Well, summer has officially arrived.  Honestly, it’s been a great spring for working in the garden, and now that the heavy work is done, I’m OK with heat, humidity, sunshine, and rain doing most of the work for the next few months.

First, we have the potato box.  This is a bit of an experiment, and I’m hoping it gives me some tubers for mashing, smashing, roasting, boiling, and baking.

Potato Box

Potato Plants – 2 weeks after planting

Next, we have the kale.  This is the second growth of the crop.  We’ve already had two meals from this patch, and we’ll get at least two more.  I’m going to keep them in the ground as long as they keep growing.

Kale

I see a lot of salads in our future:

Lettuce

We are going to have our first blackberries this year, and we’ve already gotten a lot of strawberries.

Blackberry Blossoms

Strawberries

We’re also going to have our first crop of apples.

Apples

Our peppers, onions, and tomatoes are also doing well. Some of the tomato plants are already blooming, so if the weather cooperates, we should have a good haul of spaghetti and chili sauce this year.

Not a bad haul if I do say so myself.

Here is the first of the big sunflower heads.  We’re going to let them dry out, then use them for birdseed and to plant new ones next year.

That’s one big ball of squirrel bait, right there.  The package said “Mammoth Sunflowers” on it, and they weren’t fibbing.  They remind me of the sunflowers that used to be grown agriculturally around Minot when I was a kid.  I think I’m going to save a handful of them and roast them in the oven to see how they taste.

Next we have Irish Woman’s punkin with a pumpkin:

It’s the only one of the early crop that survived the intense heat, even with shade from several trees and twice-daily watering.  It’s ripened way early, but I have it downstairs in the cool and dry in hopes that it will survive until October.  The plants are still flowering, so we may get more now that the weather is back to normal temperatures.

We also have several baby watermelons that are coming along nicely.  I’m going to nurse those along until Labor Day, then they get fed to the kids and the vines will be pulled out.

Our potatoes did OK, but not as well as I hoped.  We got about a bushel of potatoes that went into several meals.  Next year, I’m going to give them more space in the bed so that they can spread their roots further.

I didn’t get pictures of them, but our tomato plants of all varieties are going nuts.  I already put up about a dozen quarts each of chopped tomatoes, chili base, salsa, and spaghetti sauce from tomatoes we got out at Gallrein’s, but I may have to crank up the canner again if they all come in at once.  We’ve already been eating them as fast as they can mature, but if they all hit at once, we’re going to be up to our necks in ‘maters.  I may try my hand at making dried tomatoes and see how that turns out.

I think the cucumbers are almost done.  I have enough picked now to make another batch of pickles, so that will probably happen tomorrow or the next day.  There appear to be enough on the vine to do another batch of bread and butters for Irish Woman this weekend and that should be about it.  The same goes for the green beans.

This has been a disappointing year so far for our bell pepper plants.  Not sure if it’s the heat, the dry, or both, but we’ve only gotten about half a dozen peppers off of them.  Next year, I think we’ll plant more jalapenos and banana peppers, which seem to grow well no matter the conditions so long as they have sunlight and water..

The new strawberry beds are filling quickly, which means I’ll be making a new bed this fall for transplanting so we have an abundance of Boo’s favorite food come the spring.

And that’s about it from DaddyBear Acres.  Y’all come back now, ya hear?

After a month and a half of weekends, the new raised garden beds / retaining wall is complete.  We’ve even got some things planted.  More will go in if we can ever get a good stretch of warm weather.

Probably going to be watermelon or cucumbers

250 Strawberry plants. Irish Woman and Boo harvested a few berries from the plants that were transplanted from the old bed

Carrots are sprouting

Tomatoes will probably go here

Onions are coming along well. The other side of the bed will be either cucumbers or watermelon

 Our fruit trees are doing OK.  Some are doing better than others.  We had hopes for another great harvest of cherries, but we had a false spring and even with draping canvas and such around the trees at night, we didn’t have very many cherries out of a whole lot of blooms.

It’s a good year for peaches

and grapes

Not such a good year for cherries

Our big cherry tree It was covered in blooms, but has very few cherries on it

24 hours ago, this was overgrown with weeds

Two new peach trees It’s also a great year for tiger lillies

We are definitely going to have to thin and split the tiger lillies next spring.  They are taking over.  They grow wild here, so any place you give them a little cultivation and attention they run rampant.

The tiger lilly thicket In a couple of months, you won’t be able to see the house through all the orange

The false spring that hurt our cherry crop also burned some of the shrubs

We have a few critters in the yard.

Old Mr. Frog is slowly becoming one with the earth We’ve had him as long as we’ve had the house

A giraffe finds his way out of the jungle

The Giraffe was done by YardBirds We have a few of their sculptures scattered around the yard. Once I get the tiger lillies under control, maybe I’ll find them.

Not all of our landscaping is edible. Some of it is just pretty

We started out with one yucca, which Irish Woman unsuccessfully tried to kill We now have 12 I keep them around because they remind me of Arizona

Looks like it’s going to be a good year for cherries:

Each of those blooms is being picked over by bees.  If even half of them are successfully pollenated, then we’re going to have even more cherries than we did last year.