I harvested all my beets today. Well, maybe I should say I did it this evening. Since it was so hot earlier in the day I thought that I would can them when it cooled down. I was feeling so brilliant and smart with myself.

So I scrubbed them up and we started the process of boiling them outside on a big propane burner. We ended up having three large batches to boil separately. Inside, I had my favorite pickled beet wine recipe simmering on the hot plate. Then I peeled each batch of beets, sliced them, filled pint after pint, poured the wine concoction in it, screwed on the lids, and got ready to can them in a water bath.

“Robin, where are your canning utensils,” Lee asked me at 2:00 am in the morning as he was getting the canner ready.

I looked at him blankly and then with dawning horror.

It was most definitely an “oh crap” moment. I did all my canning last year down at my mom’s house and just used her tools. I had never bought a set of my own. So off we zoom to Walmart as it was the only thing open around here that late that would have canning supplies. We got there and then walked around the store for about 20 minutes before we finally found a set. Walmart employees are really, really scarce that early in the morning to bug with innocent questions from bleary eyed canners.

So we get home around 3:00 am and started the canner going, and by 6:00 am the last batch came out. I got 19 pints of the most glorious red beets canned. The 6:00 am time was so not worth it, but oh those beets (when I open one up three weeks from now) will very much be worth it. I didn’t bother to can any plain beets as the wine recipe is so ding dong good. Lee, who hates beets, will eat these because they taste that good.

Oh Yum! It’s the first cucumber of the season for us here. They are almost ready. I can taste it in my mouth already. It may just not make it back from the garden one day when I am out there watering. Lee will kiss me and then get suspicious of my cucumber breath and then want to know where his is. Then I will have to tell him that I accidentally ate them all while I was standing there bored watering the cucumbers. There is a lot of produce that seems to get munched on out in the garden, and then Lee wonders why those Sun Gold tomatoes are not producing very well this year…

I try not to burp too loudly when coming back from the garden.

The tomatoes seem to be doing awesome this year. When my mom comes over she laments on how well our tomatoes have set on while hers are behind. Hopefully all goes well as I have plans. BIG PLANS! Okay, well just plans of making salsa or pasta sauce.

I’ve been snacking on those too while out in the garden watering. Well, just the early one and the Sun Gold. Sun warm tomatoes are just meant for munching on. I eat them in front of the chickens and don’t share with them either.

I have already harvested a few zucchini and it looks like we may have better pollination this year. They were good also.

There are a few pumpkins starting on the vine. I have been watching over them like a concerned parent. Sometimes I take my finger and stick them in all the flowers to help with the pollination in case the bees are having a party somewhere else. Lee raises his eyebrows at me dubiously.

Some of my seeds for my winter garden have sprouted. YEAH! Now if I can keep the slugs away from them and remember to water them I just may have something going on this winter other then garlic. Not that I have a grudge against garlic, it’s just that while I am out there watering it’s not something I want to munch on.

I need to get on the ball and plant some more. I need some more prepared beds. Maybe if some more potato rows die…

Lee is putting together some drip irrigation for me. This is going to help immensely as I think some of the plants aren’t getting enough water by hand watering. That and maybe he hopes to cut down my munching while watering, so he gets more of his beloved Sun Gold tomatoes.

This year we planted several types of potatoes purchased at several different places. We had potatoes that were saved from last year’s crop, potatoes bought on the cheap ($0.99/lb) from two different farm stores, and potatoes that were certified disease-free from Territorial Seed Company. The latter cost the most. We knew that we were running a risk planting the saved potatoes and the cheap farm store potatoes as there was no guaranty they would be viral free, but we wanted to experiment and see if there was a difference that justified the cost of the disease-free seed potatoes… Well, here is a picture of our three potatoes rows.

The row in the front is entirely certified potatoes and still looks very healthy. The next row, where part of it is missing, isn’t doing well. The Red Norland (farm store seed) is completely toast (as in, no longer exists) while the very end of the row is a white variety and is hanging on barely. The last row looks really rough and is also trying to hang on. So the moral of the story for us is: next year pay the price for certified seed and don’t save potatoes and replant them the year after (even though some people swear by it). You live and learn and experiment and try not to cry when your crop goes completely bust.

I have a confession to make. I never thinned my carrot patch. Granted, I didn’t think that I had any carrots growing for the longest time. So I finally got around to thinning out a few, and while munching on the thinnings I had the bright idea to see if I had any big carrots. I pulled one and my eyes about bugged out! HOLY COW, I have a real carrot. This is a first for me as I have never grown carrots before.

I also had to pull a beet so I could look at it better. Sometimes you just have to be a little crazy and do something like that.

Tonight I planted kohlrabi, rutabaga, and broccoli for my winter garden. Hopefully I can get the seeds to sprout. I plan on taking over the potato bed that got decimated by blight and planting some more winter garden stuff there.

I harvested most of my broccoli crowns today. YUMMY! We ate a big ol’ serving of it and then I blanched and froze about 5 quarts. I think I should plant more of it next year because I am sad that it is mostly gone. Hopefully we will get a lot more side shoots, but the plants are looking a little rough.

While I was sitting in my camp chair taking it easy watching Lee hard at work slaying blackberry vines, I noticed a plum tree. It’s growing under a row of fir trees not to mention it has a Purple Robe Locust pretending it’s an umbrella above it. I think it must have gotten a little confused on where plum trees are supposed to grow.

I had a feeling revisit me that I haven’t had since last year. It was the feeling of, “I’m going to beat up some bozo deer” anger. It’s a valid feeling, really! The herd of deer that seems to hang out here in the summer time decided to get brave, come up to our house, and do a midnight munching on my aronia berry start. I was so happy with how much it had grown as I had bought it as a seedling last year.

I planted some cosmo’s in my garden this year. They are so bright and cheery that I always smile when I look at them.

I pulled up all our garlic today, except for one late variety. I am very pleased with the results. Last year my mom had given me some starts and we planted them in the spring and harvested them in the summer. The garlic was much smaller, but we didn’t care.

Last fall we got our garlic planted at the right time and we added complete organic fertilizer to the soil. It’s amazing how much bigger the bulbs were for this year’s harvest. This is only the second time we have grown garlic but I can’t imagine not having it out in the garden from now on. It doesn’t need watering (in our climate), is easy to keep weeded, and has few pests. (Other than pocket gophers.)

Now we will have the hard task of trying out the varieties we planted and seeing how much we like them (yummy). Of course, when it comes time to plant again this fall, I will probably have to plant some new garlic varieties as well.

Two weeks from now when the garlic has dried, I will braid them and hang them in my kitchen. It’s nice having garlic cloves close at hand when you are cooking.

How goes our garden? Well, it’s been going slow. While Lee and I were recovering from the flu last month, we slowly got the last of our squash starts and what-not planted.

Here is a picture of it from afar. The garden is looking a little better.

The things we planted late were mostly squash and melons. Though, due to the Aggie episode, I have no idea what a lot of the plants are. Since we were working on limited “after the flu energy” we just dug holes instead of manually tilling the whole bed, put fertilizer in the holes, and then planted the starts.

Our three potato rows still look really nice. You can see a size difference when you are out in the garden as all the rows were planted at different times. Lee planted some of his Painted Mountain corn in the middle row. We didn’t plant any popcorn or sweet corn as we were to late in the season to do that. The Painted Mountain corn doesn’t need as many days to mature so we took a gamble on it. After Lee planted it the weather decided to get cold and cloudy before it turned blazing hot. It’s been about two weeks now and nada. We aren’t sure what happened. My mom planted corn this year also and she had really spotty germination. Guess it’s not a corn year here for us.

On a potato note, we are seeing some blight in the non-certified seed potatoes we bought. We didn’t have this problem last year. Thankfully, only the red potatoes seem to be affected so far, as the Cal White’s in the rest of the row look great.

Only one type of carrot I planted germinated. So far they are growing okay, at least I think they are. Lee has been trying to trap voles and gophers in the garden again. Hopefully he can get them as I don’t want my root crops getting wiped out.

I swear I planted this lettuce two and a half months ago. I thought cool season plants would have liked all the rain we’ve had since then. Last year when I was planting lettuce we had it taking off like weeds–now a whole herd of turtles would have won a race about 20 times since I planted this year’s little patch.

My beets are still growing, YEAH! Hopefully I get a nice harvest as I am dying to can lots of beets using my most amazing beet recipe that I tried last year.

I bought a couple pepper starts and my mom gave me two more. I put some of that biofilm around them after the weather got cloudy to help them grow.

Yummy, I foresee cabbage soup in my future.

My collards are coming along. They need weeded but I can’t believe that they are growing. The slugs almost wiped them out at one point, but they survived. I planted them two months ago from seed.

My broccoli looks really great. These were planted as starts about two months ago too, and also got attacked by slugs. I’m always impressed with how well broccoli explodes into growth. It makes me feel like I’m such an amazing gardener even though I had nothing to do with it. I did notice a worm munching on it today so I need to break out my BT tomorrow.

We bought three cucumber starts as we were way behind due to the weather and then us getting sick. I find it humorous we only have three after my huge row I had planted last year. Ah, well, they seem to be growing fine.

Lee’s hops are winding themselves themselves up their posts. Since the first year of growth is not nearly as substantial as the second years, we are just using my pole bean poles. I didn’t get any beans planted this summer anyways, so I didn’t need to use them.

I’m probably going to harvest my garlic in the next day or so. It will be exciting trying the new varieties and seeing which ones we like the best and replant next year. I did pull my three remaining elephant garlic that survived the destruction of the fat pocket gopher. They didn’t get as big as I had hoped they would. On the other hand, each row was tunneled under so the remaining ones probably had some serious root damage going on.

One part of our garden still needs mowed. It’s pretty funny.

WOOHOO! I’m growing something new in my garden. Okay, so I have to be excited about anything growing out there this year. I bought 6 snow pea starts at the Extension Service Master Gardener’s sale this year and we finally got something off of them. It’s not much, granted, and it may be boring for some people, but this is a first for me to grow them.

I have to say that I like them. I like them so much that I may just have to grow some more next year.

…we are sick. If Lee can come back from the living dead somehow by this coming weekend, and I’m not too out of it, we will try to squeak a few things in. Otherwise, it looks like it is going to be somewhat of a bust for our summer garden. I’m feeling disappointed but there isn’t a whole lot I can do about it. The weather has been awful, one of the wettest springs in forever, and trying to hand till made us slower.

I talked to another neighbor a few days ago who told me that they had planted twice this year as the first time everything rotted. They are hoping for better luck this time around. My mom is squeaking things into her garden this week also, while not planting any corn. On her north sided hill she didn’t figure that it would have enough time to grow.

My plan is to plant a winter garden instead. Last year I didn’t because I was so frazzled by the end of the summer I didn’t feel like it. This year, with not a whole lot going on out there, I will still be in the mood. Besides, it feels like I haven’t even started gardening yet. I might see if I can pick some vegetables at some local farms when they come into season. That way I will be able to still do some of my canning and preserving that I want to do.

This past weekend was really beautiful. The perfect day for doing some weeding. So, hmmmm, where do I start? After all these months of rain and no weeding going on this is what our garden looked like. Makes a girl want to cry. Now if I can just find where I planted those beets….

I used some crushed oyster shell back at the end of May to help combat my slug problem. Lets just say it worked not one iota, and before I could get my sluggo bait they had wiped out all my newly sprouted seedlings. I have some collards that kind of survived and since I started using sluggo bait they have perked up along with my broccoli. I was really looking forward to my kohlrabi and cabbage too. I’d eat the slugs out of vengeance, but they just don’t sounds as appetizing. Bleck.

Our potatoes look gorgeous. At least what you can see of them. They finally got hilled for the first time. Lee had to bring the lawn mower into the garden and mowed down the pathways. Then he mowed where he hopes to dig new beds if he ever feels better. I couldn’t help but have a few giggles that we were having to mow our vegetable garden.