I cut all the bean plants and cucumber vines to make room for 12 new cauliflower and 6 new brocolli plants. It was sundown when I was taking the pictures, so they didn’t come out great. You can see my big watermelons in one of the pictures.
Amber has been checking our watermelon plants almost every day to see if they are ready to harvest. Tonight she decided to grab the first one. Oh wow, it was sweet, juicy, and delicious! I didn’t do anything except plant the seeds and wait. No fertilizer, no babying. I barely watered, except when they were drooping in the heat of summer.
My new hive wasn’t strong enough going in to spring to add honey supers on, but I did add a second ‘deep’ hive box to give them room for expansion. I’m glad I did because they almost filled it up with honey! I pulled 2 frames out for myself. I didn’t use any special equipment, just scraped the honeycomb into a bowl, strained out the wax, then heated the wax and let it cool. My end result was 4.5 pints of raw honey, 1 pint of cooked honey and a small chunk of wax.
Me, Aiden, and Bryson started moving all the tree trimmings in place to create a hugelkulture bed today. The wood is stacked 2 to 3 foot high, then I’ll add another 2-3 foot of soil on top of that.
Aiden and I went on the tour of Texas Worm Ranch that was set up just for the members of North Texas Vegetable Gardeners. A nasty thunderstorm moved in while we were there and we hung out in the bathroom because the winds were so bad the roof next door was flying off.
After we left the worm farm, we went over to Carol Garrison’s urban homestead and she gave us a tour of her front yard vegetable garden, chickens, tropical garden, rainwater harvesting, greenhouse, composting, and fish. She dug up some of her blackberry bushes and a special okra plant and set us home with these plants! I came home and put them in the ground. I just checked on them this morning and they seem to be doing good so far.
Sugar snap peas are producing lots of pods, but are also getting eaten by a caterpillars that I haven’t found. I’m debating if I should spray them with BT or now. The comfrey plants are getting huge. Too big for my small raised beds, so I need to make a decision about where to relocate them. My tomatoes, peppers, beans, cantaloupe, and watermelon are all doing OK, but don’t seem to be growing fast.
Plants are growing at a very fast pace right now. I finally have some sugar snap peas to harvest, but just a handful so far. And 2 strawberries! They were delicious. Aiden raced me out to the garden to pick snap peas, he loves them!
The Pomegranate Tree I planted last fall didn’t bud or leaf out this spring, so I called Stark Bro’s and they shipped me a new one with zero hassle! (This was tree 16 shown here) It was delivered by FedEx today, so I replaced it.
I also picked up one more pepper plant at the CCMGA Plant Sale this morning, along with a few flowers and a thyme plant. After these were planted, I mulched the beds with leaves. I still left areas un-mulched where I have seeds planted.
