It’s over 90 degrees as I sit on the porch trying to find ways to stay relatively cool. The heat of the summer has set in, and along with it comes the slightly more rewarding work in the garden. In the early spring the temperatures are cold, it snowed one of the days we built the chicken coop. As the spring starts to give life to the soil and the plants, the garden starts to come alive. Now we are in the hot summer and competition is starting to take over. Its a competition for light, water, and nutrients. We are doing our best to help out the plants we want to win, and tamp down those plants that we don’t want. But most exciting is the start of the summer harvest.
Harvest
We started harvesting in mid-June and so far we’ve had some success. We’ve gotten 1 pound of carrots, peas, and broccoli; three pounds of red currants which we turned into muffins and jams; five pounds of beans, cucumbers; six pounds of blueberries; and so far we’ve gotten 20 eggs (still small but increasing in numbers by the day). We’ve begun freezing beans, broccoli, and blueberries and pickling some cucumbers. This is just the start of our annuals, we’re seeing tomatoes ripen, peppers get bigger and bigger, and eggplants starting to set. Our pumpkin, watermelons, and cantaloupe plants are starting to put out buds and the bees are around.
We’re starting to get some excess that we can store for ourselves, an share with others as well. Once we get enough excess we’ll start publishing a price list of what we have available, at a minimum we hope to get enough eggs to sell by the middle of august.
Struggles
Our main struggles are with watering. The brussel sprouts have been wilting like crazy in the heat (we’ve somewhat revived them but they still don’t look great). We also haven’t been able to keep the apples on the apple trees, we’ve lost all but 3 and we’re not expecting those to last the summer. Our homemade pesticide spray appeared to have scalded our apple trees, but there is still some new growth. I would classify our tree establishment as marginal so far. We haven’t lost any trees yet but none of them look overly strong yet. We have 2 apple trees, cherry tree, plum tree, peach tree, and 2 pawpaw trees.
Our blueberry bushes have survived so far, only 1 of the bushes has gone through extreme water stress and lost all of its berries. 
One of the bushes has been producing like crazy. The bush we put in last year doesn’t have a lot of berries, but they are the biggest blueberries I’ve ever seen! Believe me, they taste just as good as they look.
Share Now!
