Last year at this time, I was probably freaking out that the tomato plants weren’t yet setting fruit.  I learned to expect ripe tomatoes at 1,700 feet in August, not July.

With that knowledge in mind, everything seems like it’s right on time here at the end of June.  We’ve got baby tomatoes, squash & cucumbers!

And ever-trusty cosmos.

Echeverias in the greenhouse keep on blooming!

And, it looks like we’ll have a decent crop of apples and pears this fall.

Now, on to July!

A running theme of this blog seems to be: “Wow, I can’t believe it’s already XYZ time of year!”  But, that’s exactly how I am always feeling.  We’re now less than a week away from the summer solstice.  It was a quick transition from a cold, rainy May to a pretty brutal heat wave in the first few days of June.  Here’s a peek of what we’ve been up to over the past month or so as we have prepared for our summer garden.

I planted carrot seeds back in December.  This was when I was still in my idealistic “I’m going to grow food year-round!” phase…before the cold, wet winter set in and the last thing I wanted to do was go outside and thin the carrots.  Well, the result was a bunch of carrots that didn’t really grow because the seeds were too close to each other.  We wound up with a few short, stubby, perfectly edible ones.  I’ll probably continue to leave my carrot supply to the professionals…

 

We planted our “summer crops” – tomatoes & squash – on May 26.  This might seem late, but we had to wait until the cold weather was safely out of the forecast.  In an exercise of restraint, we planted 5 tomato plants: Japanese Black Trifele, Sungold, Sweet Millions, Black Krim & Hawaiian Pineapple.  As we did last year, we got our plants from Love Apple Farms.  JBT & Sungold were our best performers last year, so we’re hoping for repeat luck with those plants.

    6-11-2019, Day 15

I started squash & cucumber seeds from Row 7 Seed Company.  Mike and I first learned about them at a Spade & Plow farm dinner last summer, where we were served the most delicious squash, a hybrid between a butternut and Japanese pumpkin.  From Row 7’s website: “We are a seed company grounded in the notion that deliciousness might just change the world. A seed company built by chefs and breeders striving to make ingredients taste better before they ever hit a plate.”  SOLD.

To create irrigated, fenced space dedicated to growing flowers, we put in three new raised beds.  Our friend, Summer, helped us build them and we’re now on our way towards hopefully having a flower garden.  I say “hopefully” because some insect ate all of my zinnia seedlings, and the garden’s success now lies largely in the germination of other types of seeds.  Always learning…

 

On a final note, we’ve had some new additions to our usual range of animal life around here.  A cottontail rabbit has been hanging around, and we’ve named it Bun Bun.  It seems pretty friendly, so something tells us it’s not too long for this world.  On occasion, we also find scorpions in the house or in the yard.  I found this one while I was moving around some piled-up sandstone pavers, and it stayed still long enough for me to get a good photo before it slinked back into a dark crevice.  From top of head to end of tail, it’s probably no more than an inch and a half long.

 

Here’s to a fruitful summer!