Hello Friends!
These past two weeks have seen me spending all of my free time picking raspberries or working on a dharma talk for my sangha this last Thursday. Now I am busy in the garden and catching up with all the things I let slide.
A heat dome arrived today and we are under an excessive heat warning through at least July 14th. High heat and high humidity. I remember the good old days when I first moved to Minnesota in 1994. Summers then were so much cooler. More than five or six days of 90F/32C or higher heat was rare. Now I’m looking at 90F/32C or hotter for this entire week, and it isn’t even the first string of excessive heat days we’ve had. The climate is thoroughly broken.
There is no rain in the forecast, the heat dome is keeping the rain away, so I will need to hand water the garden from the rain barrels. That promises to be a sweaty affair.
The garden has thus far been abundant. Those raspberries:
We’ve had so many this year! We’re putting them in our morning porridge, smoothies, making small batch jam, and I donated some to my neighborhood food shelf (Have also donated a lot of arugula, some herbs and onions). And still the freezer is packed with them. The freezer is also packed with rhubarb. James is going to be doing some canning, but we are also considering a small chest freezer for the basement.
The peas were doing great this year until the first heat wave rolled through at the end of June and the peas decided it was too hot for them. The heat followed by rain nearly every day for over a week, kick started the rest of the garden though.
All the squashes are vining and flowering, the cucumbers are vining and starting to flower, the citron melons are vining but I haven’t seen flowers yet. And the beans! The pole beans have all reached the top of their trellises and are reaching for the sky. I’m picking a cereal bowl full of yellow wax beans nearly every day. All the cherry tomatoes are covered in fruit and I look at them daily, anticipating when they will be ripe. The other tomato plants have tiny fruit that will take a while yet because they are all paste and slicing tomatoes. I can hardly wait for the first bite of sandwich with a fresh from the garden slice of tomato on it. Mmmmm.
Tired of poles falling over during big thunderstorms, James and I built two sturdy arches this spring. I’ve got pole beans climbing up one side and winter squash climbing the other side:
I am pleased with them and I think I will add a third next spring. I took this photo a week ago. The beans and the squash are at the top of the arch today. The beans here are brown resilient beans. They began life four years ago as bush beans and last year they decided to revert to pole beans. The squash is green striped cushaw. I have not grown it before. The leaves are gigantic and so are the vines. Here’s some flowers and bees on the vine this morning:
The garden has also gifted me with a volunteer pumpkin. Last year I planted saved seeds from Naked Bear pumpkin I had grown the previous year, not realizing this variety of pepita pumpkin is a hybrid. I got one small pumpkin last summer whose seeds were regular seeds, not pepita seeds. It cooked up as a nice, not sweet, pumpkin. The vine also had a giant elongated pumpkin that a squirrel ripped apart just before it was ripe. The squirrel scattered some of the seeds, and one of them sprouted. The vine is vigorous and I have to keep redirecting it out of the garden path and away from a tomato plant. So far it has two pumpkins and I spied a third tiny one this morning:
I am strategizing on how I can protect them later in the season. I have no idea how big they will get, whether the seeds inside will be shell-free, or how sweet the flesh will be, but I look forward to finding out!
Here’s a couple big view photos of the garden this year I took about two weeks ago:
This year we’ve made milkweed flower jelly and daylily flower jelly. Both are delicate floral flavors that are lovely on toast made from, for example, this medjool date-sunflower-orange tea sourdough bread I baked:
Instead of using plain water in the recipe I made sweet orange tea and used the tea. So delicious! And now I am wondering what other teas might go good in various sourdough loaves. Whole wheat chai spice? Multigrain green tea? Cinnamon-raisin chamomile? It would be fun to try mint but I am not certain what bread I would pair it with, maybe a seedy Danish rye?
The chickens are doing great. Baba and Nanny are now three months old:
They have their big girl voices now, no more peeping. They are friendly and curious and will eat from my hand, which meant Baba got the huge grasshopper I caught this morning much to Sia’s chagrin. Sia is head chicken, for now. I suspect once the witches are full size, Baba will challenge Sia for top of the pecking order.
And there you have it. If it is hot where you are, stay safe and find somewhere cool to be. Take care everyone!
My mom and dad have a raised garden bed thing on their covered front porch in which they grow tomatoes, and one is my FAVORITE things ever is when my mom secretly videos my dad checking on the plants, and then she texts the video to me. It SO SWEET.
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That is so awesome Melanie! What a joy 🙂
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That trellis is awesome. I have a Hartman yellow cherry gooseberry tomato and it’s HUGE and I could use something like this. I hope your heat wave breaks soon. That sourdough looks amazing.
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Thanks Laila! We are really pleased with how the trellis turned out and how easy it was to do. The best thing is that it hasn’t blown over in high winds like our stick trellises have done the last couple of years 🙂 Cherry tomatoes get gigantic. I hope you are enjoying lots of them. Mine still haven’t gotten ripe. I am growing impatient 😀
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Wow your garden is so amazing! Do the black raspberry taste any different from the pink ones? Are you planning on any jelly/jam? I didn’t bother to de-seed mine last time and it was still good. This time I did some strawberry jams.
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Thanks Smithereens! Yes, black raspberries do taste different, I find them to be sweeter and never tart. There will be jam 🙂 We never de-seed them, the seeds are tiny and the effort would not be worth the time. Strawberry jam is delicious. We eat our strawberries too fast to have enough for jam 😀
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You have a very healthy looking garden and nice looking chickens! I’m sure a lot of it has to do with the chickens adding fertilizer? I love black raspberries. My dad complains they have too many seeds but I find their taste and juiciness makes up for the seeds. We’re having a heat dome too. What fun!
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Thank you Mara! Yes, we started keeping chickens for their garden services rather than for eggs. They have done a spectacular job at improving our very sandy soil. Plus they are great at eating grubs and turn our kitchen scraps into fabulous compost. I like black raspberries better than red ones and don’t mind the seeds at all. Hope your heat dome has moved away. Ours has but it’s still hot and we need rain badly.
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Sounds like your chickens are a real win-win. Our heat dome and smoke has cleared and it’s actually gorgeous out. Wishing you the same with rain!
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The chickens have been a delight Mara! If you ever have the chance to keep any, take it! Glad to hear the heat and smoke have cleared. I hope you continue to enjoy gorgeous weather 🙂
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Another new thing I learnt from your blog: black raspberries exist! I’d never heard of them before. Now that I look them up, it seems they’re native to North America, so I guess that’s why. Great idea about those flower-based jams. I could probably make some from the wildflowers I have growing around the house, but I don’t know what they are exactly and don’t want to accidentally poison myself. One day, I really must get a guide to help me identify these things. Stay cool! Have you been affected by smoke from the Canada wildfires?
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Heh Andrew, yup black raspberries are amazing and can’t be found in grocery stores or famers markets because they are too delicate for transport. So much fun to make flower jelly. Daylily jelly was the easiest with the big flower petals. Milkweed was pretty easy too, though challenging making sure there were no ants crawling in them. Get yourself a plant ID book or talk to a neighbor who knows the plants. I imagine you have lots of wonderful edible plants near you. We were lucky to have clean air for a few days, but have since been blanketed with wildfire smoke and unhealthy to breathe air 😦
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We finally had some steady and good rain this morning (no lightning to spark new fires, hopefully helpful to extinguish and minimise existing fires) and I hope you have gotten some rain too. Love the rogue pumpkin story! I wondered yesterday, noting the damage to the blossoms on all our many petunias, how individual growers like you can protect their crops from falling ash and the tiny chemicals that get blown around from the substances sprayed on these blazes, when it’s hard for larger-scale organic farms to manage this too, even though they are more accustomed to having to think on a different scale that way. Our growing season is way behind you now/still: we just had the first (and only) local strawberries this weekend. Your rasperries are gorge!
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What a relief to have a good steady rain without lightning Marcie! We got a small bit of rain, but not enough for a good soak and it has been bone dry since then. We are not officially in drought yet, but listed as abnormally dry.
We haven’t gotten any ash here so I have not had to figure anything out about that and I hope I never have to. But if I do, I suspect that the University of Minnesota agricultural extension services would have some information I could use.
Yay for strawberries! Ours did really well this year and I hope yours do too. The amount of raspberries this year was amazing and we will be enjoying them from the freezer for a while yet.
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Love the big garden pictures. It’s lovely seeing individual plants, but it is great sometimes to get a view of the whole. The chookies are looking magnificent.
As for the climate, yes, broken. The impact here seems to be less cold winters – but less warm ones too if that makes sense! In other words, in recent years we seem to have have higher winter minimums – meaning way fewer frosts – but the maximums have been about the same. According to weather people that means a warmer winter, which I understand, theoretically. But, these warmer winters are partly so because we’ve had more cloud. More cloud means less frost but also less sun, so it feels colder even if it technically isn’t. The apartment we downsized to has perfect aspect – which was a major reason we chose it – because it makes such a difference. On sunny winter days we get sun into our bedroom and main living area in all day from around 9.30am to 4.30pm. Just wonderful, but there are been more cloudy days. (Conversely, in summer we get almost no sun into the apartment, except some very late afternoon sun in late summer. Not enough to seriously heat the place.)
Love the sound of our tea experiments with the bread.
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Glad you enjoyed the big picture view!
Winters here have been similar. We still have arctic cold days but overall temperatures are warmer both day and night. January used to mean brilliant blue skies and frigid cold but here too there has been more clouds which contribute to keeping it warmer. It’s all so disconcerting.
The tea experiments have been fun!
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