Here is What Has Been Happening This Summer

This year I am doing more yard clean up.  If you ignore your yard a little or a lot for a year or two or three like I've done then you will have a lot of clean up.

June 7, I decided the pineapple plant that has been growing in a pot for years needed a bigger pot.  I was quite surprised when I saw the root system.
 

                                                                  

All the roots were short except one that wound around the bottom of the pot.


Hubby has been slowing cutting down the dying Pussy Willow bush that he kept trimming to grow like a tree.

The bottom is growing like crazy, but the doves are enjoying it as a new perch.  One is up high.  Is he looking at the one on the lower part of the stump?

Tuesday August 10, I went outside to pick more ripe tomatoes.

This is the third tomato I have found this way.  They are in the middle of the plant like this, so I know there is a tomato horned worm somewhere, but I cannot find him no-matter how much I look.  Hubby and I have both looked.  I'm picking the tomatoes while they are still orange and I'm getting them before the tomato horned worm.  There is another tomato plant next to this one.  I hope the worm doesn't find its way to that plant. 2014 was the first year that I saw tomato horned worms.  There were 3 on a plant in a pot on the front porch.  I haven't seen one again until this year.  I'm hunting this one tonight.

Some critter came for a food haul from the compost bucket.

The bucket is just inches away from the trailer fender.  Early the next morning this stash was nowhere to be found.  I must have interrupted his collecting adventure.  That is what happens to compost material when you don't keep it buried in non-critter-eatable material.

Look what I found at the edge of the garlic bed. They were mostly shaded by the wooden frame around the edge of the raised bed.

I've now know that if you leave your garlic in the sun for a month it will start turning green. LOL. I guess those will be some on the ones I replant soon for next years harvest.

August 11 I picked the last 65 pounds of peaches from my dying tree.

We have canned peaches, peach jam, peach syrup, and peach leather for this winter.

The cabbage and Brussels Sprouts from my neighbor are growing good.

I cut the bottom off of some buckets and put two around this plant.  When there was only one it kept blowing off and something kept eating all of the leaves.
I haven't covered the cabbage yet and so far there are no cabbage worms in it.  There will be tomorrow after saying there are none.  Isn't that how it goes?

Here is what my cabbage bed looked like last year and almost daily I found a cabbage looper moth trying to find her way out.  She had no problem getting in.  I killed more eggs and worms than I want to ever see again.


I want to know what is doing it's daily duty in my garden.

As you can see, it is dried and has fallen between the cabbage leaves.  I swear there are geese in my garden.  I am constantly dodging these geese sized land mines.


The lettuce is going to seed.

The lettuce is flowering and will soon be going to seed.  This year I will collect the seeds and not leave them in the paper bag for 2 months and let the bugs eat them all.  Little Freckles (the darker one) is my favorite lettuce and I planted the last of the seeds this year.

I planted potatoes in pots this year.

     

I covered the growing plants with soil in the 4 pots grouped together, but none have done well.  The two huge pots have grown even less.  I added a little soil once to those growing plants.  They didn't flower this year and are dying as small plants.  This seems to be the same problem a lot of people are having this year.


I dug up the dead plants and this is what I got.

The back left two are Kennebec (usually a large potato), the back right are Blue, and the front group are Yukon Gold.  I told Hubby that we should have eaten the seed potatoes.  They were a bigger crop that what has been harvested.


On a happy note:

This is the first year we have gotten Green Gage plums from our tree.  Hubby picked 6 more today.  They are hard to find on the tree, but the birds can't find them either.

Lettuce Core Update and garden Update 8-5-14

Well here is the lettuce core.  I have been gone for two weeks and this is what it looks like now.

Pretty disgusting isn't it.  I will try another one in soil and see what happens to it.

The Yukon Gold potato plants were completely dead, so we harvested them Monday.  Here is what we got.  I put a regular sized canning lid in the picture to show the potato sizes better.

I brought home tomatoes and Larry made salsa.  He needed two bell peppers and was able to go pick them out of the garden.  I didn't think to take a picture before he cut them up, here is one still in the garden.  Nice and big this year.

The greens from Bangladesh are starting to germinate.  The grass is growing great in with them.

The Little Freckles lettuce is doing great.

Radishes are looking good too.  The front few leaves are from a turnip.  A few of them germinated and are doing good.

Only a few beets are coming up.  Hope more germinate soon.

The asparagus patch looks like a weed farm. I had all the weeds gone almost three weeks ago. The parsley plant has turned yellow.

Apples are growing nicely.  Still need to get them covered.

Picked a few peaches this morning.  You can see that the birds are eating them.  There are a few more to pick that I can't reach and a few more that have been eaten by the birds and aren't worth picking.  As soon as all the peaches are gone they will move to the apples.
Monday we had waffles with peaches and whipped cream on top for breakfast with our company.  YUMMY!

Garden Update 7-11 through 7-15-14

 The Yukon Gold potato plants are dying fast.

The front potatoes are Russet Norkadah and the back potatoes are All Blue.  Just the right side of this bed has dying potatoes.

Peaches are starting to ripen.

More peaches.
I haven't seen many birds around I wonder if the "B Gon" products are keeping them away or if it is just too hot.

The wind we had a few days ago blew a lot more apples off of the tree.  Here is one a squirrel brought next to the nice damp soil under the faucet and ate. I found it there yesterday morning.  This morning it is completely gone.

These are Moon Flower plants at my front door at 8:30 p.m on 7/11.  They are starting to open.

Here they are at 8:30 a.m. on 7/12 before they close for the day.  Sometimes a bee will go inside the flower and it will close.  The bee is stuck there until it gets dark.  The flowers are so thin that you can see the bee buzzing around inside.

Our honey bees died last year, so Hubby cleaned out the hive and found out that moths were the problem.  He stacked the hive pieces up in the corner where our junk is and this year bees made themselves a new home in there.

 He is taking everything apart to find the queen and the sections the bees are using.

Here he is moving them to a new location.

My darling little helper decided to help her grandpa, she got snow overalls, coat, and gloves that would protect her so she could be a beekeeper too.  She went to where she could see the bees and grandpa around the side of the house and got scared, because she had nothing to cover her face.  How sweet of her to give it a try even though she looks like she is going to die of heat.

I have bought fresh basil from the store and tried to root a piece of it many times in the past and it hasn't worked.  Last week I bought fresh basil and the package wasn't cold like it usually it.  The store I went to had the herbs hanging above the produce.  I put one of the pieces in a vase and as you can see it has rooted.  I am now thinking that the other one I tried were refrigerated and that made them not grow. 7-14-14

The roots have grown a lot in one day.  7-15-14

 Here it is in the vase.  I currently sits in the kitchen window.  I will get it into soil soon. 7-14-14

We made salad last night and decided to experiment with two of the lettuce bunches.  We cut off the bottom pieces and put them in water to see if they would root.

 Here is the side view.  I let you know what happens.

Update:  I am amazed at how fast this is growing.  It was cut and put in water 7-14 and this is it in less than 48 hours later.

I saw on Pinterest a watermelon cut into sticks, so I decided to try it.  This is our third watermelon now cut this way.  It gets eaten a lot faster cut into sticks.

These sticks are very kid friendly.  You still get wedges on the outside edge, but they are easier for the kids to eat too.  I don't think I will ever cut a watermelon any other way now.  This is not from my garden.  This is a personal sized watermelon from the 99 cent only store.  So is the lettuce.

More Yard and Garden Pictures

The carrot seeds are all formed now and ready to bag.

A close up of the largest bunch of seeds.

As I was putting the bag around the seeds the stocks broke off.  There are a lot of ants in the ground at the stock.  They must have been eating the carrots.  There are some garlic stalks that are brown next to the carrots.  These were ones I didn't see last year and they grew.  One got caught in the clip when bagging the carrot seeds so decided it was time to pull them all up.

This is what the carrot stocks looked like where they broke off.  There are 3 ants on there, but you probably can't see them.

Here is the garlic that was growing next to the carrots.

This bed of garlic I planted in the spring never flowered and they are dying.  This is the first time I have planted garlic in the spring, but I wanted the garlic and you can only buy it at nurseries in the spring, so I gave it a try.

Here is what I pulled up.  It is single round balls.  Cloves didn't form.  I will use some and save some to plant the end of next month and see what happens.

What strawberries survived are growing good.  My little Easter Bunny helper is so good at watering now that she turns on the water, waters, and turns off the water without me going out to help her.

Here are 4 tomato plants growing as volunteers.  I planted the rhubarb plant there and  tomato seeds from 2 years ago have taken over.

Only one yellow leaf from the rhubarb plant is left in the center of the tomatoes.

Several Elderberry plant are growing after we pulled what we saw out of the ground earlier this year.

Here is the other one that didn't get dug out yet.  It has lots of flowers and the birds will soon have food.

The few peaches we have are looking good.  To bad they are at the top of the tree.  We will net them soon and hopefully the birds don't get them all.

A few more peaches.

The grapes are growing good.

These cups are working great for trapping the aphids.  They are so thickly covered that I need to make new ones.  It was nice looking for grapes and not getting a million aphids in my face this year.

These three Yukon Gold potato plants have not grown very well.  They just don't grow as all well as all the others do.  We will be digging them up in another week or two.

I am standing just in front of the peach tree.  This is where the raspberries used to be until it became too shady in the afternoon.  I moved the raspberries and have been working on putting down plastic and gravel to eliminate another cat bathroom area.  One yard of gravel down and I need about 1/2 yard more and I will be done.