Waiting
I am waiting.
The potatoes look great. I planted them a little late this year. They are starting to flower, which means the tubers are forming. I also got the winter squash out later than usual. They are looking better every day and I can see squash growing. But they are not what I am waiting for.
The first two plantings of lettuce have been harvested and eaten. The third and fourth plantings are coming along. The batavian escarole is ready, as are the chicories, but not the radicchio yet. But, they are not what I am waiting for.
I planted beans earlier than usual this year. The Romano Gold beans have flowers now. And the peppers are looking so good. I think the peppers will be ready early this year. I am kind of waiting for these, but there is still something else I am waiting for.
I had trouble with my tomato starts this year. It took three tries, but the third round of starts finally took. I kept them under lights 24/7, to help them get some gowth. I still don’t know if they will have enough time to bear. I did get a some tomato plants from neighbors and friends. We even ate two tomatoes this week.
Some of my cucumber starts didn’t make it and the rest were very slow to get growing. They are making progress now; flowering and I even saw some very tiny cucumbers forming.
Tomatoes and cucumbers: these are what I am waiting for.
The first tomatoes of the season
Still waiting for cucumbers
Off-Topic
My sister, Karen, rode in the Race Across Oregon this weekend. She won the solo women’s division. I am so proud of her!
Steven was a part of the support team (along with Karen’s husband and my/our dad). There wasn’t room in the van for me or Paige, so we stayed home, worked in the garden, and watched her progress on-line and through phone calls from Steven.
Congratulations, Karen!
Karen, during the Race Across Oregon
Whatever the Weather
Even though I read the forecasts, when I woke up today, I still felt disappointment. Clouds, a little mist, wind. The sun is gone for a few days.
Some onions bolted
The weather is always on my mind. Whether it is too hot, too cold, too dry or too wet, there is usually something that is not quite perfect. But really, this year has been pretty good. The spring was drier than usual, though a little cool until April. May and June had some beautiful summer teaser weeks, not just days. I thoroughly enjoyed them, as did most of the garden . . . except for the onions. Some decided to bolt after the weather cooled back to normal. Back in mid-June we took the end plastic off the hoop houses–it was warm enough. That was about two weeks earlier than last year. And where did these last few sunny, hot days come from? They shouldn’t come until late July or August.
The end plastic came off the hoop house early this year.
Summers here are so beautiful, I forget that there actually are cloudy, misty and rainy days sometimes. A few cool days with rain are okay, but just a few. Once in a while I have inside work to do.
I just checked the forecasts. The sun should be back by the end of the week.
The Playhouse and Pecked Eggs
An Americauna taking a dust bath.
I haven’t written much about the girls for a while, so it is time for an update.
First, an update on our girl who passed away a few weeks ago. I wrote that we thought she had broken her neck. What I didn’t say, was that she also had been pecked on the top of her head. On our last trip to Linnton Feed & Seed, where we bought our chicks and I get lots of advice, we told the folks there what we thought happened to our girl. They said, no, it would be highly unlikely for a chicken to break its neck. All the symptoms that made me believe she had broken her neck, would also result from being pecked in the head. Her brain was damaged enough to impair her body movement and cause her to die. We were reminded that chickens are animals, not anything else that we might think.
The cds could be tacky decorations, but they are meant to scare the jays away.
Back in May, Steven built the girls a mobile coop we call the “playhouse.” It gives them a good place to lay their eggs and get some protection from wind, rain and sun when they are out around the yard. When it was ready, we moved it and the girls out by the blueberries and currants. After a few weeks, we started finding eggs with holes pecked in them. At first I thought the girls were doing it. A couple times I even caught a Dominique eating the pecked eggs. But then, I noticed some jays flying around the playhouse. It even looked like they were flying into the nest boxes. On Friday, Paige and I hung some cds around the playhouse to scare the jays away. (I had heard about using shiny, flashy things to scare birds away from cherry trees and blueberries.) The rest of Friday and all day Saturday, there were no pecked eggs. But, Sunday morning, there was another one.
One of the Dominiques, doing what she should: not eating eggs.
I am still not sure if it is the jays or the chickens who are pecking the eggs. (Though I do hope it is the jays. I don’t want my girls to do that sort of thing!) I think we may need a camera to find out what is really going on.
Someone New
A week ago Saturday, Steven and I drove out to PDX to meet a passenger flying into Portland from Colorado Springs. Her name is Paige. She is our niece (Steven’s sister’s daughter).
Paige checking for eggs.
Paige is staying with us for a while this summer; as long as she doesn’t get too bored out here with a couple of middle aged folks with no kids. Well, at least not human children…the chickens are pretty close to the same thing and quite entertaining in their own right. To our delight, she said she wanted to learn about organic gardening and is ready to help however she can. Being the good and loving aunt and uncle that we are, we couldn’t disappoint her. Paige is blogging for her family and friends about her time in Portland. I asked if you could read her blog to hear her perspective on June’s Corner Garden and life with Steven, Michelle and the girls. She said yes.
Snap pea vines ready to go to the compost pile.
This has been a productive week. Steven took a few days off again, to help in the garden. He and Paige finished putting the t-tape irrigation in on Monday and cleared out a bed of weeds so I could plant winter squash. Tuesday, more of the same; another bed of weeds and more winter squash planted. Wednesday, Steven went back to work and Paige and I did more weeding and got several flats of new seeds going. After deliveries on Thursday, we started more seeds. This time I am getting fall crops planted early enough to get some edible results (I hope). Friday, back to weeding: clearing out the first planting of snap peas and weeding one of the hoop houses to get ready for, you guessed it, more winter squash.
Whew! Get a few extra people out in the garden and things get done!
I am into T-tape
I was very excited on Friday when a package arrived. Inside I found rolls of tubing, couplers with valves, t-fittings, adapters, u-stakes and, best of all, t-tape. This was what I ordered to set up a drip irriagtion system in our newest vegetable bed.
Drip irrigation is great. You don’t use as much water, you water your plants, not the weeds and it saves time and labor (especially with an automatic system). Last fall I went to a workshop on irrigation and heard about a drip irrigation product called t-tape. It sounded like it would work well for our vegetable bed set-up and I wanted to give it a try. This new bed gave me the perfect opportunity to see how it would work.
This is what I have been waiting for! I can easily turn the water on and off individual rows of vegetables.
I ordered all the supplies from a company called DripWorks. In just a few days, the box arrived and I dug in. I can get a little geeky about these kind of things . . . a neighbor stopped by to chat on Friday and asked about how we water. As I told her about the drip system we have in place in most of the beds, I had to show her all my new stuff. When I got excited about this particular fitting: a connection between the main water line and the t-tape line that has a valve, she asked if I was really into garden gadgets. I am, I guess, when a gadget can do something I have been wanting to do, which is the case with this valve connection. Now I can turn off the water on individual rows of vegetables, without making changes in the set of irrigation lines. So convenient!
T-tape ready to irrigate the beans.
Saturday, Steven and I set up part of the system. Of course, there were a few bugs, so it wasn’t until Monday that it was completed. (Steven is taking a few days off this week again. Yeah!) And it works! The tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and beans are set for water.
Now I will watch and see how it does. If it works well, I wil slowly convert the rest of the garden to this type of drip irrigation. An affordable system with valves: I love it!
Watch the Peas Grow
One of the things I love about gardening is watching plants grow. Sometimes is seems like it takes forever for a plant to show any new growth and when it does, it feels like such a triumph. And then there are times like the past few weeks, when things grow like crazy and it seems impossible for anything to grow that fast. Friends who grew up on farms in the mid-west have told me they could almost hear the corn growing.
Hoop house peas on April 22
For me, peas are a great example. When I pick peas, I walk up and back down the rows, picking both ways. It is easy to miss a pea pod, hiding behind some leaves, so it helps to look from different directions. This past week, when I was picking, I could swear that the peas grew while I was going back and forth down the rows. I picked up the row, and then when I came back, peas I had passed up as too small were now ready to pick. I couldn’t have missed that many peas, could I?
Hoop house snow peas on May 23
A Perfect Week and a Sad Day
It was a perfect week. Steven took the week off to help me in the garden. Two people can get so much more done than one. And Steven likes to do the hard, dusty, dirty work. The weather was just right: sunny, 70’s to 80’s and dry — all week. How often does that happen in Portland in May?
Our largest Asian pear tree in bloom
For me, the week started with thinning the Asian and Bartlett pear trees. I have never thinned them so early in the year. This is my chance to see if it really does make a difference in their boom and bust bearing habit. There were tons of blooms (a boom year), so if I thinned the fruit early enough, I should make the tree think it didn’t produce enough fruit this year and it will produce a lot again next year. Unfortunately, I have to wait a whole year to find out.
Look at all the fruit I thinned!
Thinning is hard, not physically, but mentally. The first part isn’t so bad, taking each cluster (anywhere from one to six or seven fruit) down to just one fruit. I know this will help the fruit grow to a larger size. But, then I have to remove some of those single fruits, to give each enough space and energy to grow. That gets hard, because I keep thinking there isn’t going to be anything left to enjoy! I have to keep reminding myself, there will be plenty to eat and this is good for next year’s crop.
The tomato/pepper/eggplant bed is ready to plant
The rest of the week involved weeding in our “backyard,” that will one day produce herbs and maybe even some Mediterranean fruit, preparing beds for planting (Steven’s expertise) and planting.
The sad day was today. One of our girls died…our blonde Americauna chicken. She was our best Americauna egg layer, she loved to be held and she was crazy for scratch. We aren’t sure what happened, but we think she fell trying to get into a nest box and broke her neck. I will miss her.
Bethel Springs Farm 