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chocomouse.
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June 20, 2023 at 6:28 pm #39551
Yesterday was finally dry, but not much sun; today was gorgeous - no rain, full sunshine all day. The rest of the week should be the same, but getting warmer and possible storms on Friday. Today I spent hours in the flower beds - reweeding things I weeded in May, planting flowers I bought the first week in June, and mulching. My husband weeded the small in-ground garden in areas we had not yet mulched, as well as in the raspberry and blackberry patches. We're eating from the planters on the deck - spinach, several kinds of lettuce, beet greens and radishes. There are baby tomatoes on the Sweet 100 plant, and the herbs are overflowing their pots.
June 20, 2023 at 7:59 pm #39555I've got blooms on the Fourth of July tomatoes, not sure if any fruit has set yet. It might be too warm in the daytime to set a lot of fruit right now.
June 24, 2023 at 11:24 am #39583I picked two 12 ounce cups of black raspberries today, I think this is the biggest crop we've gotten in several years, last weekend's rain probably helped things along, the berries were very juicy today.
Not a bad return from two or three plants put in about 25 years ago along the back fence, not that there are any raspberry plants in that section now. The birds have redistributed them.
June 24, 2023 at 4:33 pm #39585I have picked two, pint baskets of black raspberries so far. I need 3 1/2 and, ideally, 4 to make jam. It is going to be close.
Our kale has done very well, and I used some in last night's stir-fry. All four tomato plants (four different kinds) and the cherry tomato plant have flowers.
We are hoping for rain tomorrow.
June 24, 2023 at 9:34 pm #39590I doubt we'll actually make anything with the black raspberries this year, one of the two cups I filled up this morning was gone before I got back inside with the second cup. Diane had it with her cottage cheese for breakfast, and enjoyed it immensely. I had a good portion of the second cup.
I'll probably check them again in the morning, but the Cubs are in London this weekend and tomorrow's game starts at 9AM local time.
I'm keeping a watch on the elderberries, there are several pockets of them around the yard and the birds haven't discovered them all yet. I'm still not counting on getting any to process, though. I wish the birds would spread them to the front of the house, too, like they did with the asparagus.
June 25, 2023 at 9:09 am #39594I recently ordered the Presto 23 quart induction-ready pressure canner recently, and was testing it yesterday. Looks like it will work just fine on my standalone 1500 watt induction cooktop, and with the shorter time to heat up and faster processing times it will keep the kitchen a lot cooler when canning.
It was taking close to an hour for the 24 quart stockpot to get to a boil and then 45 minutes to process tomato juice.
In tests yesterday, the induction cooktop got the pressure canner to full pressure (11+ pounds) in under 30 minutes, and it only needs to stay there for 15 minutes. It took about 40 minutes before the canner was cool enough to be opened up. It is possible that in production use these times might lengthen a bit.
And although it hit 95 outside yesterday and I had the canner at full pressure for at least 40 minutes, the kitchen did not get heated up.
June 29, 2023 at 8:45 pm #39623I've got several zucchini that'll be big enough to pick soon, currently they're about 5 inches long and an inch in diameter. I'm looking at zucchini bread recipes.
I need to keep a log of how many zucchini I pick and how big they are as part of the urban soil improvement study. (I'm not planning to let any grow too big, though.)
There are a few tomatoes on the 4th of July plants, but they're probably 2-3 weeks away from being ripe. But tomato season is coming, other varieties should start producing by the end of July.
June 30, 2023 at 7:56 am #39628I had picked about three 1-pint baskets of black raspberries from our terrace and am closing in on four. My husband found a patch in his woods, so I now have enough for at least one recipe of black raspberry jam, which I will make and process today.
Our bean plants and tomato plants all have flowers, and I think my husband said some have fruits. The squash plants have yet to flower. The kale is doing spectacularly. There is only a bit of lettuce and spinach. No snow peas action yet.
June 30, 2023 at 8:27 am #39629We got 1.25 inches of rain overnight, and there's more in the forecast for the next few days.
July 1, 2023 at 3:46 pm #39640I love to garden, but not this year! I've never seen anything like the current weather. According to my weather station, we got 2.33 inches of rain this week. I haven't yet added up the month's total, but I suspect it is around 6-8 inches. I'm usually just hoping for an inch a week to maintain my plants. Some days we get 8-10 storms a day, drizzles or downpours, no sun. Days with no sun, and for the last couple of weeks we've had haze and smoke from the wildfires in Canada. Most of my plants have survived and are growing lots of greenery, but they're not producing. My cherry tomato is about 4 ft tall, and has a few small green tomatoes. The herbs look great, crowding each other out of their planters. In my in-ground garden, inside the electric fence I have broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and about 2 dozen bell peppers plus 1 jalapeno, and cukes and zukes and summer squash. Surrounding the fence I have 6 Celebrity and 6 Amish Paste tomatoes, along with 2 hills (4 seeds planted in each, some rotted from too much water and cool temps) each of Delicata, spaghetti, butternut, and buttercup winter squashes. In planters on the deck I grow lots of different varieties of lettuce, spinach, beets, radishes, scallions, green and yellow beans, a cherry tomato and 2 bell peppers, plus about a dozen herbs. We do have a good crop of raspberries and blackberries coming along, but lost most of the blueberry blossoms and all of the apple blossoms when we got a hard freeze of 24* in mid-May. I guess we won't starve if the sun shows up soon, but I may be shopping a lot at the farmers' markets this summer. I hope the rest of you gardeners are getting lots of produce!
July 1, 2023 at 9:21 pm #39644I have tiny tomatoes on at least 4 different varieties of tomatoes now, the largest of them isn't quite ping pong ball size yet. It was cool and rainy today, hopefully that means we will have set a bunch of fruit.
There are plenty of zucchini blooms, so it should be a good crop. The variety they sent us for the Urban Soil Health Initiative is called Dunja. I need to keep a close eye on them, I want them in the 8-10 ounce range, not a bowling pin.
I bought a lug of sweet red cherries today, we'll probably make some kind of jam with most of them, but both of us had a cupful at lunch.
July 4, 2023 at 6:35 pm #39662I think I've got at least one zucchini that will be big enough to pick either tomorrow or Thursday.
One of the spaghetti squash plants I started inside did eventually germinate, so I let it grow for a while and transplanted it yesterday. I also planted a small hill of spaghetti squash seeds, it's kind of late in the season for planting squash seeds, but maybe we'll have a late frost and I can get some spaghetti squash in early October. We have a volunteer melon in one of the flower beds, possibly from last year's melons, it'll be interesting to see how those come out, we didn't enjoy the melons we got last year, but the squirrels did. The Athena melon plants I bought are starting to flower, too.
And I saw a hummingbird today!
July 5, 2023 at 12:51 pm #39665I did pick the first zucchini today, 10 inches long and 21 ounces, or enough for 3 recipes of zucchini bread. 🙂
July 6, 2023 at 3:01 pm #39675I picked another 14.5 ounce zucchini today.
One of the first ones to set seems to have stunted for some reason, not sure why. It is wrinkled, soft, and only weights 1.5 ounces.
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You must be logged in to view attached files.July 6, 2023 at 6:58 pm #39688Great zucchini, Mike! I am waiting for some to show up at the Farmers Market. We do not have room to plant them here, as we devoted the squash section to the honey nut squash. One of those plants had a male blossom, so that is a start.
My husband has picked enough snow peas for us to use in a stir-fry tomorrow night. He tells me to be prepared for beans within the next two weeks.
We have some green tomatoes on the various tomato plants. The cooler weather helped them set fruit.
Tomorrow, I plan to can black raspberry jam!
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