Showing posts with label gardens. Show all posts

Remember, when I took a picture of some of the flowers earlier this spring and pointed out fact that some chipmunk, had planted a few sunflower seeds in the pot of flowers?

Well anyhow they are blooming now, and look pretty cool all filled out. They only got about 3-4 feet tall, but the flowers look good!

Okay, I am sure some of you remember the new pumpkin patch area I fenced this spring. You can see it looked quite empty.


The gate was newly hung, and below you can see just the top edge of the gate!




You can see the pumpkins have even started to spread outside the fence, and from the shot below you can see they are climbing my fence walls. The top edge of the fence is sporting a row of mini-gourds all along it...


Below in these two pictures you see some of the volunteer pumpkins growing in the llama pen, yes we set some of the pumpkins from last year in the pen to see if Bucky and the llamas would chew up any of the leftovers. Well some of the seeds liked my manure piles, and are grwoing a bunch of pumpkins also.

It looks like this could be a good pumpkin year if they get a chance to mature before our first killing frost, which I am predicting to happen around the 10th of September the next full moon.

Yes, I said late summer, it seems the summer has been flying by. I know time marches on, one minute at a time but it just seems like it was early June!

Still doing a lot of the same things, like mowing grass weekly, at both places the farm and the store, weeding the gardens both the flower gardens and also the vegetable gardens.

We have been busy also with harvesting some vegetables, cucumbers and broccoli, some beans yet, and also picked one of our first tomatoes Tuesday night, i t was one of the heritiage tomatoes, more of an orangy red color, but it tasted great in our supper.

We will have lots of tomatoes soon, if things ripen properly and the sun keeps shining!

We also have some red cabbage that is almost ready.

I will get some pictures of all this stuff, as we begin picking in the next week or so!

Tonights haul from the garden!

Crystalie went down and picked these items from the garden, things are starting to bear produce, she picked as you can see some green beans, a head of broccoli and also some basil and two different types of zucchini.

We like picking the zucchini when they are smaller and more tender. Well most of this ended up in our hobo suppers tonight and it was of course all very delicious!

Nice to start eating the results of all the work and nuturing!

Tonight I spent about an hour putting cages on the tomatoes, which was almost to late to do...they are getting big and starting to fill out nicely and of course some of them even have blossoms on and I even saw some small green tomatoes on some of them!

I also am trying a tip I saw online, for fighting the blight issue. The article said that you should pinch off the little branches with leaves on up to a foot of the ground. More of the plant energy goes into the fruit also!

The reason being the ground underneath them has the fungus, that causes blight when it gets on the lower leaves, the dirt gets there from tilling the dirt, and also from the rain splashing on the ground, then the leaves start getting splotchy.

The idea is by removing some of the lower hanging branches closer to the ground, that you will see less blight on the whole plant. Another tip is to wet the plants down with a compost tea almost weekly, or a food mixture, the healthier the plant the more it can endure!

Compost tea, is essentially putting your manure and dirt combination, in a thin gauze or an old pantyhose leg, tie it off and soak it in a 5 gallon pail of water for a day or two. The nutrients leach out into the water and you can use a sprinkling can to wet the plant down with nutrient rich water which will have a brownish tint to it!

Try this it really greens up your plants!

4th of July brings lots of explosions of color, but in this case it is in Crystalie's Coffee Lake Farm Flower Garden! Below you can see a batch of Lilies that just burst open in the last day or so.

These orange Calla Lillies, have been blooming about a week now and look so cool!

Here is a closer look at one of the dark red Lilies, the pictures don't do it justice, but it is very bright and so perfect right now!

I hope you enjoyed the explosion of color, thanks Crystalie for supplying some great flowers to take pictures of!

High on my task list the couple of days was to get my garden tilled, in between the rows to stay ahead of the weeds. When we awoke this morning, the sky's looked very gray and I was worried, that it would rain before I had the chance to get the tilling done.

So at 7;25 am I was down in the garden starting my tiller and running it up and down the plant rows.



















As you can see I got through all the rows and even took the weed wacker to the tall grass on the garden path to the shed, and around the rhubarb plant. I need to do some hand weeding but, it looks much better, and it will give the plants a chance to absorb some more heat, when the sun shines.


















You can see things are growing well, with the last few days of sunshine.


















After getting all the tilling done it was time to head inside, hop in the shower and it was off to R for another day of answering the phones and dealing with guests. But after I got home at 5 I went to work on finishing the fence around the new pumpkin patch. Which you can see below, I did get it finished, the nice thing about this fence is that I did not have to buy anything to get it done, I did receive a donation from Crystalie's Dad of a roll of concrete re-enforcement wire, which was 5 feet tall and also nice and heavy for plants to grow on, the balance of it made from corn crib sections that I had left over form our two corn crib gazebos.


















It may not look the best but it is functional and when the pumpkins and gourd vines start spreading this will be a wall of green!

Anyhow after 2 hours of building fence it was time for grilling some chicken on the grill and enjoy a couple of beverages.

In the pictures below you can see the garden is doing well, we have plenty of rain and when it is sunny the plants are growing. We could use some more warm days, but the forecast here is for lots of rain in the next day or so.

I also saw our lettuce is up and it won't be to long before we can have fresh green salad. Looking forward to the fresh produce already!

Well, Jennifer those seeds and onion sets we planted are starting to peak through the ground, I noticed it yesterday and took some pictures today after getting home form work at R. today!

Above is a Zucchini plant coming up....

These are green or yellow beans peaking through...

Sunflowers starting out fast and looking good....

Radishes, starting to pop out of the ground and won't take long to grow.

These are the yellow onions, but there are a few of the red ones starting to show through also.

It is cool to see that they are off to a fast start, and in a couple of weeks I will beginning the weeding and any thinning I need to do.

Thanks for all your help Jennifer, I thought you would enjoy seeing the progress!

Crystalie, spent some time snapping some pictures of the flowers in her flower garden next to the little greenhouse. I do not know all the names but see if you might recognize some of these!
Purples and blues seem the predominate colors, but there are some other colors prevalent.

The combination of the bright pink and the silvery blue-green, makes this a cool looking plant.

Lots of blue here.

greens and blues, and you can see the plants really loved our wet spring.

There were more pictures, but the upload wasn't cooperating well, but I hope you enjoyed the early summer colors! Thanks Crystalie for the nice pics.

Well it may seem late, but it is almost complete, the garden planting began last Saturday with the help of my daughter Jennifer. Tonight, June 7th Crystalie and I finished the job...except for a few squash seeds and some sweet peas. Below is the part of the section Jennifer and I did last Saturday, smaller stuff in these rows, carrots, lettuce, spinach, radishes, and lots of onions both red and yellow.
The picture below shows the tomato's and peppers and also broccoli and cabbage. There are also some basil and parsley plants here.

Another view of this, almost 45 tomato plants, plus about 30 peppers, many different types of both for lots of different uses in the kitchen and for canning.

Below is the new pumpkin, and gourd patch, the fence will be going up soon, now that it is planted, hopefully by this next weekend!

Of course when things start coming up you will see more pictures!

The greenhouse, as you know Crystalie had started all the tomato's and peppers and some other things for the Stanley Family Garden Club. Below you can see the plants prior to their departure to the rest of the family.

As you can see despite the cold spring and not a lot of sunny days they have grown quite well.

Now the challenge is to get a few dry days so we can start planting what is left in our garden area which has recieved almost 2 1/2 inches of rain in the last 4 days!