a few of the girls

Bethlehen

Attila the Hen

Henrietta

 Growing well, but still have quite a ways before they're laying!

The chickens are growing!

 

Henrietta and Rinnah.

Evania with Attila the Hen and Rinnah with Mrs. (Lavender) Allen Milgrave.

Potatoes 2021

 We got the potatoes in late this year, and they just weren't dying down until FINALLY we got a light frost over the weekend. With heavy rain supposedly coming tomorrow, that meant yesterday and today were our days to get them in. So we did! I did most of the digging, but Matt came out for bits of time as he was able, and Owen put in a good hour in the afternoon after school as well. And these two girls (and Rinnah, too) were tireless, not only with the fun task of pulling up the potatoes (we got some amazing potatoes after what did not appear to be a promising year) but also with the not so fun job of pulling up weeds ahead of my digging so I could see what I was doing.

Tomatoes

 While we certainly haven't been as invested in the veggie garden this year as last, we're still doing a decent job of keeping up and getting a quite decent yield.

Here are Dad and Evania picking tomatoes from the annex on the west end of the veggie garden where we put all of the volunteer plants that we found in the spring! They filled the entire turkey roasting pan with cherry tomatoes!!

Gladiolus

 Matt diligently watered our gladiolus bulbs during the drought, and we've been rewarded over the last few weeks with a steady and copious stream of beautiful flowers.

Here Evania's showing off just a small sampling. We're bringing in this many almost every day!

Green Beans

 This year's garden may not be as spectacular as last year's, but we've still got some decent produce, including really cool asparagus beans! I had forgotten to tell the girls I'd planted them, so when they discovered them in the garden today, they were *really* impressed!

A ton of food

 Today marks the day that we surpassed 2000 pounds of food that we've pulled out of the yard! The girls and I processed just over 80 pounds of pears today, and that (plus a bit of kale and about a pound of green beans) was enough to push us over that magic line.

Now we can say quite literally that we've grown a ton of food this year. ;) That's pretty cool. 

Reuben made himself comfortable near the compost pile where we're throwing all of the not-so-good pears.

Rinnah's climbing the ladder to pick the beans off the 12 foot tall sunflowers! Thankfully they're bending down as the season progresses.

Three kiddos tossing pears into the pile.

One of the perks of having a big brother is his big muscles! He's got three little sisters in there!

Picking, picking, picking pears.

What are you doing, Dad?

"What are you doing, Dad?" ask the little biker girls.

"I'm measuring the sunflowers, girls," says the Dad with the big floppy hat.

"It's THIIIIIIIS big!"

We couldn't quite get the tape measure to stand up tall enough, but were able to determine that this one is between 12 and 13 feet tall!!! That's a big sunflower!

And since height is apparently one of the themes in the vegetable garden this year, here's a picture from the day before of Matt harvesting cucumbers.

Growing, growing, growing

The giant sunflowers are living up to their name! They're twice as tall as the little girls!

The late tomatoes are starting to take off - not nearly as big as the ones we planted earlier in the season, but we'll get tomatoes from them, I'm guessing, before the summer's over! This is the little rock-pile wall that Owen built for us at the edge where the rhubarb grows. We had to co-opt the space to the west of it for the tomatoes because the regular garden is out of room!

The vertical pumpkin growing is a great idea, but would work better if we only had one plant on each trellis! Our winter squash are doing fine, but these pumpkins are taking over. I'm beginning to hope they reach far enough back to climb up the pine tree!

This is looking to the east from the other side of the co-opted tomato space. You can see the corn through the trellis, and on the far left of the photo, the south side of the vertical pumpkins.

One of our zucchini patches. Four clusters here and three in the other location. Curious to see how many pounds of food these babies put out this year!

And this is a view into one of our fenced-in areas. Beets in the front, and some bush beans that got planted late. Middle is lettuce, zinnias (just to be pretty!) and carrots, and in the back, just visible, a hydrangea, more beets, and a cabbage.

Zinnias are such boisterously exuberant flowers!

 

The largest cluster of Roma tomatoes. Lots of fruit; none ripe yet.

The veggie garden

 This really is the best vegetable garden we've ever had.

Gloria walking past the corn with a handful of daylilies we're potting up. Pumpkins are climbing vertically on the left.

Evania demonstrating how tall the corn is getting!

The pumpkins - already halfway up their trellis!

The basil is taking off

We're going to be sharing lots of potatoes at this rate!

We have sunflowers growing up in the center of each of our pole bean cages. The sunflowers are doing better than the beans so far!

Japanese beetles and cabbage

We saw our first Japanese beetles today. On the raspberries and the small apple tree...where they always start. Next will be the pole beans. So out came the old yogurt containers with soapy water and plastic forks, and my vigilant troops began their patrol...

Ain't no beetles getting past these toughies!

And on a more encouraging note, look at how lovely the cabbages are, photos courtesy of Rinnah.

Plant sale at the neighbors'

The little girls helped me dig, split, and pot up a variety of plants from around the yard to add to our neighbors' plant sale, and over the course of two days, they made more than $400!!! And that's just our plants! Sylv and Sam did just as well, if not better.

They worked really hard with the digging and keeping everything watered and bringing it all over...and they were out there on the driveway for every hour the sale was on...and then they helped me load it all back into Owen's truck to bring back home this afternoon! We also got to keep the things that Sylv and Sam don't want to take up space keeping for next year, so here's looking at even bigger profits in 2021! My budding small business owners!

Even Ebenezer is tall enough to help load the littler pots into the back of the truck. We have ALL appreciated Owen's truck!

It really has been a long time!

We were thinking, as we've worked on putting in our tremendous veggie garden this spring that it's probably been at least five years since we've put in a "real" vegetable garden. Sure enough, this popped up in Shuttlerfly's "remember when" today:

Look how little they are!

Digging potato trenches

Keep the boys swinging and we can keep working!