi and Cotton are moving to Maine. They have bought a house in Biddeford about five miles from me on Ferry Road and are in the process of preparing it for the projected late fall/early winter move-in moment.  So I am now cutting another lawn! Fortunately a riding mower awaits me when I travel to their place to tackle the easy project when they are not available to do it.  Some brush clearing was also needed and I try to help with other tasks when they arrive for brief visits and unloading of some of their belongings brought from Brooklyn. Roxi and Julian haven't been as available to help in my gardens this year because of this new adventure but I am sure in the long run they will be able to do alot more than their great efforts in previous years, as well as be able to help me enjoy feasting on the bounty from the gardens. I have given them orders to NOT plant a vegetable garden at their new place but help and enjoy the big gardens at Schlaver Seed Farm. Obviously, they are more than willing to do that.