First Salsa and Plum Harvest

Yep, it's officially summer. Ricky C made the first batch of salsa.

The tomatoes at the farm aren't quite ripe yet, except for the cherries, which have been producing nicely. But we'll get some very soon. The Cosmonaut Volkovs are taller than I am, and just laden with fruit. If they're as tasty as they're supposed to be, that one will be a keeper. The tangies in our backyard are ripening, and we ate a couple last week. In our backyard, the Ananas Noire and the Hillbillies look to be good producers. I'm not impressed with the Beaverlodge.

And I'll grow these Indigo Rose tomatoes forevermore. They are even more purple-black than they were a week ago.

The plums are all coming ripe. They are juicy and delicious. I thinned a lot, but I will thin even more next year. Pruning the trees small has been a huge help in harvesting, and we still get PLENTY of fruit.

 I even made jam out of some! It's great on zucchini pancakes.

We're getting plenty of zucchini also. I make pancakes a couple of times a week. Delina is having way too much fun with that zucch!

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Weather Note
The weather has been nuts. I talked about the 50-some degree temperature swing two weeks ago, from 111 to 55. Since then, we had about a week of absolutely perfect weather, then it rained, and now it's getting hot again. And all throughout, it's been windy/breezy. Now it's supposed to hit 106 this weekend.
In June, we don't usually expect to see clouds on the new moon...

And clouds on the full moon. This particular full moon was at a close part of its orbit, and it looked very big and close.

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I've been getting a good bunch of food out of our backyard also. I harvested all the garlic already, but I'm still pulling out onions. I'm justifiably proud of this torpedo onion.

It's bigger than my hand.

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What We're Eating
On the 15th, I went out back and picked this...

Added homemade bread, fresh eggs from our pastured chickens, and new potatoes from R&C's yard...

And we ate this... yum!

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We seem to be having better luck with melons this year. This is an American melon (I think)

These are honeydew and galia melons from the Renee's collection.

We're getting lots of fruits on the pumpkins too, especially the Winter Luxury, Red Kuri, and Baby Blue Hubbard.

The beans for drying are flowering and setting beans on.

And the borage is doing a fine job of attracting pollinators.

The whole farm looks lush and inviting.

Under bright but cloudy skies.

And if it's summer, it's time to plant for fall! So I started the very first fall plants on 6-20, one day before the solstice.

Flat A, two rows each: broccoli: Belstar, Packman, Deccico; Chinese cabbage: Rubicon, Soloist.

First Tomato

We don't actually rush to have the first tomatoes in town. Our spring garden is usually still producing, and anyway, tomatoes do better if planted after the summer weather has really settled in. Still, we're proud to have harvested our first tomato on June 6th.

We got the first set of zucchinis before Memorial Day. This is one of each type.

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Weather Note
Ok, we know it always rains on the fair, and this year held true to that.

Only one week later, 6-8, it hit 111 degrees! Yikes! We were really looking forward to Kim's party, but it was too hot to even leave the house. Then yesterday, 6-10, it rained hard, with thunder and lightning. At midday, the temp was 55 degrees...only HALF of what it was two days before.

It was great to get some more rain, especially after that crushing heat. One thing about a 111-degree day... it makes you grateful for a mere 95 degrees. The rest of this week is supposed to be mid 80s.
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Catherine decided to upgrade the tree bases a bit more. She noticed that portulaca did well in similar conditions, so she got and planted some.

Rick was on vacation last week, and so was Nancy. Nancy went for a couple of walks with us. What a pretty place to walk!

She thought this view of One Mile looked like an impressionist painting.

She also spotted this turtle, sunning himself on a log.

We went to a cooking demo at The Galley, and ended up buying Quesaleras. You fill the holes with cheese and other stuff and bake it.

Melty cheese is always good. It's festive too, and I think I'll use it for Rock Band a lot.

Rick and I took the tour at Sierra Nevada. We hadn't been in a long time, and it's a lot different now. It was a lot of fun (except for the catwalk part), and there was tasting at the end.

They provided a good selection of wildly different beers.

Rick also made great progress on the treadle feeder. Here is the box part. He's also made the step mechanism, and he's just finishing up the finer points now.

At the farm, the plums and apricots are ripening. It's nice that the apricot limb fruits at a different time from the apricot tree, but sadly, it looks like it's the same time as the plums. So we're going to have to get ready for a big fruit deluge.

The garden in our backyard is looking good. The beans are up well, and I harvested all the garlic.

The tomatoes are huge too. I'm using the stake and rope system here, and it is working well.

I got some nice big heads of garlic, although I think I harvested a little late. And I'll have to keep at least half of what we got as seed stock for next year.

The Indigo Rose tomatoes are really fun.

The Tumbling Tigers are another fun tomato. The plants are tiny, as you can see in this shot with my foot for scale.

The fruits are tiny too, but the plant is just loaded.

I've got serranos setting up in the backyard, and lots of every kind of pepper setting at the farm.

This is the little Honduran Conical. It isn't setting yet, but it's grown a lot.

I held off transplanting the Winter Luxury Pie pumpkins until the weather cooled a bit. I took this picture yesterday, and I swear they are twice as big today.