So, it's been a month (about) and the garden has gone great guns! Lettuce that is almost as tall as me (it will grow on stalks if you keep stealing leaves), peas that have crested the 9' mark by enough that I think we're safe calling some of those vines 10', and my first zucchini! The eight-ball zucchini have really struggled on fruiting - the plants are great, but every time I got out to check them, another small fruit has rotted off the vine! I managed to save one to be proper size, and it's in the vegetable drawer in the house. One more and I'll make some bread!
The carrots will probably be ready soon, but I'm going to try to be patient and wait for the frost. The blueberries are going to be huge, and we're still waiting for them to ripen - right now the little green orbs are the size of the first joint of my first finger, and still growing! The currants were huge too, the size of marbles!
I scavenged about 40 golden raspberry canes from a friend's patch, and they are all doing very well. Hopefully I'll get them some trellis' built by next year - they'll do much better on production if I trellis them up and prune them proper. I've been looking up instructions on the proper care of brambles, and think I've got a good idea on how to care for them properly.
This month has been so wet (rain every other day for most of the month) that the yard isn't mowed, the perrenial garden is overgrown with weeds, and the garden paths are gone (thick with weeds as well). I started cleaning up the edges with my new weed trimmer yesterday - it's the best one by far that I've ever owned. This time I opted for a light model, electric, and the Stihl FSE60 has not disappointed. It made quick work of the small canes from the weird purple flowers that remind me of my mother's hostas out back, and it trims up rock and fence lines easily. The vegetable garden paths were half cleared when I decided to take a break, and tonight I'll finish them, and start working on the grass. The lawnmower is gassed and ready, and we've had two days of sun in a row - one more and tonight it should be ready enough.
No chickens yet - I've had bear scat in the yard three times this month, so we're going to not do that this year. Chickens are great bear-attractors, and apparently my backyard is already interesting enough without adding that temptation. I do have plans for the coop drawn up though, and I've been chatting with the feed store about a solar powered electric fence. I'm considering connecting the coop and fencing to the vegetable garden fence, so that it's easy to let the chickens clean up the garden at the end of the year.
My compost heap is shrinking, almost too fast for me to keep up! I need to go stir it some more, though - I've got more curly dock growing out of the top of it, so the center isn't warm enough to kill it any more.
So far this year Dave's strawberries have been mostly safe, but he hasn't weeded them much and they are getting hard to find among some of the thicker weeds. Which means it's also harder for the pests to find them, but still.
My fern that I moved in from the woods has not been doing well, but as it is still alive I think next year it will do fine. My wild geranium appears to have made a good start, and the new peony isn't dead, so I think it will come back. I've got a Rugusta Rose to find a home for - it's still in a large pot, but it's still alive! I think it's going to share a space under the Mountain Ash. We'll see.
I guess that's it for now. Without pictures, you can't really see any of my progress, and I left the pictures on the camera yesterday! Ah well. Later tonight, perhaps.
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