What's growing?

It's already summer and I've not done a garden post in a while. In fact, I can't remember when I last did one, but, then again, I can't remember what my kids birth dates are either sometimes.

So, here are some random photos of the garden.

lots of garlic (right) and onions (left) with tree nursery in front

kale in the foreground

alpine strawberries that some people claim are full of flavor, but I think they mealy

various lettuces

trying out a special weed cover made from paper

banana peppers

eggplant in the greenhouse

nopal (that we hope will grow big enough to eat one day)

Asian pears in the orchard

black raspberries

These photos were taken over a couple of weeks of end of spring and beginning of summer, so there's a mix of spring and summer veggies.


And finally, because I've preempted "My Favorite Scene" today, I feel like I should at least have a video, so here's one of the guys and the chickens:

So, how about you? How does your garden grow?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Water, water, everywhere...and same with vermins

I saw the best quote the other day from Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar:
"We all make mistakes in life. The thing that separates successful people from others is how we handle those mistakes."  It's the one lesson I hope the kids come away with if they remember nothing else I teach them.

Speaking of lessons for my kids, one of the ones I keep reminding ds#1 of is to not waste water:

Source: eLocal.com

Clean water is something that we should never take for granted.

~~~~~
We've enjoyed several meals of yummy sweet corn...

until the evil raccoons somehow got into our fenced garden (something they'd never done before) and destroyed the rest of that one bed. Luckily, we still have another bed, or two. One of those is surrounded by an electric fence, so they should fare better.

Raccoons, or some other pest, also swooped in on our Asian pears. One day our 2 trees were loaded with fruits, nearly ready for picking, and the next day, not a single fruit was left on either tree. Nada. If we catch the culprit, it is stew meat! Grrrr. The tree branch in this photo was so loaded with fruit that it had snapped off.

Luckily, there are other things we are able to harvest and process - more basil, for instance:

And here's hubby making the pesto, after I washed all the basil and the jars and lids, and the kids stripped the leaves.

A good friend, Tia, brought over two pullets that they didn't want anymore after her girls were done with their 4-H project. Meet Vader (guess what that was named after?) and Tawny (as in Sigourney Weaver's character from Galaxy Quest). Ds#1 gets the credit for these names. Do they look like they're doing a Rockettes' dance or what?

Our old hens had pretty much stopped laying due to the heat and their being broody, so we look forward to finally having some homegrown eggs again. Thanks, Tia!

In other exciting news, we'll be getting a new tractor soon - a lovely red Kubota! Hubby had looked at John Deere, but the dealer in town was surprisingly unresponsive, with the manager acting like he didn't really want to make the sale. The Kubota dealer in the town south of us, on the other hand, was so helpful and eager that hubby decided to go for it. Plus, the size and features that he wanted were cheaper with the Kubota. Can't wait!

Do you have any exciting gardening purchases?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

The week in recap

Because I've been too darned lazy and busy to do a post during the week, I'm down to Sunday and don't want to bore you with a long post.

An update on the copperheads: it would appear that after guarding our blueberry bushes from the marauding chipmunks, and obviously having eaten all the chipmunks in our backyard, they have decided to move on to a new home. We've not seen them all week. I'm a relieved but a little sad. They did do a darn good job with keeping the chipmunk population down.

Dh picked some more Asian pears this week. This is what happens when you leave them alone for a while instead of trying to pick them early: they grow bigger! Duh. The one on the left was picked a couple of weeks ago, while the one on the right had a chance to catch a few more rays of sun on the tree.Yesterday was canning day. The pile o' tomatoes in front of dh was just 1/3 of what we ended up processing. We got a total of 18 3/4 quarts of sauce! The 3/4 quart we didn't can, but will use for borani or something this coming week. Never leave more than a small head-space in your canning jar.All the tomatoes in 4 big pots:Did I mention that they were in FOUR big pots?We watched a bit of Mad City Chickens last night. We'd first seen it written up in a paper in Vancouver, and requested that our library get a copy of it. Being the generally agreeable library it is, our wish was granted. It's a cute little film, a bit silly and humorous. What struck me as sad though, was, at the beginning of the film, someone in Madison, WI, who had been raising chickens illegally, said that one of her neighbors complained to the city about her chickens...not because of the noise or the smell, but because this neighbor was afraid this woman might eat the chickens. I'm boggled as to where this neighbor thinks the supermarket chickens come from? Rained down from the sky in a pristine shrink-wrapped form?? It's disturbing how some people are so removed from their food (and ancestral roots of merely a couple of generations ago) that they think it's unnatural to raise and process one's own meat.

We finished up the kids' swim lessons this week. It was good to find out that they didn't forget everything that they learned last year. :)

Our homeschool co-ops and classes will start up next week and the week after. I guess fall is officially here, despite it not being September yet.

Has school/homeschool started for your kids yet? What sorts of fun things are you doing as August comes to an end?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Our garden, a little tour

I promised I'd show you some pictures of and around our garden, so here goes...

This is one of our several semi-dwarf apple trees. They're about 6 years old, and not producing like the dickens yet. The fruits tend to be small and ugly (we don't use chemicals), but the flavor is so complex, it's like the best Pink Lady you've never eaten. ;)I didn't get a photo of the Asian pear tree, but these are just a few of the fruits we harvested:I bought a couple of geraniums from someone selling them for 4-H earlier in the year, and, for some reason, they just never did very well. One of them is finally putting out a bit more bloom:...but the other has one foot in the grave, apparently:And speaking of grave, one of our summer squash plants bit the dust - a sad combination of the fruits not being harvested enough while we were away and borer worm damage.Sometimes, though, what looks like death just means it's ready to harvest. Take these sweet onions, for example:The yellow onions are not quite harvest-ready yet:We finally bought some grapes to plant this year! Here's a close-up of one of the 3 plants:From farther out, you can see they're kind of tiny and pathetic. Deer got to them one evening (before dh put up the fencing) and munched one heavily.The opposite of tiny and pathetic would be our tomatoes. Dh thinks it's because of the grass clippings mulch he's been putting on them, but these babies are 8 feet tall!We're growing several varieties, as usual, but these grape ones are especially cute and tasty:The corn is doing splendidly too:We had our first meal of it Friday evening. Look at those lovely ears: Wandering around, here are some of the (messy) leaks:and some mildly spicy yellow peppers that dh thinks might be Hungarian yellow:One of our green bean beds:The celery always does pretty well for us. Because we don't "blanch" them, they retain a very strong flavor that you'd never find in ones from the store.Inside the greenhouse, we have the Japanese eggplants which have never failed us yet. They're not bitter like the fat eggplants that are more common and the skin isn't tough either.And here's another killer tomato plant inside the greenhouse (notice how it presses on the ceiling?).Most people grow flowers to attract bees and other pollinators. We just grow flowering veggies, which are useful/tasty as well as pretty. Here's a bee on a gai lan (an Asian green) flower:Not from our garden, but this is the wackiest case of a dead frog. Yup, you read right: it's dead, but looks amazingly alive. Dh found it in the pool. Fascinatingly creepy.Do you have anything wacky or fascinatingly creepy to share? Hope you're all enjoying the weekend!

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams