Winter's a-coming!

 Whoo-whee, do we have a cold snap on the way!

Not only is nearly seven inches of snow predicted for Friday, but then temperatures absolutely plunge to 1F late Sunday/early Monday. Whee.

To this end, Older Daughter and I have been frantically harvesting the garden. We tucked the potatoes, peppers, and carrots indoors so they won't freeze.

Dried beans are out in the barn. The cold won't affect them.

The cold snap isn't supposed to last long, and with luck all the snow will have melted by Wednesday or Thursday of next week. But wow, temperatures like that this early in the season? Are we in for a hard winter?

Garden update

Despite the cool wet start to summer, the garden has actually done very well this year. Here's a walk-through.

Grapes. They're not ripe yet, of course, but show a lot of promise. There's just nothing prettier than grape vines.

Herbs. I grow parsley, thyme, sage, oregano, basil, rosemary, spearmint, and horseradish. Here's the parsley, starting to go to seed. I'll save some of the seeds for our next homestead, but in the meantime it will seed its own bed for next year's crop.

Oregano.

Spearmint. This is my garden candy. I actually don't care for mint tea in any form, but I simply adore the smell. This lush bed started from one small plant I impulsively bought a few years ago at a local hardware store, and it spread to fill an enormous tire with perfume. (One of the advantages to gardening in tires it it's easy to contain things that like to spread, like mint.)

Rosemary and basil.

Raspberries. The fruit season is past, but I have a freezer full of berries.

Blueberries. It's blueberry season, so I'm picking about every other day.

Peas. Their season is also done, of course, and all the peas are in the freezer awaiting cooler weather so I can can them up. These vines are about ready to pull out.

One of the strawberry beds.

Onions. Goodness I love onions.

Carrots.

Garlic. It's definitely ready to harvest.

Tomatoes. Lots of green fruit, and a few ripe ones.

I planted lots of dry beans this year -- Navy and pinto.

The orchard is doing very well.

Plums.

Apples

Peaches.

(No hazelnuts yet. They take a few years to mature.)

Okay, I guess I'm done with excuses, I really need to go harvest the garlic.

[Bonus feature: Here's an article on the therapeutic power of gardening.]

Buried in beans

At the moment, I am buried in beans. Specifically, dry beans.

I prefer to grow bush beans as opposed to climbing beans, and this year I planted eight tires of Jacob's cattle beans and six tires of calypso beans (both heirloom varieties, of course).

This year the Jacob's cattle beans outdid themselves.

The day I chose to pick them was windy, with rain in the forecast. I decided it wasn't such a bad task to pick a couple thousand rattling bean pods on a blustery day.

Rather than yank up the plants and then later remove the pods, this time I stripped the pods directly from the plants.

I got two bushel baskets of bean pods.

The Jacob's cattle beans were so productive that I held aside one tire's worth of beans to weigh the result.

From that one tire, I got almost 2.25 lbs. of beans, which is actually a decent amount for dry beans.

In theory, then, I should end up with about 18 lbs. of dry beans. We'll see. Shelling is slow work, but it's peaceful. I shell a few beans here and there between other tasks. [Update: Total came to 13.25 lbs. of Jacob's cattle beans. Meh.]

Here's an interesting anomaly: a hole bored into a pod...

...resulting in a hollowed-out bean. Must have been one hungry bug.

Here are the calypso beans. There were not as fruitful this year as in years past.

Since I was late picking these beans, a couple of the pods had already popped...

...and spewed the beans on the dirt.

Fewer tires as well as less production resulted in just one-third of a basket of bean pods.

Most of these beans -- both varieties -- will end up in a ginormous post of end-of-the-world chili.

Garden update

This year, the garden is being unusually productive. We are short on both wasps and chipmunks this summer, so that may have something to do with it. Let's take a brief garden tour.

Corn tires. Make that corn-and-bean tires.

This year we're growing our faithful Yukon Chief corn. This is a short-season dwarf Alaskan variety of corn, ideal for our northern climate. I didn't plant it until very late (June 8) but I can always depend on this hearty little corn to produce.

The ears of this variety aren't huge -- they generally top out at about five inches -- but they're sweet and prolific. I've never found a better heirloom variety for our northern climate than this.

I also planted ten tires of Jacob's cattle beans, a nice dry bush bean.

On the other side of the garden I'm growing more bush beans, this time calypso beans (on the right).

This bean is a prolific producer, and what's nice about dry beans is I don't have to bother harvesting them until after the first frost.

We're also growing lots of onions. My goodness do I love onions. These are red:

I adore red onions but they don't last long, so we also have a lot of yellow onions planted.

I also have a single tire of potato (multiplier) onions.

I don't know what magic is in the air this year, but this is the biggest I've ever seen this variety of onions (they can often be very small). They'll never be as big as slicing onions, but they're still a respectable size.

We have seven tires planted with potatoes.

They're getting big enough to harvest a few, though I won't harvest most of them until after the frost kills the plants.

Strawberry season is about over.

I didn't weigh the harvest this year, but I'm guessing we got 50 lbs. or so over the course of a month.

As always, the raspberries were hugely productive.

In the absence of Younger Daughter's diligent picking (it's her favorite fruit), I invited the neighbor's seven children to come strip the bushes in exchange for half the fruit. It was such fun to have a garden full of kids! They did an admirable job and got a bunch of raspberries to take home.

I'm ridiculously excited about the grapes. Last year they were stripped by the chipmunks, but this year the fruit is hanging heavy.

It's really something to look up and see the bunches hanging down from the trellis, just like you see in photos.

What to do with so many grapes? If we weren't moving, I'd try making wine. As it is, I'll try my hand at making raisins and probably juice the rest.

Pears. Plentiful as always.

These are the hazelnut trees. (Well, bushes.)

However so far the sum total of hazelnuts is ... two. (Nut trees take a while to mature.)

However the rest of the young orchard is producing splendidly, with the exception of one peach tree that died. This peach got girdled by voles during its first year, and I'm impressed it hung on as long as it did. I'll replace it.

The rest of the peaches are gorgeous.

So are the apples.

But it's the plums that are doing best. The fruit is clustered so thickly they're almost like grapes.

I cheated this year and bought tomato plants. What can I say, it was a busy spring.

These are the cantaloupe and watermelon.

The watermelon is a short-season northern heirloom variety originally from Russia called Cream of Saskatchewan.

Baby melon. Believe it or not, it will ripen easily before the first frost.

Cantaloupe.

So far the cantaloupe are almost nonexistent, but I know from experience we'll be swimming in incredibly sweet softball-sized melons by the end of summer.

Garlic. It's almost ready to harvest; I'll wait about a week or so.

Some of the herbs.

We also seem to be having a magical year for blueberries. I've picked 12.5 pounds so far, and have (I'm guessing) at least that much more still to ripen.

I pick about every two or three days, then freeze what I've picked. At the end of the season, I'll can up all the blueberries.

So that's what's growing in the garden at the moment. We're having a hot spell (mid-90sF) so I'm doing my outdoor work before 8 am when it's bearable.