2023 Food Garden!

That’s truly amazing to me! Bravo!

That’s so impressive! They’re $7 each here in the store.

We used to have a little laying flock. The barred rock hen had a HUGE crush on my husband. She’d follow him around muttering, and if he ignored her for a long time she’d nail him on the back of the leg with her beak. He was known to say “You don’t want to turn your back on a chicken.” She would ride on your shoulder.

1 Like

@MunchkinRedux , how do you know when a cucumber plant is spent?

Then


Now




Newest peppers setting fruit

Beans

1 Like

When the plant is dead - withered and brown - and the last few cukes clinging to life on it are small, misshapen and malformed. Lol. If DH had his way, he declare them “done” long before i do. I cling to them until the bitter end.

2 Likes

Ahhh! Thank you! I was wondering if that was a sign! I was thinking it might have something to do with pollination. A lot fewer bees right now, and there are still flowers.

You know, our entire town didn’t get blackberries this year. They grow like weeds, but there was never harvestable fruit this year in any quantity. Just a lot of small, underripe berries, everywhere we looked. I’m wondering if it wasn’t a pollination issue. The bees in our yard came very late this year. :frowning_face:

2 Likes

I live in NW Montana and this was the weirdest gardening session ever. Every year has been different, but this one really flummoxed me.

3 Likes

After a year of no apples (poor pollination in 2022 township-wide), I was greedy and left too many apples on our trees this year. Fortunately, we’ve had no major windstorms thus far, and the windfall has been minimal. We had one broken branch on one of the Honeycrisp trees, but we patched it back up and it looks like it will graft itself back on.

Shown here is a partial pick of Greensleeves (left), which has the quintessential flavor of “green apple”. If you’ve ever eaten a Jolly Rancher green apple candy, this is exactly what these taste like, albeit not as sweet.

Also shown is our hands-down favorite – the Honeycrisp. I never dreamed we could grow apples this big and in such fine shape. They are a terrific baking apple, as well as for eating out of hand.

FYI these all are harvested from micro-dwarf trees (M27 rootstock), none of which are over 6’ tall. Makes for easy pruning, thinning, and pest control. The rest of the trees on our property are dwarf (up to 15-16’). We let those go kinda wild, because they’re too big to micro-manage. The super dwarves (we have six of them), get special love and attention.

If you look closely, under my elbow is The Supervisor.

4 Likes