That's right! A new season has begun in our garden. The spring plantings have pretty much worn themselves out. The big producers were the Jet Star tomatoes (4 plants) at 57 pounds, zucchini at 34 pounds and cucumbers at 22 pounds. The peas, green beans, and much more also produced far more than we expected! While we've cooked down much of the excess in tomatoes for sauce and frozen many pounds of peas, green beans, strawberries, etc., we also had more than enough, along with the cucumbers and squash, to share with friends, neighbors, and even strangers passing by our front porch "Free" box. For a small garden, we couldn't have asked for more!
And now the second act begins. Our compost heap has yielded nearly 100 pounds of garden gold. We're turning the soil and spreading the compost in preparation for the "fall" plantings. The number of earthworms that inhabit the compost pile is truly amazing!
No endorsement intended. It's just what we have right now.
We had a nice rain last night, so we will delay new planting until tomorrow. We'll be putting in green beans and peas, as well as lettuce and spinach. The seeds we will be using are those that have a shorter "days to maturity" number (see picture above) on the package front and/or back to try to insure that we don't run into an early frost problem. Hopefully, late summer will be as kind to us as the past several months have been.
On the odds-and-ends side, the squirrels continue to be pests. If we turn over even one spade full of soil, a squirrel will surely stop by the next morning to dig holes in it. We recently bought some "bird netting" which we typically use to cover berry plants, and plastic mesh. We placed it on the ground over the area where the new pea and bean seeds have been planted in hopes of discouraging the little varmints.
The corn plants are out on the ground to dry before chopping them up for the compost heap. The butternut squash and spaghetti squash are beginning to ripen.
Butternut
The new season has begun! We can only hope it will be as good as the spring/summer season has been.
Hope to see you again soon! Your comments are always welcome.
Chuck
No comments:
Post a Comment