Garden

I have had lots of carrots which failed to grow nice tapered roots as shown in the seed catalogs.  But this is a new one for me.

The “May Gray” weather gave way to enough sunshine that I was able to make a lot of progress in taking the garden back from the weeds.  But now we appear to be in for a spell of “June Gloom”.  Yesterday the fog was thick enough to register .02 inches on the rain gauge.

The cool weather crops seem to be doing well.  I have been harvesting peas and lettuce as well as berries.  This is the first year I have tried broccoli and it appears it may soon be ready for the dinner table.

The first crop of corn is starting to put out tassels and silks — but it is not very tall.

It looked as if we might finally have a bunch of cherries.  (Getting the pollinators in sync has not been working well.) But before they were really ripe enough to harvest, the red house finches found them so I was only able to pick about six that had not been bird food.  They are also feasting on the blueberries as they ripen.  We need to make a frame for a bird net cover as well as trimming the cherry tree down so we can net that next spring.  It is about time to cover the stone fruit with individual net bags.  I tried that last year and it was really nice to be able to have peaches, plums and pluots which had not had huge spots pecked away.  I don’t mind sharing, but birds tend to take it all.

Another new item this year is a short day onion.  In the past years I have had day neutral varieties and they are very slow at producing bulbs and often are still growing as the holiday season approaches.  I was surprised to see bulbs already forming.

Hopefully sunny days will be returning soon.

So with the broken shoulder, the garden did not get weeded since at least mid-August.  By the usual time to prepare for the spring planting (late February, early March in these parts) the weeds had taken over.  Of course the weather did not cooperate, so getting days when things weren’t too wet and / or cold to pull weeds, meant that it was the beginning of April before the  raised beds were ready.  There was a spell of nice weather then and I planted seeds and seedlings.

 But then the May Gray came weeks early.  It was too cold and wet to weed or do  much else.  The veggies did nothing while another crop of weeds took over.  A large percentage of the seeds failed to germinate.  For weeks it seemed the soil was too wet to weed.  We even had some late April rain.

It took several passes to get the majority of the weeds out and it will require another pass or two to deal with the ones that escaped.  At least now I can see the veggies and was able to plant additional seedlings.

Meanwhile, mice were getting to the strawberries as they ripened. The owls and hawks have not been doing a good job.  In the past week I had 15 caught with a live trap and removed them to the far corner of the property.   Dealing with the gophers will have to wait a bit.  We put hardware cloth at the base of the raised beds to keep them out and have bird netting to protect seedlings from becoming bird food.

Anyway, lots more to do.   Borders along paths and fence need weeding and trimming, stone fruit needs to be thinned and general maintenance is needed.  Maybe by Memorial day weekend it will look more like a garden than a weed patch.

It has been a cool, wet winter here and the stone fruit trees in our “orchard” are taking their time waking up.  There have been some years where they are almost all in bloom by the second week of February.  Finally the cherry trees are coming into bloom.

There are only a few cherry varieties that will grow in our climate because we do not get near enough winter cold temperatures.  The ones that do grow here require a second variety for pollination.  Initially we had the two available varieties planted together and after several years they finally bloomed and we got a couple handfuls of cherries.  Unfortunately, one of the pair died out over the next couple years as the other matured into a nice sized tree that is covered in flowers in the spring.  A replacement tree was obtained, but unlike some of the other types of stone fruit, cherries are slower to mature.  The newer tree started blooming a couple years ago — but too early for the older tree.  Thus only one or two cherries from all the lovely flowers.  Finally this year, the timing is overlapping.  Maybe there will be a cherry harvest in a few months.

This spring the “May Gray” and the “June Gloom” dominated the weather.  There was not much time when the morning fog burned off and it started to roll back in again.  The veggies in the garden for the most part did not like that situation.  Germination was poor and what did sprout as well as most of the transplanted seedlings which had been started on the windowsill just sat there and sulked.  So it will be a late, and perhaps sparse harvest this year.

One of the exceptions is the berries.  The plants were moved from their original location a couple years ago and finally seem to have settled into the new spot.  While the berries are a bit on the small size, they are making up for it in quantity.  Ollalie berry, boysen berry, logan berry and a few other trailing varieties all became productive together.  And since blackberries have a short shelf life, it was time to turn the bounty into jam, jelly and pie.  The result was about three dozen jars of sweet stuff in the pantry and several pies in the freezer.

It remains to be seen if the upright varieties will be as productive.  In the past they seemed to be just about ripe at the same time we would get the one week of actual hot weather and the berries got cooked.  So far, the forecast is looking better for the berries than for the heat loving veggies.