Happy 35th Birthday Canner!

Yesterday, was the hottest day of the year (so far)!!!! It's hot!!!

However, we had a lot of garden veggies to can up and make garden vegetable soup! So, we had two canners going all day to get it done. I canned 24 quarts and except for the meat and peas, everything was from the garden. It is so nice to just grab a jar on a hectic (and cooler) day for dinner.

This is one of my canners! Now it is not very pretty! I figure it is now 35 years old as we bought it the first year we were married (I think for about $30). I have done a lot of canning over the years with five hungry boys in the family. I figure conservatively I have averaged about 400 quarts of various things every year. I figured that up on 35 years x 400 quarts and figure this canner has helped can about 14,000 jars of food!

Redoing the upper garden!

We made our upper garden a couple of years ago. However, we have been battling the previously established Bermuda grass. That grass is vigorous and this shows the extensive root system that is everywhere.

Last summer to battle this matted mess in the walkways and it kept trying to work its way into the beds. So in August, we covered a lot of the upper garden with black plastic and kept it there throughout the winter to try to smother the grass.

We have uncovered it and to get it out before this grass starts to grow, Michael has been digging out roots and then we are putting down cardboard and a heavy mulch.

We have also redid the beds by taking out the soil, lining the beds and putting the soil back in! It's been a ton of work but we are keeping our fingers crossed that this will help rid us of this problem and we can get this garden established as well as the lower garden is. (Our spring broccoli is beautiful).

I've also cleaned out the lower garden from Henbitt, which is an edible winter ground cover that dies out as it heats up here in the South. It looks much worse than it was to clean out the beds. Underneath, I found some blooming strawberries already.

100 degrees . . .how does your garden grow?

We were told this week in the news that this is the hottest summer in Upstate South Carolina in 100 years. Not real good for gardens!

It's been a struggle keeping things growing. Amazingly, the tomatoes look great and green. It's hard for them to set fruit in temperatures over 95. I'm hoping they stay healthy for when the temperature moderates so we can get some fall tomatoes! I was still able to get about a half a bushel last week.

The sweet potatoes seem to be vining around just fine in the heat. We will know how good they did in September.

Michael did put in a drip irrigation system in that helps immensely. Our pepper plants are just loaded.

The peppers are also bigger with having the drip irrigation. One of our green bell pepper plants was actually in our greenhouse last summer and I planted it outside for this summer and it's still producing!

Baskets of Berries

Our blackberries and Marion berries are in full swing. This was Monday's picking, about three gallons! Michael's berry smoothies are wonderful!

We also picked our first tomatoes June 2. Here is Monday's harvest, some tomatoes, cucumbers, and Romaine lettuce. Can you tell dinners are salads these days! We should pick our first green beans tomorrow.

Early Harvest

Here is a picture of our upper garden. Yes, we are still building more raised beds! You can see how Michael set up a way to tie up our tomatoes. It's survived some storms so far! We are heavily mulching everything so keep the moisture to the plants and protect them from the heat, which we need since it was 97 today!

We started some tomato seeds in January so we had some nice plants ready to plant outside the first of May. They really have set fruit.

We have some almost ready. Many of these are over a pound and I wanted to pick one for dinner but Michael prevailed on me to wait another day or two! We have never had tomatoes by the first of June before!

We wintered over our onions and they have done really well. Here is the last of them (not as big as the first ones we pulled up). It's probably about half of the onions we harvested.

Our grape vines are just full and look so healthy. We have added three more vines to our grape arbor so we are hoping in future years to have a good harvest.

Our Marion Berries and Blackberries are just beginning to turn. They too look full of berries and so healthy. This is the first year of our Marion Berries.

In fact, here is the first picking of them today.

May Garden update

We are big time into strawberries right now. I've picked about 35 gallons so far but they are winding down. I'm excited that we have more berries coming. These black berry plants have canes that are over six feet tall!

Our blackberries are loaded and will really perform in a few weeks.

Here are our Marionberries, my most favorite berries ever! They are Oregon's best kept secret but they will live here just fine!

Our potato boxes and potato raised bed (with another bed frame one on top)is going gangbusters. I hope they are setting a ton of potatoes!

Here are our early tomatoes and they have a lot of tomatoes that are really big already.

Our green beans are up and doing well. Since green beans nitrogen fix the soil, I've planted them on the sides of our berries to help their soil and also give us more green beans. Those plants are also doing well so we may have a lot of green beans.

New Steps

Michael has been busy this week with a lot of jobs and one of them was to build steps to go down the hill into the greenhouse. I didn't know how we would do it, but he had a plan and went to work.

Here's the finished product. The top step isn't slanted, but he put some extra wood and dirt in their to hopefully redirect the rainwater. We eventually want to build a swell to direct the water but in the meantime we were able to get some bales of hay and played them down the hill to help in the meantime.


Here is a picture of the new part of the garden. We probably have about 10 cantaloupe almost ready. I'm very disappointed in our corn as it just hasn't set many ears. In fact, I'm a little worried. Most years there have been a lot of bees around and I have hardly seen any and I think that is a factor. Our tomatoes started out setting fruit and after several days of rain the end of May, they are not setting fruit much even though the plants look beautiful. I may have to start hand pollinating them!

May 2010 garden

One reason I haven't blogged as much this month is the garden! It's keeping us very busy but we're having great payoffs! Our strawberries are almost over but we've picked 70 gallons and had a wonderful harvest.

We're loaded up with blackberries that are just now starting to ripen. Our blueberries are right behind.

Here's the older part of our garden beds. The tomatoes are in the back. We harvested our cauliflower and broccoli. Our earliest corn is toselling!

Here is a picture of me in the garden.

And Michael working in the garden.

Here are the new beds we've built. As soon as we build and fill them with soil, we've been planting!

We have four more to build but the new beds are already producing squash and cucumbers!

Beautiful first day of spring!

We had an absolutely beautiful first day of spring. It was in the 70s and so pretty outside. All of the trees are just about to bust out in bloom.

Eric and Tracy came over and the kids helped plant a bed and a half of seed potatoes. It was fun to watch them in the dirt. Sydney got excited to see some worms but the dove back down in the ground very fast. I caught one in my hand and she asked to touch it. She loved the wiggles it made!

Haily was good at covering up the potatoes. They wore some cute aprons that Grandma Fuller made to work outside.

While we were doing that, Eric helped Michael run a trench digger that he rented for the day. We have a water line down to the greenhouse but decided to put some water at each end of our future raised beds and we also ran a water line over to the existing raised beds so watering will be much easier. I can't imaging digging the trench by hand as Michael figured he dug about 160' with it.

Dreaming of our summer garden

I don't know if you can tell what this is, but it's a diagram of our yard and garden. I've wanted to do this for a long time. The round circles are fruit trees we've planted and the squares are our raised beds. The big square is our soon to be greenhouse and the raised beds on the other side of it are beds we plan on building this spring to increase our garden size.

I've wanted to have a plan so I can track what we plant in each garden bed so I can rotate plants and document how things do. The first 12 raised beds are our berries.

Last year we had such a wonderful garden and ate out of it daily. The fresh food that we grew organic is so superior to what you buy and I know there are no preservatives in what we ate and canned. I didn't document the pounds or bushels but I hope to do that better this year.

Apple trees

One thing I need to do is get better with handling our orchard. We have several dwarf trees that we've gotten a little bit off fruit but we plan on expanding our fruit production.

So, we ordered four more apples trees, standard size! We have two Gala and two Anne. These apples are very sweet. We will have to probably wait a couple of years to see the fruits of our labors.

In other pictures you may have seen all of the 5 gallon buckets by the trees. We have attached a drain spout on the bottom and put them in the soil so we can water where the roots are.

In other news, we have some lines of water, electricity and natural gas going down to the greenhouse. I'm relieved that we didn't have to break down any of our concrete on our little driveway area that goes to the back of the house.

We are getting a lot of wonderful lettuce of various varieties right now. I hope the colder nights won't be too hard on it! We'll cover it up if we need to as our cold doesn't normally last right now.

Michael is so great to do so much work around the home. I'm so blessed to have a sweetie who has so many talents on building and fixing things. If he doesn't know how to do it, he works to learn it!

Rainy Saturday

Fall has definitely come to our little neck of the woods. It seems that our rains come on every Saturday. It sure would be nice to have a sunny one to work on the greenhouse! This look seems like I should be in Oregon right now.

I did notice this spider web which is neat with the rain on it. I wasn't sure how the picture would turn out but you can see it.

The rate of harvest has gone way down but we do have collards. Before a rainy Saturday, I ran out to pick some to cook up. I'm no Southern gal but Michael has some fond memories of his mom's collards so I'm trying!

I takes so many collards to cook down. The big bowl above cooked down to about 4 quarts of cooked collards. Michael liked them and said they were good. . . but I'm not sure they were better than his memories of his mom's!