Tag Archives: plum

Onion and Broccoli Harvest – 5/22/2023

Amber pulled up the onions. Some of there were huge. I think onions are year-to-year the easiest crop we grow. She rigged up some wire fence across a few saw horses and hung the onions on the wire fence to dry for a week or so. He plans on freezing some and storing the rest.

We also harvested broccoli, as the weather is getting too hot. The bugs are eating it up quickly and most of it has already bolted. Good eats though!

The tomatoes are getting really close to being ripe. We picked a few that are starting to turn red because we don’t trust the local wildlife to leave them alone. The bushes are getting really tall, to the point we are going to need to top them to keep them from falling over.

The melons in the backyard are growing well. Sweet corn seems to be doing well too. Okra, not so much. I sprayed it all with a foliar fertilizer (Hasta Grow) and I hope that helps. A big mistake from last year was letting the wild non-edible melon continue to grow. The seed it released is now germinating and I have hundreds of those plants growing, in and among my useful plants. Lesson learned: stay on top of the weeding!

We also harvested a few carrots (meh). The blackberries are starting to get ripe, but they are absolutely covered with moths and wasps. Some of the plums are starting to ripen, but they are all infested with bugs because I didn’t spray insecticide at the right time. And our chickens have been naughty and are hanging out and laying eggs in our raised beds. The local rat snake found the eggs and had a nice meal.

Garden Update – May 7, 2023

My oldest fruit trees along the west side are finally producing fruit! I wish I would have been on top of spraying them for insects though. I lost 7 young fruit trees from last summer’s heat and transplanted the 4 figs that survived in pots last summer.

A few of the blackberries are already starting to ripen. I’m surprised by the number of blackberry plants that have died off. Only the thornless varieties have died, the native thorned variety I have is multiplying faster than I can keep it trimmed. A wasp was occupying the fruit I was photographing.

The raised beds in the front are all doing great. The squash and cucumbers I planted a few weeks ago are all popping up and I’ve already thinned them out. I added a layer of old tree leaves as mulch. We need to hurry up and harvest the broccoli before it bolts. Onions are almost ready to harvest. The peas are putting out fruit faster than we can keep it picked.

In the back in-ground row-garden, all the mellons, corn, okra, and cover crop is starting to come up. I thinned out the melons today and tried to transplant some of them. We should have enough melons to supply the grocery store if these do well.

We planted 4 tomato plants in the raised bed in front of our house. This bed is usually just out-of-control mint. I’m happy to see the start of delicious tomatoes well on their way! We are having a hard time keeping the chickens out of this bed though. The love to hang out and dig around.

tomato
tomato

March 16, 2020 – Greening Up Status

It’s was warm most of last week and has rained all this week. Lots of new green growth in the garden. Most of the fruit trees are flowering.

Peach, Apricot, and Plum Trees – Planted 1/23/2018

My order of bare root fruit trees came in today, and I immediately put them in the ground.  I planted them in a pattern I learned about in a the film “The Permaculture Orchard“:  2 fruit trees, followed by a nitrogen fixing tree and prevent two fruit trees of the same type from being close to each other.  The idea is the nitrogen fixing tree will provide for the fruit trees on each side of it, and if one tree gets attacked by pests or diseased, the problem doesn’t easily just jump next door and take out another tree.  I planted at 12 foot intervals, and about half of the trees will be shaded for the first half of the day.  The fruit trees and redbuds came from Womack Nursery in De Leon Texas and the 3 nitrogen fixer trees are on order from Cold Stream Farms in Freesoil, Michigan.

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