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.

The completion of our orchard

If you recall, we planted our baby orchard a year ago in May: Four each of apples and peaches, and two plum trees. We also planted two walnut trees in another location. These all supplement the two already-mature pears we have in the garden.

While growing fruit trees in giganto-tractor tires is completely experimental, so far we're delighted by the results. The young trees are strong, healthy, and bearing fruit.

We had left room in the orchard for additional trees or other perennials. After some discussion, we decided to plant hazelnuts. Why hazelnuts? Because these are only one of two types of nuts that grow in our region (the other being walnuts), and unlike walnuts, they bear much sooner (walnuts can take up to 15 years to yield).

So last fall, we ordered four hazelnut trees through our feed store: three Yamhill (resistant to eastern filbert blight) and one Sacajawea as a pollinator (two different varieties are needed for cross-pollination). They arrived in early April and we brought them home.

But we weren't ready to plant them yet. We needed to prep the tires and holes, so until that happened, we tucked the four pots of trees in the barn through the late spring. In late May when the weather improved, we carted them into the garden so they could get sunshine and be more easily watered.

But of course, the wind instantly knocked them over.

So I tucked them against a fence facing the prevailing wind direction, and tied them in place.

And there they waited, patiently, until such time as we could prep their permanent location.

In early July, we assembled the biggest tires we had, and Don cut off the top and bottom sidewalls.

Using one of the sidewalls as a marker, he marked out where to dig the holes to plant the trees.

Then, using the tractor auger, he augered three holes in each location, which then "joined" to make one large hole in the heavy clay dirt.

He then churned the clay-y dirt with sand to loosen it, and backfilled the holes.

In late July, he maneuvered the tires into place over the holes.

We pushed and pulled and got them as close into a tidy alignment as we could.

Don mixed up the filler for the tires: a combination of topsoil, compost, and sand. Then he filled each tire to the brim.

At last it was moving day for the trees. Because the temperatures have been so hot here, we've only been doing outdoor work in the very early morning, so we took things step by step over a few days. The first step was getting the trees over to the tires.

Within an hour, the wind had knocked the trees over, so I carted them immediately outside the fence, the logic being the prevailing wind direction would just push them into the fence and they wouldn't get knocked over.

This worked fine until this morning, when we went to actually plant the trees. Wouldn't you know it, today we have wind coming from a contrary direction.

In each tire, we dug a hole...

...then cut the cardboard-ish pot almost off the tree before settling it in the hole. (I know the pot is designed to be planted with the tree, but for us it's just as easy to cut it off.)

We repeated this with all four trees, and soon they were all planted.

Don put three screws in each tire and then anchored each tree with baling twine. (This is temporary -- we'll collar them with rubber for permanent anchors.)

Although they came as a tree, hazelnuts sprout constantly from the roots and quickly form shrubs. According to one source, "Growing hazelnuts as a shrub can make it easier to hand-harvest nuts as soon as they ripen, as they are ripe nearly a month before they drop." So -- we won't trim back the sprouts.

The last thing I did was paint the variety on the outside of each tire, so we know which is which.

As far as we can tell, this completes our orchard. There are no other trees we feel a particular interest in planting. We like the idea of growing as many perennials as possible on our homestead (less work!), and nuts are an excellent source of protein.