February 13

What do you do with hundreds of pounds of plums?

Here's what the kitchen looks like halfway through capping this year's plum wine and then again after the capping task is finished.  

The plum wine includes juice from our 2007, 2008 and 2009 plums.  We freeze the plums as they are picked and then Lew crushes them once the whole crop is in.  We made plum jam the first few years we lived here, but we switched to wine about five years ago.  

Lew's planning to enter some in the county fair this year.  

 

The plum blossoms are just starting to open.  We're expecting rain later this week.  Hopefully the blossoms will be OK and we'll have a good crop.  Last year we had very few plums.  I think it was because all the rain hit when they were in full bloom.  The flower buds on the peach tree are just starting to show a hint of pink. 

The first spear of asparagus is about 6 inches tall.  It was a surprise to see, but will be a great addition to tonight's dinner!  The parsnips that we planted in September look like they may be ready to harvest too.  

And the first of the sugar snap peas are ready to be picked.  We planted these in early October, after pulling the peppers and pumpkins that had been there before.  We still have 5 pumpkins left.  The lettuce looks great -- and hopefully will continue to grow throughout the season.  We've had trouble with it over the past few rotations.  I think it's white mold Sclerotinia spp. which, according to Pests in the Garden and Small Farms is spread easily by wet soil surfaces.  I'm going to cut back on the water this year and see if that helps.  Otherwise, we'll probably have to move the lettuce out of this bed for a couple of years. 

I sprayed the berries and backyard apple tree last week with the lime-sulfur, starting out with a hose-end sprayer and then switching over to a tank sprayer about halfway through.  Neither method was too successful.  I had used the hose-end applicator with the copper solution a few weeks earlier and it worked like a charm, but the dilution for that application was quite a bit higher than called for with the lime-sulfur -- which was supposed to be 8 ounces per gallon.  The spray was erratic, coming out yellow sometimes and clear other times.  So I dumped the rest of the solution in the tank sprayer and diluted it accordingly, but the sprayer didn't operate very well.  I must not have cleaned it out well enough the last time I used it and some of the solutions crystalized on the pump and in the wand.  It's clean now and ready for the next application - as soon as the berry blossoms open!

Saturday got me out to pull more weeds -- but luckily the soil was pretty wet, so I had to give up.  With this week's expected rain, maybe I'll get a couple of weeks off of weed duty. 

I'm off to look at seeds and decide when and where to plant the vegetables this year.  

Starting in January

This blog will serve as documentation of our gardening efforts this year.  It will help us monitor annual tasks, like pruning, planting and fertilizing and see how those efforts impact our family-sized crops and landscape.

It's our first blogging effort and really is designed to help us remember what we do in the garden and the results of our work.  But suggestions from other gardeners are welcome.

January 2011
1/15/11

Pruned the apple, peach and plum trees

I always get anxious about pruning the fruit trees and am probably don't prune as aggressively as I should.  I'm trying to open up the center of the plum tree so that there's plenty of room for air and sunlight to reach the inside limbs.  But I'm afraid I don't cut the tips of the long branches off far enough.  As a result, I usually have lots of fruit at the ends of the branches.  But all that weight puts a lot of strain on the branches.  We have to prop them up as the fruit matures.  Sometimes that's not good enough, and the branch breaks.  This year, I've taken pictures of the pruned trees before they leaf out and will look at where the fruit develops.  Hopefully that will help with pruning decisions for 2012.


I removed some very large limbs on the apple tree in 2010.  As a result there were lots of small new branches this year.  I cut almost all of them off, especially those that were growing off the main branches.  The tree is shaded by a large oak tree and we also get lots of aphids and a dusty mold (?) on the leaves, so I want to make sure that air can circulate through the branches.

After many years of very few peaches and a tree that didn't ever seem to get any larger, I delved into some of my gardening books to see what was wrong.  I found out that I was supposed to prune 1/3 of the new growth back to the old wood; 1/3 was supposed to get pruned back halfway to the old wood and the last third of the new wood was to be left alone.  The first season after I did that, we got a great crop, for a little tree.  So I keep trying to do the same.  This year, I may have pruned a little too early because there wasn't much new growth.

1/22/11
I spent most of the weekend cleaning up an overgrown coffeeberry bush that "volunteered" in the garden a few years ago and then sprayed the fruit trees, berries and roses with Liqui-Cop.  In the past I've used lime-sulfur fungicides in the spring.  It will be interesting to see if the copper based solution gives us different results.  We usually get a lot of peach leaf curl in the beginning of the season.

We've also had trouble with what I think is the redberry mite on our blackberries.  We get a beautiful crop, but at some point, they stop ripening.  I don't know if the copper solution will help or not.

1/29
A great rain and wonderful visit from Rob were excellent excuses to stay inside for the weekend