Much more has been happening in the garden than this poorly maintained journal would suggest. Peas, and a host of lettuce, the mesclun patch, mache and kale have come and gone. The asparagus showed a modest improvement in spear growth over last year, but still not enough to begin harvesting.
In the orchard, the Hudson’s Golden Gem has put on a promising looking crop, and the Ashmead’s Kernel is back from its biennial break, though with fairly tiny fruit. I was a bit lax in thinning after fruit set, but did get to them early enough that there was no June drop. We shall see how the apple harvest fares. The Italian Golden Honey Fig, while suffering from some mysterious brown spotting on its leaves (Oregon figs aren’t supposed to be suceptible to rust), has a nice breba crop about to ripen, and looks to be setting a decent main season crop on its new growth. It’s shaping up into a handsome candelabra-shaped tree. The medlar on the other hand hasn’t set much fruit this year — it dropped quite a lot — and that which it has set has split, by and large. It’s just a two year old tree, however, so one oughtn’t expect much from it. I do believe there will be enough fruit remaining that we’ll have some to blett this autumn. Perhaps an unexpected Thanksgiving surprise.
Mixed success in the vinyard. The vines, in their third year (I purchased year-old stock last year when planting), are growing nicely, but the Zinfandel is again beset by a mildew of some sort on the underside of its leaves. The vines are vigorous, and I didn’t thin for fruit, so there’s a crazy fruitset. The Buffalo grape is, if anything, more vigorous, but seems not to suffer from the mildew problems of the Zin. At the rate they’re growing, their scaffolds will be established this year, meaning that from here on out I’ve got some tricky pruning to look forward to.
The summer vegetables are doing their thing now. The squash (an eight-ball green zucchini and a butterstick yellow) are already setting fruit, and the Roma (The OSU-bred Oroma) has some green tomatoes on it. The pole beans — from saved seed and planted rather late, I’m afraid — are just now getting tall enough to latch onto their strings. Yardlong beans were planted earlier, and are already vining halfway up their A-frame. The potted Mexican Sour Gherkin, on the other hand, has already topped its cage and begun to sprawl, with some very tiny fruit set already. Oh, and the potted Bearss Lime looks as though it may actually be mature enough to bring a few to ripeness this year!
Several weeks back (let’s say around the beginning of June) I planted a Tigger melon, but it’s not really taken off yet. Surprising, given the long hot days we’ve been enjoying of late. Wanting to get my melon on, and having some spare space, I planted some Blacktail Mountain watermelon transplants on June 20th (or there ’bouts… must keep better notes). It’s a very short season melon — at 76 days one of the shortest — so I have hopes that we’ll have a nice warm early September, giving it time to mature.
I’ve just today put in a patch of Golden Beets in a 4″ x 4″ grid on the northwest peninsula. Also, a row of Swiss Chard (Bright Lights, a multi-colored variety) on the north side of the northeast peninsula. I’ll drop a second row to the south of it in a couple of weeks if I’m to be a good succession planter.
