Production in the Garden

The garden is producing beautifully - both veggies and weeds! Monty has constructed a chicken run for me to place in between rows in the garden. I'll put 2 or 3 chickens under the bottomless structure out there and let them scratch and peck freely within the 4-ft by 2-ft area. This should take care of some bugs and lots of weeds.

I'm getting 1/2 to a full pound of yard-long green beans every day! They are delicious and SO tender. I'm going to have to begin freezing them now that they are getting ahead of our daily eating.

Contender green beans are petering out, but I'm doing some succession planting and we'll see how they do this late in the season.

I've pulled enough purple-hull cowpeas to (shelled) fill a 2-cup mixing bowl, but I'm combining those with the quarts we're shelling out of the free pea-hulls from the feed store and there'll be enough to eat and freeze. I've planted more peas between the first ones and around the old cabbage where I finally gave up on cabbage and planted Swiss chard.

Yellow squash production is slowing down to maybe 2 - 3 pounds a week with only the rare zucchini, so I've done an additional planting of squash seeds between the plants that are slowing down. There is plenty of space, and I'll pull these older vines when the new ones need room.

I harvested 2 acorn squash and 3 butternuts last night. They are smallish, but the color was right and I didn't want them dangling around to possibly rot in the heat. I baked them last night and the KIDS like them!! Shocks me to no end what they'll eat from the garden that they'd never eat from the store.

I'm going to plant some Egyptian walking onions from my MIL, more Swiss Chard (wish I had bed after bed full of that stuff) in the next couple of days.

Tomatoes? I've got tons of big lucious tomatoes that aren't turning red yet. I have lots of cherry tomatoes, too. My first planting of romas got choked by an untimely liberal application of leaf-mold mulch, but the most recent planting is doing well with little shoots about 2 inches up now. I think we'll be making lots of salsa and sauce in July and August. I'm going to find a source for dead-ripe peaches (this is Clanton after all) and try a peach salsa recipe.

So far, we've harvested 44.25 lbs of produce and that doesn't include the 10 or so cucumbers that have come in one at a time or the little cherry tomatoes that we wash and eat without bringing in the house.