New England, June 2015

Uh oh, lights are blinking.... this day just keeps getting more & more interesting... and it's only 7:30.

I've been picking my strawberries red and pink. The pink ones go under a bowl on the kitchen counter to ripen before heading for the freezer. If I pick them young they don't seem to have any bug bites taken out of them yet.

NHG, when the bees swarm does that mean the hive is empty or are there still some left in there? Seems kind of sad that they leave home like that...

Nope, it's bee reproduction. They take the queen and probably half the hive population and most of the honey, which they suck into their guts for safekeeping, and fly off, leaving baby queen cells behind in various stages of development for the remaining hive to raise. It just cuts your bee population in half and you lose the honey in there, so it sets you back.

Wow, it sure is storming outside!  I hope your bees find those empty hives more hospitable than that tree limb, NHG.  

CC, I'm using an iPad and the problem seems to be that if I'm on a page too long (as what happens when you're henpecking a long post) chrome seems to just up and crash on me.  It's happened more than once. I'm going to try uploading the pictures onto my Evernote app  and then use my laptop to edit.  I'm also playing around with the dictation feature which would speed up my posting time significantly.  The crummy thing about last night was that I was literally at the end of the post when it crashed.
( good luck with that tree  branch BTW.)

mollyhespra wrote:

CC, I'm using an iPad and the problem seems to be that if I'm on a page too long (as what happens when you're henpecking a long post) chrome seems to just up and crash on me.  It's happened more than once. I'm going to try uploading the pictures onto my Evernote app  and then use my laptop to edit.  I'm also playing around with the dictation feature which would speed up my posting time significantly.  The crummy thing about last night was that I was literally at the end of the post when it crashed.
( good luck with that tree  branch BTW.)

Chrome has been giving me fits! The last couple days it seems to have been infected by a virus even though I have antivirus software installed. Before that it kept freezing up and I was lose posts because I had to keep shutting down. Now I'm using Firefox and I'm having no problems other than I can't use emoticons on this forum. Totally worth it. Once there's another Chrome update maybe I'll give it another try but until then I'll stick with what works.

Rain & hi winds seem to have let up. It appears we got about a half inch. I just turned the heat off which has been on all morning, cuz baby, it's cold outside.

Oh... Just noticed I can't post a photo either because there's no tool bar across the top. That's a problem....

Still raining here for now.  We've had 1 1/4" of rain so far and more expected during the day.  Winds OK, nothing knocked over.  I'm going to settle in my chair for the day and read and watch some TV I guess.
My cherry tree had 2 cherries on it that the birds didn't get and I picked the ripest.  Almaden Duke Cherry is touted as being both sweet and tart and they were right about the tart.  I like mine sweeter but I'll take these, or whatever the birds leave me.

It probably needed a bit more ripening to be sweeter.

Sorry you lost your crop. We lose all our cherries too, and many of our figs. Netting the trees is quite a pain, though.

Marc.....I netted my cherry tree one year thinking I did good.  Well, imagine my surprise when those smart little birds flew up into the tree from below where the netting didn't cover.  I figure they're smarter than I am and didn't bother netting since then.

Heh yeah it takes being near perfect to keep the birds out, and perfect is hard to do. Even if we get it right, getting the netting off and on again to pick the cherries is awkward and difficult even with two people doing it. We've just resigned ourselves to not getting cherries.

CapeCoddess wrote:
(Snip)

Rain & hi winds seem to have let up. It appears we got about a half inch. I just turned the heat off which has been on all morning, cuz baby, it's cold outside.

(/snip)

Yes, cold indeed.  I'm sitting next to this right now while I figure out the rest of the posting issues:



Though it's hard with one of these on my lap:

Marc Iverson wrote:Heh yeah it takes being near perfect to keep the birds out, and perfect is hard to do. Even if we get it right, getting the netting off and on again to pick the cherries is awkward and difficult even with two people doing it. We've just resigned ourselves to not getting cherries.

Hmm... for a year now I've been going back and forth about whether I want cherries. After months of trying I was finally able to get two little cherry seedlings to sprout a couple of weeks ago . I think this conversation is tilting me in the 'do not plant' direction.

Wow. Molly.

I am sitting here under a blanket because I REFUSE to turn on the heat on June 28th! LOL.

CC, it could be like nature's bird feeder!

And maybe keep them out of your other stuff.  

I have a sweet cherry, and a tart cherry bush, planted. They aren't growing very quickly. If they ever even bear a single cherry I'll be satisfied. 

We have blueberry bushes and the birds don't waste their time getting to those. 

Sometimes it just boils down to "the thrill of the plant" - haha.

My grandmother in Pennsylvania decades ago had a tart cherry tree in her backyard - maybe she had a sweet too I can't remember - she used to make the most delicious cherry pies from the tart - but those trees were really big. There was no question about whether or not to net those, you'd need a crane. And somehow, yet, she got lots of cherries from them. So maybe size has something to do with it, if it's a big enough tree, maybe there are enough cherries for everyone.

Okay I'm going to try again the old-fashioned way being as now Evernote won't sync so I can't use my laptop anyway.  

(drumroll please…)



You saw this one already but it's worth repeating in order to have the whole sequence in order. This one shows the strawberry bed or rather the "invading alien strawberries from outer space"  that have escaped their bed and are taking over one end of the garden. Problem is, our resident chipmunk likes them as much as we do so we never get much of a harvest…



And in the bed next to it, you will see first some teeny baby egg plants and peppers  followed by larger nursery-started 'Black Hungarian' and red cayenne  peppers, behind which are two varieties of potatoes divided by my green Mountain multiplier onions. All the way at the end you see some peas in bloom. That variety is called "Wild Pea of Umbria".

In bed number three we start with some golden beets, a couple of winter squash (Thelma Saunders), carrots with some jalapeños in between, bell peppers, and at the far end some paste tomatoes on the trellis.



(So far so good.)

And in this long shot are beds number four, five, and six.   Let's start with number four: at the top is a dwarf variety of pea for drying  called 'Desiree Dwarf Blauschokkers'  which has purple pods and was supposed to not need trellising, but as you can see, it's already 3 feet tall.  Behind the peas are two more varieties of beets:  Cylindra and white albino followed by more potatoes, green Mtn onions, yet more potatoes and ending with tomatoes at the far end.

In bed number five we also start with peas, this time a golden colored snow pea behind whichare some zucchini, more carrots and ending with three of the original prolific yellow straightneck squash from which I'm hoping to get at least one funny looking squash with ribs (the one we call Molly mishap squash).  All along one side of this bed are some bush beans.

And finally, in bed number six are a whole bunch of snap peas with a group of determinate tomatoes at the far end.

Beautiful Molly!

Where'd you get your woodchips?

OK!   We are nearly there!

This is just a shot of the foundation plantings next to which are various plants in pots. Specifically (call me crazy), I took the trouble of transplanting a few specimens of each variety in the radish mix I planted earlier in the spring so that I could save the seeds.



And now for a tour of the SFG expansion into the backyard...



...where you will find…more potatoes!



...and some garlic.

We've also added some beds along the West side of the house which contain three types of tomatillos ( purple, giant yellow, and San Juanito)...



...and five varieties of cherry tomatoes:



OH!  And I almost forgot the new asparagus beds we put in earlier this year:





Which you will see are located at the other side of the fence by the alien strawberries…thus concluding our garden tour!

NHGardener wrote:Beautiful Molly!

Where'd you get your woodchips?

TY!

They sell them by the truckload at a local lumber mill and the logger from whom we buy our wood does us the favor of delivering them to us.

P.S., do you recognize the strawberries?

CapeCoddess wrote:

Marc Iverson wrote:Heh yeah it takes being near perfect to keep the birds out, and perfect is hard to do. Even if we get it right, getting the netting off and on again to pick the cherries is awkward and difficult even with two people doing it. We've just resigned ourselves to not getting cherries.

Hmm... for a year now I've been going back and forth about whether I want cherries. After months of trying I was finally able to get two little cherry seedlings to sprout a couple of weeks ago . I think this conversation is tilting me in the 'do not plant' direction.

CC, if I were to plant cherries, I would see if I could find a dwarf cherry tree. Getting bird netting on and off a big tall tree is really hard, but maybe a dwarf tree would be something one person could handle or at least something that two people wouldn't have so much trouble doing.

Molly, what an abundance! And it all looks strong and happy.

Uh-oh on the chipmunk though. Hope you have a way to control it before it devastates your gardens. I see you do have fencing, so how does he get in?

I like your asparagus beds. Asparagus is quite an investment so I hope you can keep the critters away from it!

Marc, the chipmunk is small enough to fit *through* the fencing...so long as his cheeks are empty that is...

And actually nothing seems to want to eat the asparagus (except for the asparagus beetles of course). Which is why we took the risk of adding those two beds. A bunch of years ago I planted a few as an experiment and when nothing bothered them we added a few more to that first bed which is along the outside of the fence by bed #6.

At the time I was the only one who liked asparagus, but now that DH has decided he likes it too, we added the two beds in the picture. Here's a shot of the original asparagus planting:




It really is a thing of wonder that the critters have left it alone all these years.

(Oh, dear-- does anyone know how to rotate an image clockwise? Sanderson? Sorry about that folks…)

I'm curious.

We seem to be getting more rotated pics than usual lately, and I'm wondering why.

It seems to happen with pics taken in portrait mode, rather than landscape mode. Is it something that portable devices are doing? Something else?

Boffer, I used an iPad if it helps to know, and I probably *did* take the pic in portrait mode but on my camera roll it is oriented correctly, so it wasn't until I had hosted and posted it that I realized it was rotated.  What's the code to rotate?  Is it on the menu somewhere because I looked and didn't see anything.  Thanks for fixing it, BTW! 

holy crow Molly, what a beautiful and huge garden! Thanks for the wonderful tour! I had to zoom in on a bunch of those photos so I can see everything close up. Got a good laugh out of your strawberry bed with all its escapees. New England sure is good to its strawberries! And your beets are so far ahead of mine. I always have such a difficult time with beets. do you do anything to the mm to make the beets will grow so well? You guys sure do love your potatoes!

Boffer, I haven't had any sideways pictures and I use my tablets all the time but I'll do a test right now since I'm on the broken tablet that chrome seems to work fine on. Otherwise Firefox won't let me post any photos. I'll have to post this and then edit so check back. Stand by...
first one is landscape and second one is portrait.

CapeCoddess wrote:...buffer, I haven't had any sideways pictures...

And that auto-spelling is getting so common that I'm about to change my user name to accommodate the newest technology!  

mollyhespra wrote:Boffer, I used an iPad if it helps to know, and I probably *did* take the pic in portrait mode but on my camera roll it is oriented correctly, so it wasn't until I had hosted and posted it that I realized it was rotated.  What's the code to rotate?  Is it on the menu somewhere because I looked and didn't see anything.  Thanks for fixing it, BTW!  

If it looks proper on your iPad, how would you know?!  Any simple graphics program has a rotate feature.  But for a quick rotate, I right click on the image file name, and select 'Preview', and that opens up the built in Windows Picture and Fax viewer that has two rotate buttons, one for left, and one for right.

I'm still using XP, so maybe someone has another way to do it easily in a newer version.  

I don't have any portable devices, so if we find that's where the problem is, somebody else is going to need to help out with finding an answer.

I just went through the camera roll and indeed the picture is oriented correctly there. It doesn't look like cc's tablet picture was rotated, though.
How did you fix mine, Boffer?