OMG, I thinned the carrots!

And it's just as exciting and monumental as the title of this post indicates.  I've been terrible about thinning out my carrots in the past, but this year, I actually made it out into the garden and did what I believe is a very fine job getting them all straightened out.  The thinning was desperately needed, as I had monster clumps of carrots starting.  So I thinned the carrots (and to a lesser extent, the parsnips) to about 2 inches apart.  While I was on a roll, I also thinned my squash, beets and kale, and added a few more fennel seeds to try to fill in the empty spaces in that bed.  We are relatively on top of the weeds this year, and while my eggplants are still struggling against the predation of the flea beetles, the garden dust has helped and I think they may pull through.  We've also had a good amount of rain this week, and so I haven't had to water.  Mike has been regularly giving compost tea to the asparagus, tomatoes, eggplants, and to the trees, and that seems to make them noticeably perkier and greener.

On the pest front, I've made tin foil collars for my brussels sprouts, broccoli, asparagus, eggplants, and peppers, and that has helped tremendously with the cutworms.  I've also been using garden dust on the eggplants, broccoli and cauliflower.  The potato bugs are here, so I've been hand picking them and their eggs, and dreading the emergence of the larvae.  Today I noticed the first herd of cucumber beetles, who are going to town on my squash, so I'll have to do something there.

Speaking of trees, we have deer nibbling on the apple trees.  Apparently even though we added a third dog, they have done nothing to deter deer.  Weird, since they're all fantastic at barking at the wind....So Mike has purchased some deer repellent, and is hoping that it will work.

Fennel

Snap peas are coming!

Shell peas, spinach, snap peas, and pole beans

Edamame (front) and green beans

Tomatoes

Eggplants in their tin foil collars

Close-up of the sad, dusted eggplants in their collars

Walking onions

Shallots - apparently they really can't take a joke about being transplanted

Makeshift hotcap for a particularly delicate brussels sprout

Broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts

Glorious potatoes

Parsnips and carrots, pre-thinning

Hilling, weeding, and the first potato bug sightings

We've had a ton of rain over the past week, which has been fantastic for my seedlings and even better for my weeds, so today when Landon was ready to be handed off to his dad, I headed out to the garden.  My first task was hilling the potatoes, which have gotten huge over the past week.  Mike picked up two yards of compost this morning to use for hilling (and for other things, as that is clearly an excessive amount of compost to hill two beds of potatoes), so I started by shoveling the compost out of the truck into the garden, then into the beds.  I'm going to be one sore mama tomorrow.  I surveyed the plants for potato bugs and eggs before I started, and found about 10 potato bugs, although I couldn't find any eggs.  I'd really like to catch the eggs so that I don't have to deal with the larvae, so I'm going to try to get out to keep checking over the next couple of weeks.

The seeds that I planted two weeks ago are all coming up nicely, and earlier this week I put in my second planting of bush green beans.  I'm planting three sets 10 days apart, in hopes that they'll be ready for harvest at a staggered interval this year. 

Pole beans 6-10

The beets continue to do nothing.  Strawberries are coming in, and I hope that this year we'll be able to snag a few before the birds eat them all!

 In the lettuce bed, I've tried to replant some of the lettuces, rather than thinning them, as my seeds came up in clumps (I'm sure this had nothing to do with how they were sown...).  Today they transplanted lettuces are looking a little limp, but I'm hoping this will work.

Lettuce 6-10

 The carrots and radishes look fantastic.  We harvested our first radish for salad on Saturday night, and it was delicious. 

Carrots and radishes 6-10

Chard 6-10

 I think cutworms got to one of my eggplant seedlings and one of my pepper seedlings, so we hit the farmer's market again to buy replacements.  The other seedlings in those beds are fine, so I hope these were isolated incidents.

Eggplant and tomatoes 6-10

 I have at least three tomato seedlings that have come up from last year's crop, including the one below (with one of last year's onions), one in the scallion/leek/shallot bed, and one nestled in with the cabbage.  I haven't pulled any of them yet, as I'm still admiring the fact that they took the initiative to grow.

Rogue tomato and onion from last year's garden 6-10

Snap peas

 Lily has spent the past week trying to eat the bulbs that my mother planted, so Mike installed a pretty fence around the perennial garden out front to keep the dogs out.  It looks lovely (he also mulched), but has been completely ineffective as far as the dogs go, and I've caught them both in there several times.  Apparently the new mulch is delicious (says Lily).  She can't understand why she's also banned from the vegetable garden...

Mostly planted

I had a fantastic Memorial Day weekend, with lots of farming and even a bit of sleep.  Mike and I hit the farmer's market on Saturday morning to pick up eggplant, pepper and herb seedlings, and then stopped by Skillins to get a few last herbs and tomato cages.  When we got home, Mike strapped Landon into the Ergo and they had major father son bonding time while I spent two wonderful hours in the garden, weeding and planting.  On Monday, we repeated this setup and I "finished" (are you ever really done?) weeding and planting the summer seeds of bush and pole beans, zucchini, cucumbers, winter squash, and basil.  Mike then managed to pull off the feat of watering the garden while wearing the baby, which was impressive but ultimately unnecessary given the huge amount of rain that we got yesterday.  Also on Monday, my mom planted day lilies, gladioli, and peonies in the flower bed around the well.  Lily has spent the past two days trying to dig up the bulbs and eat them.  She also helped herself to a generous serving of last Thanksgiving's fried turkey oil that was in the barn.  Anyone want a bearcub?

The tomatoes seem to have benefited from the actual hardening off that I did this year, and they look happy in their spots in the garden.  The carrots, radishes, snap peas, potatoes, and swiss chard are germinating very well.  My beets have barely come up at all.  I'm not sure if they are just being slow to germinate, if they were duds, or if something is eating the seedlings.  Also in the category of garden puzzles is the fact that some bug is snacking on my scallions/leeks/shallots.  I was under the impression, from all of my gardening books, that bugs left onion family plants alone.  Not in my garden.  These tiny black and white caterpillar/inchworms are munching the tops off of all of these plants.  Very odd, and I haven't found a solution yet since none of my go-to garden guides mention this type of pest.  So for now I'm just hoping they go away.  I'm sure that will work.

cabbage 5-30

chard 5-30

herbs 5-30

from front, eggplant, arugula, tomatoes 5-30

potatoes 5-30

radishes & carrots 5-30

beets (?) 5-30

We started spraying the arugula, mustard greens, and cabbage family crops with organic insecticidal soap as the flea beetles are just terrible this year, and they've officially killed one broccoli plant.  The soap has helped a bit, but we'll need to keep on top of it as it only works when it's wet.

Our peach trees both have a fungus, so I think we are once again going to spray and forgo the notion of organic trees this year.  I think if we don't, we may lose them.

In chicken news, the girls continue to look like a very ratty bunch due to all the pecking, but are laying very well and are enjoying the weeds that I bring to them from the garden.  One of the rhode island reds has become broody, and she spends her days and nights trying to hatch the fake lime in the corner of the coop.  She may not be intelligent, but she is very determined.  Expect baby limes any day....

The meteoric rise, and collapse, of the giant pumpkin

So last weekend, with the help of Mike's dental school friends, we installed the big giant pumpkin on the front stoop, completing our fall decorations.  Sadly, this lovely fall scene only lasted a week.  When we went out on Saturday morning, the pumpkin looked like this:

 Which quickly devolved to this by the afternoon:

 And now looks like this:

It's a sad, smelly sight.  So far, neither of us has been brave enough to tackle the removal, although we realize that the situation is only going to get worse.  We did have a lovely stoop for a week, at least, and the smaller giant pumpkin is still in good shape so all is not lost. 

Even though we were very sad about the collapse of the giant pumpkin, we still managed to get through some good garden work on Sunday.  As I've mentioned before, our chard has been incredibly productive for the last three months.  I never thinned the seedlings, though, and so the bed is very unruly.  When Mike harvested a bunch of chard for visiting friends on Saturday, he told me that he thought that most of our good chard was gone.  I figured that this probably wasn't true, but could admit that the overgrown and bug eaten leaves were overshadowing the good chard, so on Sunday morning I thinned out the chard bed.

 

Overgrown chard bed

Newly invigorated thinned chard bed

Clearly, we still have quite a bit of good chard left, and the bed looks much better now that I've removed the leaves that had gone by.  While I worked on chard maintenance, Mike fixed up the gate to the garden.  Lily the wonder squirmer has perfected the art of slithering under the gate to feast on the compost, and I begged Mike to do something to prevent her from getting in so often.  On Friday and Saturday, she pulled out and ate a broccoli stem, coffee filter with grounds, half a gourd, a carrot, and what looked like a pepper.  Can you tell she's a lab?  So Mike decided to lower the gate and put wire behind it so that she couldn't squeeze between the bars.  It took him at least an hour, and he was very confident in his work.

Lily, honey badger that she is, was undaunted.  About 15 minutes after we went inside for a break, I looked out to see Lily happily noshing away at the compost.  Apparently she took one look at the new gate and decided that it would be even easier to just push her nose through the side, which opens the gate just enough for her to squeeze through.  While we're happy that at least one of our dogs appears to be intelligent, we were not pleased that the redesign had not worked.  So now the gate is both latched shut with a caribeener and then tied tightly with rope.  So far, she hasn't figured out a way to get in, but it seems like it's only a matter of time.

After Mike and I were done with our respective garden jobs, we teamed up to plant a bed of garlic, to be harvested next summer.  Since I did such a sub-par job with the onions, I let Mike do the actual planting work, while I separated the cloves.  It feels good to have now three beds of the garden already set for next year (garlic, asparagus, and rhubarb), and soon I'm going to start planning out the rest of the garden for next summer.

Before our last frost, Mike had harvested a lot of peppers, and while he was brewing a batch of winter ale yesterday afternoon he multitasked by also blackening the peppers on the grill.  We had a mix of bell peppers and poblanos, and he blackened them all.  We're going to chop them up and freeze them for chilis this winter.

We've both been doing quite a bit of chicken socialization lately, so we stopped by the coop to say hello to the girls and have another conversation about where it is, and is not, appropriate to lay eggs.  I had a real connection with a few girls, and I like to think my words made a difference because this morning we had our first nest box egg!  So at least one of our chickens is smart enough to figure out that those straw filled comfy boxes are for laying.  We had two more eggs on the floor, but progress is progress.

Beginning the fall cleanup

Since it was so gorgeous out last weekend, Mike was inspired to begin the fall garden cleanup, and I was inspired to pick lima beans.  While Mike pulled out the cucumber, green bean, zucchini, summer squash, snap pea, and cabbage plants, I harvested the lima beans.  One of us is clearly a more industrious farmer than the other - I'm lucky I have a productive teammate.

Below is the lima bean/asparagus bed pre-harvest.  As I started picking lima beans, I realized that the majority of the pods were at the base of the plants, and that the lima beans were really crowding the poor asparagus.  I also realized that the odds that I was going to go back for a second lima bean harvest this late in the season were not good, so I decided to pull out the lima bean plants and harvest the pods that way.  It was much easier to harvest the lima beans, and I think it made the asparagus happy.  As I was yanking, I promised the asparagus that I wouldn't plant anything else in their bed next year, and I apologized for doubting their growth potential.  We got a pretty good yield of lima beans, and I think the asparagus is much happier now that it has breathing room.



Asparagus and lima beans pre-harvest

Asparagus after the lima bean harvest

Lima bean harvest

Shelled lima beans!

We had a spaghetti squash from our neighborhood squash lady that we needed to use, so we came up with a fantastic dinner.  We roasted the spaghetti squash, and cooked up some angel hair pasta and lima beans.  Then we made a white sauce and tossed everything together, finishing the dish with some crumbled soy bacon.  It was creamy and delicious, and we were very proud of ourselves for coming up with the recipe.

My parents were over, and so I took the opportunity to unload as much produce as I could on them.  Our tomatoes are still going strong, as are the eggplants, chard, leeks and bell peppers.

Tomatoes

Gourds, chard and tomatoes

Hansel eggplants

Mom's haul of bell peppers, eggplant, chard, summer squash, and lima beans

The red peppers look great - I guess when you ignore your pepper plants, that really allows them to fully ripen into their colored glory.  Our orange and yellow pepper plants were duds, but the greens, purples, and reds have produced very well.  The hansel eggplant has been by far the most productive eggplant variety.  I must have sent my mom home with about ten small eggplants, which are the perfect size for roasting.

We've harvested almost all of the squash, and now it's out curing in the barn.  Because our squash yield was so much lower than what I'd hoped for, and because I think I'm addicted to squash, we've supplemented our crop heavily with squash from the squash lady down the street.  She grew a huge range of varieties, so in addition to my own squash I have quite a few of her more rare types to try out, including a marina di chioggia, which is supposed to be great in ravioli and gnocchi, and two Australian blue squashes.  Yum!

My candy roasters and rouge vif d'etampes squash

Giant pumpkin!

We haven't picked the giant pumpkin yet, and I think we'll be leaving it on the vine for at least another week given the mild weather forecast.  My guess is that it's around 95 pounds, Mike thinks it's closer to 150.  I'm not sure how we'll weigh it (or move it) yet, but I will somehow have a final giant pumpkin update in a few weeks.  It's starting to turn a deeper orange - I'm not sure if that means that it's not going to get bigger or what.  We went to the Cumberland Fair last weekend and ogled the truly giant pumpkins, and I was inspired to be a more diligent giant pumpkin grower next year.  Some of the pumpkins were over 1,000 pounds, and two had really nice shapes.  Of course, if we did have a 1,000 pound pumpkin, then Mike would argue that we needed a tractor, so maybe I don't want to go down that road yet.

Still no eggs, but Mike has started giving motivational speeches to the girls.  Some of you have told me your guesses for the first egg day, but I have to confess that if you didn't post a comment, I don't remember what your day was (that includes my own guess).  So, if you want in on the egg laying contest, leave a comment here with your guess on the first day, or send me an email and I'll put a comment in for you.  The guesses that we have so far are:

Mamie:  September 15
Mike:  September 28

Clearly, Mike and Mamie have lost, so the field is wide open.  I'm calling October 15, although I'm also hoping that I'm wrong because I'd like them to lay sooner than that.