So much news...

Summary:
Tomatoes are ripe!  Baby goats were born (3 babies)! Onions and garlic are harvested. Peas are over and done with.  Green beans are ready. 



Wow, it's been busy lately.  Since last I wrote, PJ had her kids, 2 girls and a boy, all healthy.  The sugar snap peas came and went, beautifully, and the aliums have all been harvested. It's early for garlic to be done, but it was ready and is curing nicely in the shed.  Curing?  To get garlic ready to store, it must cure.  This means hanging it up in a dry, warm place with good air circulation for several weeks/months to let the skins form over the cloves.  The onions need this time to dry as well.


The sugar snap peas were a real success.  I harvested about 3.5 lbs of peas from the 6 ft of row, so that's a decent yield of a tasty treat.  They were only producing for about a week, and were in the ground for 3 months, but they sure were good!

The carrots have been coming out too.  I only have a small plot of carrots left in the ground, and with the thermometer hitting 97 degrees today, they are going to need to come out soon.  Summer is here already.  :^/
I think I'll have harvested a total of about 30 or 40 lbs of carrots from the various plantings this winter/spring.  The main lesson I've learned is to give them space and time, and grow a longer variety next year.

Wow, I can't believe it, but I harvested my first ripe tomato on APRIL 30.  Yeah.... an APRIL tomato!

I planted them a few days after Valentine's day, and with our unseasonably warm winter, they did just fine.  The Early Girl is the best producer, followed by Celebrity.  Better Boy is crummy, not a single green fruit.  All of the vines, however, are infected with early blight.  There are a few hybrid varieties resistant to early blight, which I may try out next spring.  I bought all indeterminate varieties this year with the hope that they would continue producing through the summer and into the fall, but with the disease pressure, I don't think this will be the case.

My experiments in the garden include an okra-long bean poly-culture.  While working on a local farm several years ago, I noticed that the best cucumbers were the volunteers growing up in the okra beds, where they had some shade and a good trellis.  I am hoping that the long beans, which are basically black eyed pea, will vine up the okra like the cukes did.  Black eyed pea can take a little shade, so maybe it will thrive amidst the okra plants.  I'll keep you informed.

Other new plantings are sweet potatoes, melons, watermelons and amaranth greens.  So, we're definately moving into the hot time of year.  Which in Austin, lasts most of the year!  Yay!  Swimming, melons and peppers!


My yellow frying peppers, which were supposed to be sweet peppers, are extremely hot.  I mean mouth on fore hot.  This is a real problem because I didn't WANT hot peppers, but I'm not so keen to replace them now that they are cranking out peppers.  I started some pickled peppers today, if that works I guess I'll keep them and make a bunch of pickled peppers.  I did rip out two pepper plants and replace them with eggplants from Home Depot, at $6 per eggplant....  But, these are in 5" pots so I am hoping that, even though it's technically too late to plant eggplants, they will be far enough along and have a large enough root system not to die and to thrive and produce.  We'll see, I'm not too optimistic about Home Depot plants.

ok that's all for now.

I've got lots of pictures for you today! It's been a busy time in life and the garden both lately, and I have been lax on posting pictures, so here is a big fat pic bomb for you to enjoy.
This first picture is of Sonoran Tepary Beans. As might be expected, it is very tolerant of drought and heat. Some sources indicate that this species can produce a harvestable crop with a single watering! Nevertheless, I will water it.... I've been growing this bean out from my original seed stock, (purchased from seeds of change, no glamorous story of origin here) for about 5 years, and finally had enough to plant a good sized bed. Last year I harvested about a pound of beans from roughly 1/3 the area I planted this year, so hopefully I will have enough to EAT some this fall.


I learned my lesson about counting chickens before they hatch from my spring potato crop. Some of the books I read and planted by said I could expect a 10:1 yield on my potatoes. Experience working on farms and my disbelief in the relevance of books on gardening to Austin's climate led me to believe I might get more like 6:1 yield. That means 6 lbs of spuds for each pound of potatoes planted as 'seed'. Well, I was expecting something like 100+lbs of potatoes... I did NOT harvest that much. My yield was more like 2:1, I think mostly owing to insufficient water and excessive heat. In any case, here are most of the potatoes (minus the ones we have already eaten). They are really good, and it's still about 30 lbs of spuds, but I was disappointed.
They onions and tomatoes are quite tasty as well. This is sort of what I've been harvesting lately, thought amaranth greens, green beans and cucumbers are also coming out of the garden right now, but aren't pictured.


Here's a window that Sarah's brother gave us, in its new home.


I *finally* planted my okra. No worries though, as okra is a lot like amaranth greens in its heat tolerance. It loves heat. And, since we've been getting a lot of heat lately, I think it will do well.


Yum. Tasty melons coming to a plate near me. Maybe a month from now????? This is a 'charentais' melon, which, if you believe the seed packet, supposedly tastes better than all other melons combined. Go here: http://www.fruitgod.com/allhailthechare.html if you don't believe me.


The newest addition to the urban homestead: our outdoor shower! This is great on a hot day after working outside or riding my bike around. I also shower here in the mornings and at night sometimes, I love hearing the birds and seeing the trees in the breeze while showering, and the cool water is great. I have it set up so that it drains to our banana tree, which looks really awful right now.


Artichoke in bloom, in case you were curious.

Poblano peppers developing nicely...


Bee on a sunflower. The bees LOVE these sunflowers. I have seen at least four different kinds: honey bees, solid black bees, grayish white bees, and tiny black/iridescent bees (not flies!).


Well, that's all for now.
OH! We've been getting about half a gallon a day of milk, which we drink and make into cheese. Yum.