There was a small grove of wild Hazel nut trees in the future chicken pen. These wouldn’t normally be on the top of our list for cutting down, but they interfered with our planned chicken fence line and needed to be removed. Lee took out the chain saw that my dad kindly gave us, and made a pretty fast work of it. Jasper and I watched in the camp chair.

Before & after:

Before & after:

Lee doesn’t like being able to see our neighbors now that the area is opened up. On the other hand, the openness will let more sunlight in and the grass will grow better. It’s a catch 22. Now all that we need to do is mow the area, move and stack all the split firewood from the latest Cedar tree take down, and clean up some stray branches. After that we can get down to fence building.

As I was wandering around out in my garden I had to stop and take a another look at my turnip patch. I hadn’t looked at them for a while and my jaw about dropped. Since it seems so big I think it is about time to harvest them all. Truthfully the real reason why I hadn’t looked at the turnips for a while was that I was disappointed in the root maggot damage that I was seeing. Therefore I just figured that most of the crop was a loss. While there was some damage it wasn’t to bad. I picked one beet and had to laugh at the size difference. Both the beets and turnips were planted at the same time. The beets haven’t been doing really well. When the soil gets amended next year hopefully we will see some changes in productivity.

My grape tomatoes are starting to ripen! Eating a home grown tomato is like a taste of heaven. Nothing you get in the store comes close. This tomato and the one behind it didn’t last after the picture was taken.

My pumpkin is growing by inches everyday it seems. I don’t look at it for a couple of days and then I take a peek and my eyes about bug out of my head. Lee thinks I am growing the really giant variety but I’m not. I feel like a little kid in the absurd excitement that I feel when I look at it. My last post about my pumpkin was 10 days ago. Look at the size difference. Lee says that maybe my hand is shrinking.

This is a squash plant called Lady Godiva. My mom gave me a few seeds to try this season. Lady Godiva is used for their naked seeds and not for its meat. Here is a picture and a little more information about them from Territorial Seed Company.

My mom gave me a few kohlrabi seeds to play with. Funny thing about this was I forgot that I had planted them. For the last week or so when I would walk by this section of the garden I would be like “what is that”. It was in the greens section next to the swiss chard that my mom had also given me to try out. That was how I figured it out finally. Well that and the confirmation of when I re-looked at my garden map that has everything I planted and where its planted written down. Don’t they look like little alien balls?

I have a hot pepper plant going along with some bell pepper plants. Not all the pepper plants have this big of fruit growing on them. Everyone I know around here uses black plastic on the ground around the pepper plants to help give them more heat. We didn’t do that this year. Next year I think I will try that and see if there is a difference in plant productivity.

Lastly here are my cucumbers. After sitting around for weeks looking like they weren’t going to do a thing they suddenly decided to come to life. I have never grown them up a trellis before so we will see how that goes.

We are gearing up for food storage and preserving. On a trip to our local Bi-Mart we noticed they had sales running on canning jars and plastic freezer containers. So we bought 36 quart and 10 pint sized storage containers. I remember the ones that my mom had when I was a kid. These aren’t as thick but we were still happy to locate some. I didn’t realize that you could still buy them. We were getting ready to make an order at Lehman’s before we found them local. Lee is already itching to buy some more.

I have some mason canning jars that we inherited from the property clean up. So today we only bought three cases. Two of the cases are wide mouth and one case is regular mouth. I really like the wide mouth canning jars better but the lids are more expensive to buy. So Lee is trying to convince me to go all regular mouth. I told him that after I try canning this year then I will have more experience on what I like. That way I can buy more accordingly to my preference.

I can’t believe that I am actually going to try to can this year. As I child I hated helping my mom can. Of course since I wasn’t interested in doing it, and forced stirring was not exciting, I have not a clue on how to do it. Thankfully since my mom is close by I am going to go do some canning at her house. This time I am going to pay just a wee bit more attention.

So what did we do today? Blueberry picking! Lee and I went to a small half acre blueberry U-Pick farm near our house called Greenbrier Farm. We spent two hours and picked 22.5 pounds of blueberries at $1.50 a pound. That sure beats the $4 dollars and up price that you see in the store for a tiny half pint. Not to mention the taste is out of this world good. I had never picked blueberries before though Lee had with his parents as a child.

We got his and her paper bags. Who picked more? I can’t tell you as that is a secret. Though it looks impressive the bags aren’t full. Otherwise they would be exploding blueberries everywhere.

Lee read a recommendation online about freezing the washed berries in a shallow pan before putting them all together in a container. That way your berries don’t get frozen into one giant lump and you can shake a little out as you want some. Another way that you can freeze them without having a solid blueberry block is by not washing them so they are dry to start with. Since we had a lot to begin with I chose this method. Greenbrier Farm doesn’t spray their blueberries bushes with pesticides and only uses Roundup for weed control. We were munching them at the farm and on the way home so unless we keel over I am not that concerned about perceived “dirtiness”. When I get ready to cook with them I will rinse them off. Now if I had bought all this from a store that would have been a different matter….

So after all the munching on the way home how many quarts did that 22.5 pounds of blueberries make up? We ended up with 18 and a half quarts. I didn’t can any of the blueberries but plan on canning other fruits and vegetables later on. Lee is dying for a blueberry pie as they are his favorite from growing up. I’m not so sure about making one as nothing tastes as good as the ones that your mom makes. That and I’m not sure how I am supposed to make a pie without an oven. Not to mention that I refuse to fire up our wood stove in the middle of the summer.

We have a lot of fungi that pops up here and there. I think I need to get a book so I can start identifying whether I have psychedelic mushrooms, drop you dead mushrooms, or just plain delicious mushrooms.

This spring I got busy and did some tentative shaping of my future flower garden. When we smashed out the second story chimney we had a lot of old chimney blocks. We threw most of them away before I got creative and started using them as a small retaining wall. It required me using a hammer and a chisel to break the blocks up to the piece size that I wanted but it wasn’t that hard. Probably being 70 years old helped in me being able to break the blocks so easy. When we smash out the old chimney on the first floor of the house I am going to continue on with my wall.

When we bought the property it had some retaining wall blocks in the front of the house as a garden bed. As we were clearing out everything in the front the blocks got displaced. I decided to make a raised circle out of them. Right now they have Fuchsia’s growing in it but I think that next year I am going to plant a fern instead. That way the leaves will drape over the blocks better. I plan on putting a matching circle on the other side and it will be the entry way into the pathway leading into the garden.

I am making another raised bed using rocks found around the property. It’s not completed yet either. I have loose tentative plans for another raised bed and a sitting area along with some sort of water feature. I’m not sure what I will use as material for the pathways yet. I haven’t worked on it since the spring as we have been to busy with other projects. I suppose that on a farm a fun garden area may be considered useless. But flower gardening is something I really enjoy and will classify as a hobby. Besides, the area that is designated as my flower garden area would be a hard one to usefully use with animals.

I have put in a few plants and plan on adding some more every year. When this next spring comes along I imagine I will be out there doing some more work in the area. Winter fever has that effect. That and thoughts of playing with new plants and sprucing up the area are very enticing. Then when summer comes I will be bogged down with other important projects.  Taking care of  my veggie garden takes on more importance too. I have grand dreams for this area and hope they become reality.

We needed another tree taken out before we continued on the chicken fencing project. When we had the previous tree in that area removed we didn’t realize that there was a second tree dying. This particular tree had a split about 25 feet up the side of it. The core of the Cedar tree was dead with some rotting in the middle like the last tree.

I had fully envisioned that when this tree was taken down it was going to take out the well head, which was in its path. Lee went and put a log chunk by the pump house to act as a buffer in case the tree fell there. Luckily the tree didn’t land on it when it went down. BUT, after the tree fell down it then rolled over on it. Thankfully all the damage that happened was the roof came off the poorly built pump house.

Here is a picture of the tree line in question. The red lines show where the two trees came out. Removing this new tree seems to have made the whole area brighter still. The green lines show where the three remaining healthy trees are. I’m not sure why all the Cedar trees were planted so close originally, as it makes it harder on the trees. With all the new light it should make the remaining trees happier. The white building on the far left is the back corner of our house. The building in the middle in between the first green and red lines is the wood shack. So the tree was somewhat close to important things. Even better was that when it came down it didn’t take out the stacked wood piles that we had. It couldn’t have gone smoother.

In just a few hours between the tree being cut down to when Lee went out to start clearing up the limbs, we had spiders making webs every where. Here is one of them.

Lastly, I have to put in the action man shot. It’s kind of blurry as my battery was trying to die but oh well.

My garlic is causing me to do some head scratching as I’m not sure when it is ready to harvest. Usually you would be planting it in October in the Northwest the year before. Unfortunately I didn’t put in any garlic starts until April 10th of this year when our garden area was started. So my garlic plants are much smaller then what they should be. I pulled two garlic bulbs up and found that they were just one big clove instead of many. That was okay as I was expecting that as a side effect of my very late planting. According to Gardening When It Counts by Steve Solomon I should be harvesting when the heads fully segment and before the garlic head bursts open all the way. So how exactly am I to tell this when I just have one pretty big clove? I do know that after you dig up the garlic you are supposed to brush the dirt off the roots (no washing as it will make the garlic deteriorate faster) and then let them air dry for a while.

At least my lettuce is easy to figure out. Here is another beautiful head of lettuce that we ate for dinner tonight. Lee thinks I planted too much at once so I think we may have it coming out our ears soon.

I harvested my first broccoli today and look forward to more in the coming weeks. Yummy. You are supposed to cut the flower head off at an angle so rainwater doesn’t collect and lead to rot or disease. Also, leave all the true leaves behind, because most plants will produce side shoots that rival or surpass the central head in quantity.

I keep thinking that we have cleaned up most of the trash around the place. After this week of sprucing up we somehow managed to fill Lee’s truck bed up all the way with trash and metal recyclables. Most of it came from the buried trash lump by our house. I still haven’t gotten it cleaned up all the way.

Lee said he heard something thumping on the window that sounded like a small bird. When he checked outside with a flashlight there was this enormous bug on the window sill trying to get in. It had wings also, but they are closed up in this picture. I wonder what it was.