Garden Update: May
Technically, May has come and gone. It was such a busy month of planting and raining, prepping beds, food processing and lots of kid life stuff. Now that it’s June and we are almost done planting out everything I can finally breathe and look at pictures of May.
Despite the emergence of baby grass hoppers, the gardens are doing quite well! The pea plants all have flowers now, the cabbages have all been harvested and turned into sauerkraut or stored away for a later date. Carrots are coming up and the wheat, rye and triticale experiments are doing fantastically well!
The kohlbrabi has almost all been eaten. We never grow enough of them, ever! Though we may have grown way too much cabbage this year. Do you have any cabbage recipes you love? If you do, please share them below in the comments. Check out my post from last year From Cabbage to Sauerkraut.
The race for mid summer is on. Each evening there is more and more light to work with making finishing projects after dinner a whole lot easier. We are re-doing the chicken coop to try and make it more pest proof. We recently had a skunk try burrowing under neither it to get to grains the chickens left behind…
Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, wine berries and pine berries are all flowering! I can’t wait for fresh berries. As much as I love having them frozen to use all winter, there is something so decadent about walking outside and picking dessert.
Apples, nectarines, peaches and cherries are at it too. This time of year you really start to feel the rewards of hard work done months ago or even last year. Whether it’s that extra compost you added last fall or the pruning done in later February or even extra water given last summer to help boost apple production this summer, seeing all the flowers turn to baby fruits is so exciting. Like I’ve said before, gardening is for the enterally optimistic personality.
With optimism also comes frustration. The grass hoppers are back and eating everything, the rollie pollies or pill bugs are eating every strawberry they come into contact with. The slugs began to saddle up to the buffet that was our cabbage crop and the ants are every where. They love to eat the root stems of brassica plants. Aphids are all over the roses and wouldn’t you know it, for the first time ever I got stung by a mason bee who happened to be investigating the underside of tomato leaf that I touched.
But none of those things will discourage me. Growing my food is just a major way life for me. I can’t imaging not doing it. How is your garden doing?
