Today was a family garden and livestock day. In the morning I puttered around our backyard trying to take photos documenting where things are right now in a microscopic way without much luck, but I at least can show some of the progress.
These are the Purple Blauchaker soup pea plants I replaced the sugar snap peas with when nearly all of those plants were eaten by some enterprising rodent I assume. The soup peas can tolerate much more summer heat than the sugar snaps, so even though these were planted much later, I assume they will get to maturity, though I will miss the sugar snaps this year.
This year I planted the Rattlesnake Pole Beans where I will be able to access them for fresh eating on an outside fence of the garden. Last year when they matured at snap stage, we were just off the accident, and the trellis was surrounded by squash plants I could not navigate in my crippled condition. We found later that they also make a great dry soup bean, and this year I will save plenty for that as well, but they matured early enough that I should get a few good pickings of them in the snap stage before I let them set pods for drying and seed saving.
I have a couple dozen kale plants, both Red Russian and Dwarf Blue Scotch, planted in various parts of the garden. All seemed to have taken to transplant well and I have even snitched a few leaves off of each for various stir fries, but no real substantial harvests yet. Hoping to add their bulk to our winter preservation of leafy greens in a variety of fashions. We will see how that goes.
I am growing a lot more of the Christmas Lima beans this year. I only had 5 plants last year yet they yielded more than a quart of dried seeds for the soup pot. This year it is 12 feet of trellis, so hoping for even more of this hearty producer. It is a nice large bean, about the size of a quarter when hydrated, and when dry a bit larger than a nickle. Colors are purple and white mottling. It is a really pretty bean in the whole bean world of things. It produces well in years that Scarlet Runner beans do poorly, which they have a few years running. Always hope for a good year on them, and will keep planting them, but need a summer with long spells of cool weather without excessive heat spikes, or frosts, to get a good harvest here. The Christmas Lima fills in those years when heat kills the flowers on the runner beans.
I took a whole bunch of photos of bud clusters on my grape vine. On none of them did the point-and-shoot focus on those, but instead focused on something in the background. Oh well. Needless to say I am hoping to have my first usable harvest of grapes. We will see. I have harvested wild grapes in the past, but none that I myself successfully propagated.
This was a tough winter we went through. A lot of perennials were lost to the extreme cold (-35F) with no snow on the ground to insulate and protect root systems and bulbs. It took out my regular mint and spearmint, and maybe half of the Chocolate Mint. Now, the other side of that is we have probably 10X the Chocolate mint we would ever use, so pictured above is a clump I removed to plant a Somerset table grape vine, which Patti later used to fill in a bare patch formerly occupied by regular mint. (She did buy me a spearmint plant I will drop in the ground somewhere).
My French Thyme died. My Lemon Thyme is none the worse for wear. I am ok with that. Honestly, I like Lemon Thyme better than the French variety, and I am thinking of propagating it in more areas of the yard next to walking areas just for the aroma it gives off when bruised.
I will not have a shortage of parsley this year. My patch, pictured above, has 9 plants which I started myself way back in January. Good to know, now, how far back in time I need to start these to have them look like nursery plants when I put them in the ground.
These are the Coldset tomatoes which did so well for me last year. There are seven of them in a row in the front yard.
Galina, an indeterminate Siberian yellow cherry, was our favorite fresh eating tomato and Phoebe would spend large amounts of time stuffing herself every day after school last fall. Seven of those were what we had last year, and this year again, as it was as much as we could eat, and provided a large bowl of fresh fruits every day once they got going. A few of the plants are flowering already, and by late July they should really be going.
This is Catmint, not to be confused with Catnip. Cats do like Catmint, but not to the point where they molest the plants, tearing them apart and rolling in them. It is one of the many tea herbs Patti grows in our yard and is thriving to where she moved it to more direct sun this spring.
Unlike the previous winter, none of the Chamomile plants overwintered. As you can see by the photo above, that didn’t matter. We have thousands of volunteer seedlings from the plants self-seeding, and have to weed them out of much of the garden where we do not want a carpet of them. It is a wonderful addition to hot teas in the winter.
Once everyone was ready, after lunch, we headed to David’s to take care of the chickens. He is feeling under the weather and had not been down to the pen since the day before yesterday. Patti and I cleaned out the inner hen house while the girls watched baby Vi and tore up huge clumps of burdock and dandelions to feed the chickens. There was also 17 eggs in the hen house for us as well, though the two hens sitting on them as separate clutches of 10 and 7, were not thrilled about giving them up. But the chickens are always happy to see us, want to be held and petted, and enjoy eating out of the kids hands.
Then it was off to the Minnetonka garden. It is in a sad state, being that neither Frank nor I were in good enough shape to put it to bed properly, and this was the first day this year we had been back at it working. The late weeds from last year, burdock, thistles, dandelion, creeping charlie, grass, vines in the fences, weed trees, etc, all needed to be removed. It took me about two hours with a pruner to work my way around the entire garden fence. The girls tossed all of the weeds, old cornstalks, tree branches, and endless buckets of weeds over the side of the fence on the western edge where it drops off into a ravine.
It was nice that this is a fully fenced garden with a gate, as no one had to do more than make sure that baby Vi did not eat anything she found, and baby Vi loved the freedom to just be and go wherever her inclinations took her for that time.
Obviously baby Vi is happy here, but look at the fence behind her. Where you can see the fence, I had gone over it with the pruner. Ahead of me you cannot see the fence (though you can now) which shows how quickly things take over when you do not keep up with it, as keeping it clear had been neglected since mid July last year.
She really has been a life saving joy for me. Doesn’t matter how bad I hurt, she has a smile, hug, and kiss for me.
The kids had a ball seeing how much trimmings and weeds they could toss at one go over the fence.
This handful took an extra push though.
They are all getting so big.
But they are a great help, and I am so grateful that they are putting the time in with us to get things done.
Once I had finished the fence, and re-stretched the top wire on the bean trellis, I was too tired to string the climbing twine for pole beans, or plant any, which I had incorrectly thought I would be able to do. Plan in my mind was that I would tie top, one of the kids would cut and tie the bottom, and in that way, every 6 inches, we would have it ready for the beans. I was physically done though, and all of the kids were ready for a well-deserved trip to Dairy Queen.
That is as much as I have physically done in one day, and although it would have been no real big accomplishment in prior years for me, it is far more than I could have done a couple of weeks ago, and in stark contrast to what I did when Anonymous made the trip from Western MN to plant the Ness farm for me. Every day I can do a bit more, and I make sure I really try to, because I do need to get back into shape, and there is a lot of gardening left to go. There are almost 200 sweet pepper plants and 100 tomato plants waiting here at the house ready to get planted at the Minnetonka garden. Summer is not here yet, and none of my tomato or sweet pepper plants are long season plants, so there is plenty of time. Much as I worry about getting it done in time, it is, thanks to the help of all those who have helped, getting done in a timely manner.
