Garden journal 2013...Chicken storm disaster, #74

[897tgigvib]

OhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhJourney that looks LUSCIOUS!

CAN I START DOING WHAT THE VOICES IN JOURNEY'S HEAD TELL ME TO DO?
How do I tune into the wavelength???

 

[dewdropsinwv]

OhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhJourney that looks LUSCIOUS!

CAN I START DOING WHAT THE VOICES IN JOURNEY'S HEAD TELL ME TO DO?
How do I tune into the wavelength???

Sorry Marshall, it's a "woman" thing.

 

[thistlebloom]

Beautiful Journey! You better be resting up so you can keep up with that baby!

Hope your horse is doing better today.

 

[journey11]

Hey Thistle, now DH needs a little taste of what I go thru with SuperBaby now and then. Who knew sleeping in on a Saturday would gain me some appreciation around here? It makes him happier to go back to work on Mondays too!

Marshall, if you could hear the voices in my head, they'd be saying, "must.....pull....weeds!" I'm telling you, I could have won your weeding contest this year.

Monty, my peaches are maybe a couple days from ready and I CAN'T believe the brown rot didn't get me this year. I didn't spray a thing either, yet many of those peaches are nice and round and not at all buggy. I tell you what I think helped though....we treated the front yard for grubs to prevent the June Bug invasion that we had the previous couple of years--HUNDREDS of them would swarm the yard after emerging. I hardly saw any this year. They are notorious for chewing up your peach trees and probably carry disease too.

Every year Stark Brothers nursery catalog has a special on 5 peach trees (was $102 last year) that will ripen in succession. I really, really want to order that special this year. Seems there is always something more important that $100 needs to go to, but I am going to plan for it. I have one other little peach tree stick that I planted last year. An Elberta something-or-other. Now it is starting to look like a tree. I really had my doubts as to how a stick becomes a peach tree before! The other peach tree was here when we moved in.

ETA: Oh, the horse seems to be his usual self today. I don't know, maybe he was flaked out from the heat and humidity? He really scared me there for a second!

 

[Jared77]

Wow

I'm impressed! You've obviously been busy, glad to see things are coming along so well for you. Looks like your going to be going like this till frost!

 

[journey11]

I thought I had a bunch of big tomatoes ready, but when I went to pick them this evening, nearly all had a large soft/rotten spot on the underside. I've not seen them rot on the vine like that before. The plants don't look diseased at all. I don't know what happened, unless I can blame this on the rain too.

My appalachian heirloom pole beans are starting to come on... I've been canning up a storm this week and will be next week as well.

On a good note, my dwarf peach tree exceeded my expectations. No brown rot/fungal diseases this year (surprisingly!) :bun However, I wish now I had bothered to thin them. I didn't get a chance to spray the dormant oil, so I pretty much counted them for loss, but they surprised me. I brought in just shy of a bushel and there were quite a few nice, blemish-free peaches among them. I hadn't gotten any good peaches off of this tree the past two years, so I am really pleased.

The deer ate more peaches than I care to share though. I booby trapped my garden with fishing line and that has kept them out of there, but they decided to steal my peaches and shank all the low hanging apples from my trees instead. Grrr.... I am just going to have to fence/electrify my whole backyard. We wanted to do it this spring, but some work around the house took precedence (all the money.)

I also have a borrowing neighbor who has taken off with my wheelbarrow without asking and kept it for 3 weeks and keeps coming over to use my cistern...also without asking! Ah well...a fence would also help to contain the baby-toddler. She is always running off. (Electric along the top of a 2x4" knotted woven wire fence is what we had in mind.)

 

[so lucky]

I think a nice tall fence would help "keep the baby in" and keep unwanted creatures out, including 2-legged ones.

 

[MontyJ]

Wow Journey, you did get lucky with that peach tree. For the first time ever my bigger peach tree has brown rot It's not like the peaches would have been any good anyway, scab has ruined most if not all of them. I may take that tree down and plant an earlier variety. I wish I could remember what variety the younger one is. It bears very early. It's a cling peach though, and the larger one is a freestone. Maybe I can find an early freestone. I just hate loosing all those years of growth, just to start over. I'm not getting any younger, and I want peaches!

 

[bj taylor]

journey, it's all amazing. you get so much done AND chase after a little one. sure glad your horse is ok. that would be scary.
your food looks wonderful
they say a good fence makes good neighbors. sounds like you've got a neighbor that needs a fence to remind them of boundaries

 

[journey11]

It has been such a busy couple of weeks and now we are back to school (homeschool), so I haven't had much time online lately, but here a couple of pics from around the ol' homestead this week.

The biggest tomato I got this year was a Kellogg's Breakfast. Each plant produced lots of nice, big tomatoes too. Very productive.

A 3-gallon bucket of bell peppers I picked off of two plants today. These will be stuffed green peppers tomorrow.

Some more peppers from the other day. The jalapenos were made into Candied Jalapenos , a recipe that Jared told me about and it promises to make me famous...LOL. The hot bananas have been cut up and frozen for now until I can get some sweet bananas to mix in for Hot pepper butter (mustard).

Things are starting to wind down in the big garden, but I am still picking lots of beans. (The sunflowers in the background were planted by the chipmunks. )

These Nickel heirloom Appalachian pole beans are a "greasy" type. They have outproduced the other two Appalachian heirlooms I have by about 2 to 1. They are large pods, extremely tender, tasty and perfect for canning.

These are some of the Ora's Speckled greasy cut-shorts. I haven't picked from the 3rd teepee yet (Hill Family greasy, with multi-colored beans in the dried pods) but hopefully tomorrow if I get time.

After the potatoes came out of my front raised bed, I put in a variety of fall stuff. The carrots are too small to be seen in the pic and the parsley didn't come up. The vines in front are canteloupe....I've got roughly 6 weeks left in my growing season. Not sure if they'll make it. Then there's a little fennel, basil, beets, bright lights swiss chard, bok choy (I picked half of it as baby bok choy), the carrots and then some sugar snap peas. DH is not going to be happy about having to mow around the canteloupe vines.

My MIL gave me this red passionvine. It is so pretty, but it is like a monster consuming my chainlink fence!

I am bun-bun sitting for my sister while she is at the beach. This is Sweet Sweet Petunia and Lunetteka Dear. They are American fuzzy lops.

And this is Thumper, my DD6's bun-bun. (Thumper is what we settled on after I had to veto several not-so-bunny-like names she came up with. ) He is such a sweetie-pie!

My CX meat bird chicks arrived on Wednesday. All 31 survived and are doing great so far. DH and I will hopefully have the layer's new coop finished tomorrow and the CX will go out into the tractor here in two more weeks.

My main garden is a weedy mess and I'm ready to be done with it and clear it off here very soon, or at least most of it. Then I'll put the chicken tractor over the garden and the CX can poop all they want.