HARVEST TIME!

Our Summer harvest has begun, as the heat rises don’t forget to harvest the fruits of your hard labor. Our plants are loving the warmth and starting to blossom and set. We have harvest many green tomatoes, half runner beans, squash, zucchini, banana peppers, strawberries, herbs. Our first two zucchini’s were made into cookies. Our cucumbers were made into salt, dill, bread and butter pickles and a few buckets full to sell at the Farmer’s Market. We harvest and try to find different recipes for each one to sell something new every week.

We have repaired our greenhouse that the storm blew down. We cut a tarp in half to utilize our space and planted pumpkins and butternut squash. We used straw to protect them from the heat off the tarp. So far, so good.

INTERNS

Brasin is one of our participates sons that is thinking about going to college to further his career in gardening.  I mentioned that there was an internship position available for the garden when I can out for a garden visit and he was interested. He is a great intern, his family has taught him a lot about gardening throughout his childhood.

Savanah is a intern for the garden too. She helps maintain her father’s garden at home with her family.  We are so blessed to have both of them on our team.

Garden visits

Here are the many gardens we have enjoyed. We are looking forward to our second visit to see all the harvest from all their hard labor.

 Garden Visits

Dee and Roger has a hillside garden. They experiment with what works and don’t work each year. Last year they had beds on the hillside but this year they decided to till it and increase the size. Keith Hackworth suggested for the to build a strawberry triangle tower and they love it. They placed netting over it to keep the birds from eating their harvest. They used PVC poles to build them a trellised bean and vine plants to grow on this year too. They have many fruit and nut trees growing. The one that really interested me was the Fruit cocktail tree. They explained that it will be growing three different kinds of fruit. It was a grafted tree with Aproicots, pears, and peaches, I can’t wait to see it when it’s ready to harvest. We provided them with some bamboo sticks and a tarp for their garden.

Volunteers

Steve Slone (my hubby) and Burt Conley helped us shovel soil to place in the two big holes where the truck uprooted the two Dogwood trees. They helped fill in the holes with good soil to plant the melons on the side of the mountain.

We had a few attend the Water canning and Pressure Canning class. We gave out canning jars at the end of class. This month we had the Heart and Healthy class. The first Monday in August we will be having our season extension class, then Sept we will be giving out the end of season gifts at the Volunteer house at the Mission. Our second garden visit will be scheduled before August.