It has been tough to keep up with the garden let alone type a blog entry. So the garden didn't do too well this year. Well, at least I got about 30 heads of garlic. We had lots of beans, but many got too big and rotted on the vine. Broccoli was a bust, but I am blaming that on the purple finches for eating it. (Perhaps an unpredicted result of holly tree removal.) I pulled it out today as it didn't seem worth keeping and the aphids were starting to get thick on it.
The big news is that the apple trees are completing their second year in the ground and are, for the most part, thriving. We were in Yellowstone when it came time to protect them from apple maggots, so none of the Akane survived. I only had six honeycrisp on the tree, and only one appears to be maggot free. Although I was able to salvage fruit off four of the other five, so not a total loss. And the one that is maggot free is the size of a softball! (It weighed in at one and three quarters pounds!)
Mirabelle definitely helps out more in the garden, but also reaps many of the rewards. She is always munching on green beans in the yard, and the two of us will sit at a huckleberry or blueberry bush picking and eating for a while in the evenings. (Now that it is late summer that means hanging out at the raspberry patch and picking and eating.)
For the first time ever I purchased cover crop seeds. I'm hoping this will make my new garden beds a little more robust for next season. We can only wait and see.
