Garden Update for 14 July 2011

Despite the heat our gardens are going great and we have an abundant harvest. We have had to go through the 13 year Ciccada hatch, an abundance of bag worms, tomatoe horn worms, Japanses beetles, drought, high winds and the nay sayers who have told us what we are doing wont work....glad we dont know what we are doing since it seems that ignorance is working for us! Here are a few photos from just today:

The grapes have gone wild this year and the bananas should produce some dessert bananas...kind of crazy but we are having fun with it.

This is the second patch of corn we planted and its about 2 weeks behind the other patch. This is an experimental patch with three different varieities.

The first patch is already tasseling.

We have harvested most of the cabbage but we still have broccoli, brussels sprouts, collard greens, bush beans and horse radish in this plot.

The sweet peas are just about played out but we have been enjoying the harvest. We will replant later in August.

We have had a huge crop of bell peppers, bush beans and tomatoes this year. Tomorrow we make ketchup and we have so many tomatoes we have been selling the excess. I love tomatoes but we are eating them with breakfast, lunch, and dinner and we have been canning them in all kinds of ways.

We should have a real good crop of sweet corn and next year we plan on planting som field corn for the cattle.

We planted castor beans to keep out unwanted pests from the garden and they are growing well. Do they keep out gophers, deer, moles etc? Who knows but we like how they look.

These are some chinese beans and hot peppers we are growing. We have a bumper crop of Jalepenos, Chinese 5 color peppers, cayene peppers, thai chilis and a few others that are hot enough to melt plastic. Everything is better with peppers.

The rainbow Swiss Chard has finally come on strong along with the egg plant. They really started slow and we thought they wouldnt mature but we are harvesting them and enjoying them as an addition to our table.

We have over 30 sunflowers in various stages of maturity.

We enjoy the color and harvest the seeds for the birds. But we also let the seed heads mature on the stalk and we have lots of birds that land on them and eat the seed right off the seed head.

This was the second harvest today...we got about 5 lbs of cucumbers too that are not pictured here.

This is actually ripe and these tomatoes taste very sweet and like what a tomatoe should taste like.

This heirloom variety of tomatoe is kind of ugly on the outside but when you cut into them they are blood red and meaty with a great flavor.

We have had so many banana peppers I am actually kind of sick of them.

And its that time of year where the Crepe Myrtles are in full bloom...the great blizzard of 2011 (said in jest) didnt harm them too much.

Our upper mellon, pumpkin, squash and gourd patch has taken off after a slow start.

Healthy looking plants and full of blossums

These are gourds we will harvest and dry to make decorative bird houses

We just planted these Missouri Wonder pole beans under some cattle panel arbors we made...should be interesting.

What do you do with all the rocks that grow in the Ozarks...make fence posts of course.

Just another view of the first corn patch.

And on top of it all the blackberries are ripening and tomorrow we go into the heat to pick at the break of dawn. We have 9 prolific blackberry patches around the farm and get way more berries than we could ever use.

The Blackeyed peas and sweet potatoes are looking great as well...they seem to like the heat.

And finally, Hollys crazy lettuce patch just keeps producing. We eat off this every evening (salads are great fresh) and this just keeps growing.

Well...we wont starve.