Catch Up--Mostly on the Garden

Holy buckets!  Things have been a little crazy here lately.   I keep thinking maybe after (insert event, month, etc. here) things will slow down, but it seems they never do.  Things just change and I get a different kind of crazy. 

The garden this year is fair.  I've got peas that have gone to seed so we'll collect some of those when they're all dry.  The peppers, onions, and tomatoes that I grew from seed are doing well, but nothing's ripe on them yet.  The late frost took anything that might have grown on our fruit trees--even our apple tree in the yard that always has little apples on it doesn't this year.  We'll be hunting some down come fall.  I was able to get a little box of apricots from a friend (who doesn't live around here) which we just ate because I love fresh from the tree apricots and haven't had them for a few years.  Also got some corn that was over-ripe, so instead of freezing it, it's drying in the shop for cornmeal.  Got a bunch of green peppers from the same friend and from the Bountiful Baskets food co-op that I participate in every other week or so and dehydrated them all.  They are so handy dehydrated.  I really don't like them well enough to get them eaten fresh before they go all slimy in the fridge and turn into chicken food, so for me, drying them is usually the way to go.  Yep, I'm linking you to posts from last year, some things are very cyclical--it's the same process this year as it was last year, just looks a little different because the peppers are a different shape and the corn is yellow.

I've got radishes going to seed that hubby almost pulled out as some kind of weed he'd never seen before and sure didn't want propagating in our yard.  Thankfully he asked me what they were first.  Same deal on the garden huckleberries I grew from seed.  He was ready to get rid of those as he had never seen them before and assumed they were some kind of invasive plant.  With as fragile as those seedlings were, I'm glad he thought to check with me before eradicating them.  A few of them are actually ripening.  They are small, black, really sweet, and seedy.  We'll probably make jelly with them.  As my son told the UPS guy, "my mom can make jam out of anything".

The beans I planted were supposed to be bush beans.  Bush beans work particularly well in my garden bed system.  Pole beans do not because I have nothing for them to climb.  Well, the two varieties of beans I planted next to each other that were supposed to be bush beans are shooting climbing tendrils out all over the place.  Turns out they must be pole beans even though they were advertised as bush beans.  I have nothing for them to climb except the stray tall weeds that I just pulled out, so now they're climbing each other.  What a mess!  I only have them growing for dry beans anyway, so I guess we'll pick through it all at the end of the season when they're dry to get the beans out.  Hassle, hassle, hassle.

Enough about my garden.  Just kidding.  There's more.  The carrots, beets, and swiss chard I planted are all doing fine.  In fact, the chard is crazy and probably needs eaten.  The beets are eatable also--I'll have to take a picture of these, they're some fancy variety.  I really don't need more beets in my freezer, but when I saw these special beet seeds I had to give them a try just for fun.  The purple beans are happily growing also.  Squash is way behind, but we're finally getting crooknecks out of them.  We've been doing pretty well with the squash bug patrol this year.  I despise those stinky bugs.

Okay, maybe that's all about the garden now.  Except the stunted corn that is growing and thankfully is a short season variety because we got it in so late, so it's possible we'll get corn out of it this year before it freezes this fall.  We also got a couple more fruit trees planted, both pears.  And amazingly (or not), the weeds are also doing fine.

Did you get a garden in this year?  How is yours faring?