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.