It’s only the 23rd of May and everything is planted in the garden. Only a couple of things haven’t come up yet – basil seeds and rosemary seeds have yet to germinate. Even the corn is starting to come up!! That’s exciting.
So today was all about the weeds. The potato plants were completely covered by weeds, unfortunately bind weed which is an invasive European Morning Glory. It is everywhere. We have some long range plans to get rid of it but this summer it will just be the same old pull it out as quickly as we see it above ground.
All of the potatoes are up in both raised beds, so that’s good.
The onions are also looking very perky if still small. But we have to keep reminding ourselves it isn’t even June yet.
Since the onions are Walla Walla Sweet onions they don’t keep well, so I will chop them up and freeze them in individual recipe size batches. Sure makes using them easy, just take a batch out of the freezer and add them to whatever I’m cooking!
Next year we can harvest a shoot from each plant, maybe. It takes a while to get established. The year after it will be full production and we’ll have all the asparagus we want.
The Black Currant will grow to be a really big plant so it doesn’t really matter that part of it didn’t survive the cold temperatures last winter. We’ll be needing to cut it back at some point, in any event.
It’s such a tiny tree!! There won’t be enough for a pie or anything like that, but we will definitely get a taste. This year is all about the plant growing bigger and getting stronger. Very encouraging that it set some fruit. The peach tree had no blossoms, and the apple tree may have set one apple. The apricot tree is probably dead and needs to be replaced. We’ll try a different variety for a zone 4 instead of zone 5 temperatures.
That’s really exciting to see baby corn plants. They will grow very quickly! The squash hasn’t germinated either. Hmmmm. Hopefully it didn’t get killed with the weeds we removed.
We’ve already harvested swiss chard from the plants at the end of the pea bed, which over-wintered. We planted a bunch more chard so that I can preserve that for the winter, too.
The peppers and tomatoes are both still baby plants but are starting to get over the shock of transplanting and perking up.
We need to get some hoops and something to cover these plants, or the robins will get most of the fruit. Tons of flowers which are setting fruit, so this is the one thing we’ll have pretty much a full harvest to play with this year.
We have two of the red currant plants which should give us lots of jelly when they get to be five feet tall. Still babies, we may have enough to make one jar of jelly this year. I figure it will be several years before these are in full production.
None of the raspberry plants are blooming yet, and the new growth is only a foot tall, or a few may be a couple of feet tall. We should get quite a few raspberries to play with this year.
I planted some parsley seeds in the open spot in this bed and they haven’t come up yet. But I can use the other herbs now!
I planted a whole bunch of basil seeds nest to the tomatoes and peppers. I see lots of pesto in our future.
The iris and peony are both blooming, and the columbine will be blooming soon. In the garden the delphinium plants are looking very healthy and happy; we should get quite a few flowers from those in a month or so.
We decided that coming inside was a good idea. Rain isn’t supposed to be here until late afternoon, but I’m not sure that cloud got the memo.
We haven’t been hearing the baby and parents yelling their heads off for the last couple of days. I hope that means they have gone somewhere else and not that something happened to their baby. He isn’t flying very well yet, missing a lot of his feathers. Right now he’s mostly a fluff ball.
So the rest of the garden news is that the rhubarb plant is very happy and growing well. It’s still too tiny to see from the house but it’s only May 23rd! I have to keep telling myself that.
Carrots and lettuce and beets are all up but very tiny at the moment. A picture of that would greatly resemble dirt.
Black raspberries and josta berries and gooseberries have all set fruit, in tiny amounts. We’ll just get to taste them this year.
Anticipation is good for the soul. Or patience is a virtue? I always wonder who came up with that idea!