Garden in Full Swing

We have been in a serious heat wave dry spell here in these parts.  We have been having to water the gardens every night to keep them going.  It takes about an hour to water every garden that we have.  That is a lot of water.  I am afraid to open my water bill when it comes!  But the up side to it all is that the gardens are doing well and we are getting 2 squash/zucchini a day....a all new problem!

The onions are shouldered up and out of the dirt and starting to die off.  Soon it will be time to pull them and let them dry before bagging them up in net bags.

The cabbages have seen better days.  I started manually inspecting them and picking the worms off of them.  That has seemed to help.  I have spray for them but I am not too keen on using it.  If the cabbage does not work out the chickens will get a wonderful treat.  The LOVE cabbage and a cabbage infested with bugs is even all the better for them.

Our green beans are not looking too hot.  They are supposed to be bush beans but they seem to be falling all over themselves.  I doubt we will get enough for a meal let alone can, but the bunny gets them as a treat.  Not much goes to waste even the low output veggies.

We have a total of 6 garden tanks, 2 veggie plots, and the berry patch.  The tanks are old fuel oil tanks that have been cut in half and put up on cinder blocks.  We use a mixture of mushroom mulch, compost, top soil, peat, and cow manure to fill the tanks.  Things generally do really well in them.  This year things are really dry so the tanks dry out quicker and it takes its toll on the plants.

In the ground plots we have yellow and green zucchinis, green peppers, butternut squash, corn, pumpkins, and a variety of tomatoes.  They are doing fairly well given the lack of water and sweltering temperatures.  I picked 2 grape tomatoes the other day and they were a yummy tease of what is to come!  I can't wait until they really get rolling.

The corn is kinda goofy.  We planted 2 different kinds of corn.  1 kind came up really well and the other stuff did a sporadic growth pattern.  We did not expect much out of this garden plot, as we are still trying to fortify the lack of dirt in our yard with litter from the chicken coop.

We have tied aluminum pie tins in the corners of the garden plots to keep the critters out.  It seems to be working pretty good so far.

Although this one was looking for a way into the garden!

The chickens are not happy with us.  We have not let them out to free range in a while.  We have to get the tomatoes fenced in so they do not eat them all.  If we were to let them out now they would go straight to the garden and eat everything there!  I have read about painting rocks the colors of the veggies and placing them around the garden.  That way the chickens will peck at the rocks - get bored with the garden as soon as they figure out there is nothing but painted rocks in it.  I have not tried this - I may, we have a rock or 2 laying around.

The fruit trees are not fairing too well in the hot dry weather either.  We had all kinds of fruit in the spring but most of it has dried up.  We have some apples.

Some Peaches:

And some Pears yet on the trees.

We water them as well but it does not look like they will amount to anything.  Maybe next year.

Growing Season

Last night there was a beautiful sun set in out neck of the woods.  We were exhausted from mowing the yard.  I push mowed the *long* driveway ditches, making sure to avoid the Killdeer nest, and the sand mound since it is pretty steep.

Both mowings tag teamed to kick my butt!  I will admit this first mowing of the season has been the most exercise I have gotten since our last big snow fall.  Not to worry, I will be getting lots of activity as we will be plowing, rotatilling, planting, and all to soon enough weeding lots of ground and tanks.
Things are starting to come alive around these here parts.  The trees are starting to leaf out and bloom.

My fruit orchard is starting to bloom.

The apple trees are just starting to bud up and bloom:

The peach is about done:

The Nectarine is in full bloom.  I love this tree.  We have yet to get any fruit from it, but the leaves smell like nectarines and send a sweet wonderful sent through the summer air.

The Plum is going strong:

As is the small Sour Cherry is just crazy full of blossoms!

The pear tree is blooming nicely as well.  We have two pear trees but the other one has not bloomed since we planted it.  It is healthy and growing well.  We will be pruning it back this year to see if that will spark it to bloom next year.  You have to have 2 pear trees to get the correct pollination.

The Sweet Cherry Varieties are at the end of their bloom.  Hopefully the frost will stay at bay and we can get some fruit this year.

We have a cage of wire around each tree to keep the deer off of them.  The deer love cherry trees and did a lot of damage to them our second year.  We want to fence in the whole area with one fence instead of each tree.  Some day we will get around to doing that.

I also have to rhubarb patches.  This rhubarb is very old....probably at least 45-50 years old.  I remember as a little girl pulling a stalk from my Granny's rhubarb and chewing it right up - eating it like a stalk of celery.  About 14 years ago my Dad had gotten me some divisions of my Granny's rhubarb that I loved so much as a child.  I planted these divisions and tended them to make sure they would grow.  The did indeed grow and flourished!  My in-laws wanted some, so we divided my stalk and I shared mine with my Father in Law and Brother in Law.  We check on the plants we put in at FILs to make sure they are doing well and they are.  My BIL did a great job at tending the divisions we gave him and they really took off!  When BIL passed away - SIL his widow said we could have the rhubarb plants back as she did not want them.  We dug them up and from the 4 divisions I had gave BIL a few years back - he turned them into 11 plants!  We dug up a plot of land and fortified it with about 1200 pounds of top soil, peat, and compost.  I planted each of the plants that we got from BIL and said a prayer that they would grow.  Sure enough they all came up this spring and are growing like crazy!

Now I will have rhubarb out the ears this year!  We will harvest only a little bit of the newly planted stuff this year to give the roots the nourishment that the leaves give it.  We will harvest it next year.  In the mean time I still have the first patch that I can harvest to my hearts desire.  That patch also has 11 plants in it.  That patch is not in a good spot so the rhubarb is a bit spindly - we may move it this fall over to this long patch.

This is the second year for us growing garlic.  We bought bulbs to grow last year and they did pretty good.  We saved all of the bulbs we got last year and planted the cloves again in the late fall.  Said another prayer that they would come up.  Sure enough they did!  I think we can actually use some of these this year but will keep the best ones for next fall's plantings.  Why we are growing garlic I have no idea.  I do not like garlic at all...ick!  However Dear Husband wanted to plant some so we did.

The Blueberries are starting to bloom and leaf out as well.  The red raspberries are starting to come up as well.  The black berries have not made their arrival yet.  There will be lots to do here pretty quick with planting and weeding.