Gleanings From the Garden

We’ve been rather busy lately working on the chicken coop, planting and tending the garden, and doing housework, as well as a true opening to harvesting and canning season, so it seems that I managed to miss the month of May’s garden update (yup, it’s possible).  During the last month there has been no shortage of activity in the garden.  

Laura Ingalls Wilder and the grasshoppers destroying every last blade of grass on the lonesome prairie has been forever on my mind since we first found ourselves at home here in 2013.  A few weeks ago, the potato beetles found our relocated potatoes, for the third year in a row, and started their annual warfare on our three backbreaking potato rows.  The potato beetles had come from Colorado decades prior; at least their ancestors had.  Once feeding on the buffalo bur of another lonesome prairie in 1859, the pioneers’ potatoes looked better to these bugs that multiplied by the millions and traveled in droves 85 miles further eastward each year, looking for new potato fields to systematically devour.  Over 150 years later, they found ours, and there was nothing but whispered prayers that are once again seeming to spare our humble homestead from the ravages of these potato beetles, the groundhogs who are re-digging their holes (one into the sand mound), and the newest insect to find their ways to us – flea beetles – who are also assisting in the destruction of the potato plants.

This third year of gardening is becoming a headache early in the season due to the amount of very warm spring days we have found ourselves once again burdened with.  I’m not one for the heat, and when vegetable gardens decide they’d like to grow in the full sun, there is only so much one can do before they are baked to a crisp in the sun.  If it isn’t the hot, hot sun, it’s the driving rains (that no one can predict) that toppled our tomato rows in previous years, are now also upon us in the garden, further minimizing the amount of available time we already have.  The last week of May, these rains swept across the fields and flooded out some newly planted seeds, which managed to survive the deluge.

By the end of May we were officially behind and we finally got the rest of the seeds in the ground, preparing ourselves for a few more potential days of rainfall.  Then the storms hit us again, sweeping the new mulch and forming gullies in some of the rows, but we are fortunate that seeds are resilient and finally the squash plants are poking their heads above the ground.  Yet, all this rain is seemingly good for the garden and just about everything is perking up (aside for the lettuce and carrots that still have not been planted yet). 

The garden is looking rather green after all the rain we've been having.

The peanut plants popped up through the soil.

Just last night we finished mounding our potato rows.

The tomato plants, herbs, peas and popcorn are fighting the weeds between the rows.  A few sunflowers volunteered their services for shading the area this year (and will probably be transplanted elsewhere).

Squash plants are starting to poke their way through the soil.

Last night I repaired the squash mulching project that was sent tumbling in a recent rainstorm.

The sweet corn is beginning to spring up although corn in neighboring fields is already "knee high" and it's not even the 4th of July!

So today, even with the possibility of more rain this afternoon, our new harvest totals are finally looking a little better as we pick mulberries and sour cherries, and continue with our new chicken coop adventures. 

The sour cherries have been ripening out our living room window.

The chicks have been delighting in the mulberries we've been harvesting for them.

We've also been getting some help from the farm cat Whitey with the berry harvest.

What's been happening in your garden?