The blueberry cuttings are starting to look a bit questionable, but I'll keep watching and watering. The lavender and hydrangea cuttings seem much happier. I'll be taking cuttings of the currant bushes as soon as I locate my bottle of rooting powder (?!) It's probably somewhere with my spare set of pruners and the gardening gloves I can't find...
In the hoop house, everything is growing like crazy - though more with leaves than with the vegetables I'm waiting for. It's true that a lot of gardeners judge their gardens by when they have their first tomatoes, and I'm running behind. The neighbour has already been eating ripe, red fruit - from tomato plants that I gave her (which makes my impatience slightly worse). Her plants are falling over with fruit, while mine are just showing a few per plant. She dug up the side lawn and plopped them into the ground, while I added rabbit manure, topsoil eggshells and manure tea! It just goes to show that you can't account for all the circumstances in your garden. Heading into week 6 without rain certainly isn't helping. This is one of the Siletz plants I have my eye on:
Oh well - there's still weeks to go for the tomato season. Just as I'm not terribly sad to see the blueberry bushes finishing up their production for the year, we'll soon be harvesting tomatoes daily in the heat, and wondering what to do with them all. At least I'm starting to harvest the zucchini and cucumber crops, and the bees are helping with that. I've never managed to have enough cucumbers ripen at once before, for making my pickles - I've bought my supply at the farmer's market. This year may be the first year in my gardening history that cucumbers - and homegrown dill - are ready for pickling in adequate quantities at the same time.
The leaves of the shallots and multiplier onions started to fall over, so I finished harvesting them this morning. They'll cure outside in the sun for a couple of days, then go into the carport to finish drying with the garlic bulbs (which have already had a preliminary cleaning). The biggest of these onions will be planted back into a freshly-prepared garden bed (after the wheat is harvested) at the same time as we put out our garlic in October.
The bed that was hosting our garlic plants and peas is now home to chard, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, pole beans and some peas planted for harvesting as pea tips. The transplants were getting a bit root-bound waiting for more space, so I've got my fingers crossed that they will establish themselves and not bolt to seed. The Jerusalem artichoke in the background is flourishing - and escaping into my pathways as it tries to expand its territory. That's fine, as the rabbits are happy to eat the invaders.
Celine is still sitting on 'her' eggs, so we're counting down another five or six days and hoping to hear the peeps of a few baby chicks. I'm prepared to house mother hen and her little ones in a dog kennel and covered run, if the other adult hens seem intent on interfering or harming them.
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