July 21

Haven't posted for three weeks at this point. Things have been busy. I left town for a week on vacation and had a wide variety of stuff to do when I got back. Just to get something up here, I'll give an indication of when I started harvesting some things recently.

I harvested all of the garlic on 7/19. The leaves had yellowed. This year I have only 65 bulbs, about half of what I had last year. Many of the bulbs are smaller as well. I know that a lot of them didn't make it through the winter and never sprouted.

Started harvesting "picklebush" cucumbers on 7/19. Each day I pick a couple. They hit pickle size and stay there.

Yellow squash, zucchini,and patty-pan squash are now pickable, starting this week. The early fruit from each of these had some rotting and didn't get very big.

Peas! Both the snap peas and shelling peas got big enough that they all basically turned into shelling peas. The plants right now are about done but we got two good meals worth of shelling peas out of two rows. There are still some peas developing but the heat has done it in. Once they are completely dead, I will pull them out of the ground and plant a fall crop in the same spot. The plants got about 3 feet high, a foot higher than the fence I put up for them.

Cherry tomatoes developed this week. First couple ripe ones about 2 days ago. There are now starting to ripen some romas as well, none are fully ripe yet, though. No ripening of other beefsteak varieties.

I grew two sorts of potatoes this year and the plants really dried up in the last two weeks. I put the soaker hose on them for a while but one set of plants didn't come back and basically withered, a red new potato variety. I pulled a bunch out of the ground tonight and they look nice, some big, some small. Definitely a better harvest than last year when it was so dry. I only put 10 lbs of taters total in the ground this year, we'll have to see what I get out of it. One of these years I have to try potatoes in an actual raised bed and see what kind of production I get.

I pulled out a spinach patch and arugula patch, and replaced them with more greens.

I can now pick collard greens.

Some corn is starting to tassel. Others in the area have sweet corn ready.

Biked past some lovely summer prairie fields today, filled with purple coneflowers, yellow black-eyed susans, gerber daisies, buttercups, and other flowers depending on how wet the prairie was.