Farm Blog, Summer 2016
June 21 - September 20
June
Beg a in picking sweet cherries on the 15th and sour cherries on the 21st. The apricots began to ripen by the 28th. This year is a good one for fruit, since we didn't have a late freeze. First time since 2012. Veggies that the quail didn't eat are doing well. This includes collards, chard, peppers, eggplants, squash and tomatoes. They also didn't seem to like to eat the arugula which are eaten by the beetles.
August
Picked yellow and green zucchini, cherry tomatoes, eggplants and chard from the garden. Picked all of the peaches on the 11th because the birds began to eat them. All of them were not completely ripe, so I put them in paper bags to ripen them. On the 13th I picked the Greengage plums to make into jam and chutney.
September
This was the best late summer that we have ever had. Plenty of monsoon rain! Continued to pick everything from the garden as last month plus shishito and padron peppers. The zucchini out grew their plots and trailed into the paths. Picked an abundance of Damson plums and put them up as preserves. The other fruit that was damaged by the early hail storm did not do very well. Apples, pears and peaches were all damaged and failed to produce much if any edible fruit.
Only lost 2 lavender plants during the summer. The remainder of them are doing very well going into dormancy.
The bees are doing well in the one Langstroth hive. I gave them some 2-1 sugar water food and put on one more shallow super. The hive going into fall has one deep, one medium and 2 shallow supers. They will have all of the asters and sunflowers until the first frost next month.