Our two Japanese Plum trees out front produced the cutest little plums and I couldn't be more pleased! Every now and again, over the course of a few weeks, I'd test one to see if they were ready since I didn't know exactly when they would be ripe. Boy, they are TART when not ready, hahaha. They were ready for picking the second week of August and are so very delicious! I kept some to eat fresh that week, then halved and froze the rest. I'm hoping we have enough to make some kind of sauce in winter.
Our second planting of carrots are growing well! We can't wait to harvest those soon. We love our home grown carrots!
The pumpkins were growing and growing well!....until the deer came and got them....twice....before we were able to put a fence up. Darn it. We're bummed out, but lesson learned, and next year we will not only put a fence up right away, but plant earlier as well. So no pumpkins for the kids this year; but they looked pretty while growing!
I'm very proud of our strawberries! They have done so well! They started to send off shoots everywhere! I have to laugh because some of the shoots are searching outside the box and making their way down to the barren ground. Where do you think you're going, little strawberry shoot? LOL! We will have to get another box and do some transplanting for sure.
Every day the kids and I go down and we've got at least two strawberries ready to eat. Trust me, they are delicious! I'll be sad when we pick the very last berry of the year.
Our peppers are being finicky. First the plants were growing so well, but now a lot of the peppers themselves are getting wrinkly. We've got one plant that has retained large, firm peppers. The other plants have all gotten yucky. Darn. I will have to do research on this to figure out why. In the mean time, I've plucked a lot of the gross peppers off and chunked them. I'm still hopeful we will get a few good peppers; and next year, after research, we will do better.
Our apricot tree exploded this year! It was so filled with fruit, the limbs were starting to bend and drag on the ground. Over the course of three weeks we picked a bit every day as not all the fruit was ripe at the same time. We picked....and picked.....and picked. We had friends come pick too! In the end, we gave away two boxes and four gallon sized bags of apricots to friends. We currently have six gallon sized bags of halved and frozen apricots in our freezer. Anthony was essential to this process as he was my cutting and freezing buddy! We hope to make apricot preserves or some sort of sauce with them in the winter.
What a great year for apricots! Now we need to take down the fence and let the deer get the rest.....well, let them get the rest of what the birds haven't already gotten!
Our raspberries are now done for the year. I picked the remaining raspberries today. We'll have to trim and prune them for next year.
We are still waiting on our pear tree. It's got a lot of pears coming in and we're excited for them to ripen!
I wonder what next year's garden will be like. Exciting!
With love,
Mama Hauck
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