Welcome to this week’s homestead update.
Cabbage and cauliflower harvest
My wife planned fish tacos for dinner. Every time I’ve eaten fish tacos, they came with cabbage on them. So I decided to harvest a small head of cabbage to put in the tacos. This is the first cabbage I’ve ever grown. This is Red Acre cabbage. I planted this and some type of green Asian cabbage, but that didn’t head up. I still have 4 or 5 cabbages down in the garden. Next time I plant them, I will make sure I do it in the Fall.
Garlic scapes
I thought that my garlic was going to send up scapes later in June. I was sure that we were going to be on vacation when they came ready. But we have a couple of weeks before vacation and I picked the first scapes of the year. I was reading a post over on The Walden Effect blog about scapes. Anna pulls the scapes out of the garlic like you can with a blade of grass. I tried that this year. By doing this, I ended up scapes that were a couple of inches longer than if I cut them. I’m going to pull them out for now on.
I finally got around to planting my green beans. I went to a mom & pop hardware store and bought 1/2 pound of Blue Lake bush beans. These are ones that we have planted in the past and we really like them. I planted them in the 2 new garden beds. I like to plant beans or peas as the first crop in any new garden bed. I figure that it will help the be out by sequestering nitrogen into the soil. I usually inoculate the beans, but I didn’t do it this time since these garden beds are over the soil that I’ve planted beans in before. I planted 45 beans in each bed, I’m just putting that out there so I can see how well they germinate. Of course I updated my garden planning spreadsheet so I can keep track of what has grown in which bed.
I don’t have pictures, but 2 of the raspberry plants have a ripening berry on them. These are plants that I just planted this year. I’m not going to allow them to produce many berries, but a few are fine. So far the replacement raspberry plant has not grown. I may have gotten it after it was too dried out. The grapes are growing well. They all have a lot of leaves. I need to get the trellis built so they can climb. The gooseberry plant has a bunch of berries on it. If we find we like them, I’ll plant more gooseberries next year. A couple of years ago, I planted 2 native plums. I put them in the ground and promptly ignored them. They are growing well, but are nowhere near ready to put on any fruit. Finally, the blueberry plant is producing a lot of berries. Usually we don’t get any of the berries, the birds get them all. But this year we will cover the plant with bird netting.
