Thursday, July 16, 2009

Garden Update: 7-16-09

I'm giving away two OFF! mosquito products. Check it out while you are here!



After 4 weeks with NO rain, finally it has rained. In fact we received lots of rain on Monday and small showers every day since. My plants are thrilled. Last Thursday, our figs started ripening, so we've been harvesting a bowl full each day since then. We are snacking on them, dehydrating some and making preserves out of the rest. I've had my first run-in with squirrels this week. There are tons of squirrels around here and they obviously enjoy figs. I find the little furry thieves in the trees often and also find lots of half-eaten figs all over the ground throughout the yard. So far, they are not biting into all of the figs, so I'm not ready to declare war or anything - I'm happy to share, as long as they leave us our share :) .

The garden has not been on my mind as much this last week or so, since we started preserving our farmer's market purchases with more determined effort. In fact, between that, cooking our regular meals, homeschooling (yes, we school even during the summer, though in a much more relaxed manner), an entire day of errands in a nearby city and staying up way too late a few nights this week watching netflix movies, I am exhausted. In fact, I think I'm taking the day off today, outside of cooking dinner, and maybe some cookies. :) Yay! Vacation ;) (Tangent over - back to the garden update)



After it became obvious that our watermelon plant was not going to recover from the heat, we planted seeds (open pollinating variety) and they came up during the week. The plants are so cute and now I need to figure out where to plant them. I don't know if there is still enough "summer' left for them, but since we don't usually get our first frost until November, I figured it couldn't hurt to try.


Our blueberry plant has definitely come back from the brink. New leaves are sprouting every day.

Lemons are looking good and I'm hoping they will start to ripen soon as I'm not sure the poor tree can handle much more weight, lol.


Still harvesting cherry tomatoes, basil, and parsley. I'm hoping to make a basil/ parsley pesto today to use in our dinner (pizza with pesto for the sauce and sliced tomatoes (such beautiful farmer's market tomatoes) and mozzarella).

Its time to figure out what to do for a fall container garden. I'm going to work on that this week and post my thoughts (hopefully) next week.

Visit How Does Your Garden Grow hosted by A High And Noble Calling to read more garden updates, and if you have a garden and a blog, you can participate, too!

1 comment:

Alea Milham said...

Every thing looks wonderful! Isn't rain grand? My life goal is to settle in a forever home somewhere that receives rain. But for some reason God has kept us wandering in the desert. :-)