Month: July 2019

End of July in the fruit yard

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Rejuvenated strawberry bed.
Potatoes first time in this bed.
Nelson blackberries – plenty of green ones.
Gooseberry bush, almost ready to harvest.
Rhubarb looking exhausted. A red cabbage and squash overflow planted here as well.
Raspberry plants producing sparse quantities. The August Red plants at the end of this row are not thriving.
Grape vine growing voluminously after Sam pruned it back and supplemented with leaf mulch.
Dye plant – garland serrated chrysanthemum.
Dye plants chamomile and coreopsis, with photobomb by St. John’s wort.

Wildflowers lately

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St. John’s wort, hypericum perforatum, growing in the fruit yard on its own
White meadowsweet, spiraea Alba, blooming profusely along local roadsides
Elderberry, growing like weeds in the fruit yard Update: correction on this! I found out this is bristly sarsparilla, aralia hispida.
Fireweed, a few spires growing in the orchard

Strawberry story

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The strawberries have a leaf blight. It’s their second year, they were planted in April 2018. The variety is Albion, from Fedco, an ever bearing variety.

It’s been a wet spring this year, a lot of rain, which may have encouraged the fungus.

Sam put down alfalfa pellets, thinking the extra nitrogen might help them.

Today, I weeded the whole bed. Then I decided to pick off most of the leaves including some of the dead ones on the ground, I didn’t eliminate the blight by any means, but we’ll see if the plants can recover on their own with new growth. They’ll need drip irrigation.

Rejuvenated strawberry bed

Harvesting

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Escarole is bolting. I harvested two large bags.

Harvested one good-sized beet and a few turnips.

Also jarred up some sauerkraut (not grown by us).

Soon we’ll need to eat a couple of the artichokes.

Other news: More lettuce than we know what to do with. A few peas, a few baby cucumbers, squash blossoms, a few handfuls of blueberries, a few tart cherries. Harvested some fingerling potatoes due to potato beetle infestation.

Garden scan

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Row by row scan:

Flower row with garlic bed beyond. Mostly poppies and daisies at this time, but sunflowers coming.
Three sisters row. Corn (a few stalks), squash, green beans. A few volunteer potatoes. Horseradish at one end and comfrey at the other.
Broccoli (Aspabroc and DeCicco). Started under row cover. Vulnerable to porcupines! Saved by electric fence, now harvesting. Some cabbage, I think.
Fava bean row, plus some Dazzling Blue Kale and volunteer wild arugula from last year.
Parsnips, first and second year. Turnips. Beets. And a patch of broccoli rabe bolting. Will replace with some carrots.
Mixed greens row. Chard, radicchio, ruby red orach, Salanova lettuce, escarole, some volunteer dill, baby Turkish rocket, and some room for succession planting.
Soybeans just flowering, fingerling potatoes, carrots. Artichoke at the end of this row and three others.
Tomato row. Plus one marigold at the top.
Fence row – scarlet runner beans (not shown), rudbeckia perennial, zucchini, patty pan squash, Hopi black sunflowers, Chinese cabbage.
Lettuces under the corner trellis. Also visible – a few cucumbers starting to climb.

Corner trellis report

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I spent a humid hour and a half in the garden this morning. Plants are growing and need a little help. Okay, a lot of help in some cases.

Mostly I weeded under and around the corner A-frame trellis. And laid out more hay mulch in that area.

The scarlet runner beans are just starting to bloom. Two hummingbirds perched on the tomato trellis in anticipation.

Scarlet runner beans starting to bloom behind a maze of fencing

I dug out a huge mass of white clover which was overtaking the front doorway of the A-frame. The oak leaf and Encore mix lettuces needed only a light weeding. They look great. The Ovation mix is overgrown and mostly bolted. Hard to pick it.

The arugula quadrant has not done well at all. Mostly weeds. I tried first Sylvetta with no luck, then I planted Bellezia. A few feeble sprouts. I don’t get it.

I also started to train my 8 cucumber plants to climb the trellis. Some are too short to reach it, others are just disinclined to climb.

Bianka’s white runner beans are doing nicely at the four corners of the trellis.

Corner trellis area

There are a few little green tomatoes.

The fingerling potatoes have a nasty case of aphids.

Happily, cosmos and poppy seeds have germinated in flower pots – a late experiment.

Poppy sprouts
Cosmos sprouts “Tango”

Good Life poppies

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Always a special day when the poppies first bloom. They seem so extravagant in their color and their delicacy. These were drenched in a sudden thunderstorm.

Seeds originated from the Good Life Center in Harborside, Maine, the farm of Helen and Scott Nearing. I first grew them last summer and saved them over the winter.