In the Growing Business

Here in our corner of the world, we've got some serious growing going on. As in vegetables, weeds, berries, and poultry.


After a slow start, our Cole crops and peas have taken off, and as they are wont to do, are all producing copious amounts at the same time. So there is a constant flow of some kind of vegetable in our fridge waiting to either be made into supper or cut up, blanched, and frozen for suppers later this year.

Our first couple years of gardening together, our broccoli wasn't much to get excited about. Even this year, we set almost 20 plants in the ground, and lost almost half of them. But the half that survived are going gangbusters, thank goodness! We eat a lot of broccoli around here:

Last week, I dug a few potatoes to have new potatoes for supper. Mostly just to see what was hiding out under all those hills in the garden:

The short row of early planted potatoes that these came from is already dying back this week. Which was kinda our intent, to have a red potato crop to dig and eat when green beans started coming on.


Speaking of . . . never mention in front of a vegetable plant how very dependable that plant is, and how you always have so much produce from that plant, etc. , etc.  It will turn and laugh at you! Not literally, but a couple of weeks ago I was saying that about our green beans. Now three-quarters of our green beans are infected with some fungus or bacteria and are losing leaves. And while still showing that they will make a comeback, and even putting on flowers and pods. They will be behind, and less this year.  Not matching the new potato harvesting plan I had thought, or my predictions about how you can always count on green beans to produce if nothing else.


I mourned the end of strawberry season, which seemed short, and not nearly bountiful enough. Though really can there ever be enough strawberries? Luckily black raspberry season was right on its tail, and the weather that didn't really work for strawberries seems to have done well by raspberries. We have picked several quarts over the last couple of weeks, and for the first time in a few years I made some black raspberry freezer jam:

Believe it or not I did sieve some of the seeds out of the pulp before I made it into jam; though you wouldn't guess by looking at those jars. There are still a lot of berries out there to be picked, but they are drying up fast with this hot weather and no rain.