Homestead weekly update

Welcome to this week’s homestead update.

During this part of the Summer, there isn’t really all that much to do on the homestead.  Sure, there is a lot of harvesting.  But there aren’t seeds being sown. It is too hot to do too much work.  There is a lot of processing the excess harvest.  But over all, it is a time to relax a little.  Soon enough I’ll have to tear up old Summer crops and plant the garlic and onions.

Filling the garden beds

But just because there isn’t a lot of work right now doesn’t mean there is no work to do.  These six beds had peas in them for the Spring.  I meant to get beans into them, but that didn’t happen.  So I decided to double the height of the beds.  The standard size is 6″ tall, I don’t think that’s big enough.  So the other week I knocked these bed extensions together and put them in place.  Then we had horribly hot weather, so I put off filling the beds.  This week it cooled off enough for me to move the compost off of the trailer.  One load of compost filled 3 beds, these 2 and one other in another part of the garden.  I’ll get another load of compost and fill the other beds.

Black cherries?

I’ve been watching this tree since I moved into this house.  In the Summer, it forms these berries.  The birds seem to like them.  But up until now, they were just a nuisance.  I’ve ruined more than one pair of shorts by having these berries fall onto the seat while I’m mowing under this tree.  I wouldn’t notice until the shorts were ruined.  I got to looking online and in my Peterson Guide to Edible Wild Plants and it looks like this is a black cherry tree.  I’ll keep looking to verify that I’m right, then figure out what to do with some black cherries.

Some tomatoes

We went out the other morning and picked a bunch of tomatoes.  The majority of these are Amish paste tomatoes and will be made into tomato paste.  There are a few beef master tomatoes in there as well. I still have a bunch of green ones on the plants.  On the left corner is the first cucumber of the year.  I don’t know why, but we don’t get very many cucumbers on our vines.  I think part of the problem is poor pollination since when we get them, the one end is usually fat and the other shriveled.  I’ll get it figured out sooner or later.

Sweet onions

I also pulled the last of the sweet onions.  These should have been pulled several weeks ago, but I just now got around to it. I did have to pull out a lot of weeds to find the onions.  Most of them are medium sized, but there are a few that got really large.  These three onions were huge.  That’s a quarter in the foreground to give the shot some scale.  I like these onions, these are the ones that I bought from Walmart.  I will certainly plant these again next year.

That’s what went on around my homestead this week.