blue jade corn | Thespunmonkey's Blog

The dill is ready, but the pickling cucumbers have barely begun. Oh, well, I’ll add these little fireworks of the garden to several jars of fermented dilly beans over the weekend and sow a new handful of dill seeds into a freshly harvested garlic bed.

Fairy watermelons? Remember these? I forgot to order seeds last summer, so it’s been two years since the season of Epically Adorable Pickles:

That is a pint jar, and we popped those things like candy for many months.

The main excitement this week, besides harvesting green beans and inspecting the drying progress of garlic braids, is in the wee corn patch. This color? Intriguing.

The bees, thankfully, are loving on it, and we hope for full ears of sweet blue kernels (that stay blue when you cook them!), and plenty of them. We have not yet had luck with sweet corn up here on the hill, but these seem promising.

The japanese beetles are a force to be reckoned with this year, however, and I’ve had to pick them out of the silks with tweezers. They have a thing for the corn and tomatillos, especially, with a bit of everything else on the side.

This weekend, the 2nd round of peas and greens will be sown. We are hoping for a fall crop of shelling peas, since the Spring round just sort of fizzled. Nightshades are only just starting to flower, so we have a long way to go this season, but here, I have enough of this for at least one cup of tea:

…and it’s been cool enough the past few days to want it HOT!

Harvesting this week:

Lettuce
Broccoli
Green Beans (tons!)
Nasturtiums
Pak Choi
Misc. Herbs

Sowing 2nd plantings:

Carrots
Gilfeather Turnips
Green Beans
Golden and Chioggia Beets
Shelling, Snap and Snow Peas
Lettuces
Brassicas

No, really. Come on in.

C flagged down the tree-trimmers down the road and graciously offered our driveway as a spot to dump their full load of mulch. A heavy rain storm the other night washed a good deal of it away after our teeny stream jumped its banks, but I have plenty more to reapply. A top item on the agenda for when C can use his body normally again is to dig that stream bed a bit deeper. Thank goodness I had not yet planted out the peppers…their whole bed was gone! So much topsoil…whoosh, down the hill. It’s tricky business, farming on a steeply sloping piece of land. Creating drainage is a constant, evolving issue.

Very similar to the last installment’s garlic photo, but can you spot the difference? I harvested yesterday and ended up with this:

Today, I will fill the two-gallon crock with scapes to ferment, and another generous portion will go into yet more batches of pesto. Beyond that, I’m out of preserving ideas, so will do my best to grill and saute my way through them in the next week or two, and maybe make a compound butter. Any other scape ideas?

Finally, a week of solid rain and these guys took off. Pickling cukes, you will be mine.

1st and 2nd generation broccoli and cauliflower. Almost time to start the seeds for a fall planting…crazy!

This is the blue jade corn. It’s an heirloom variety that only grows to 3 ft. tall, so I’m not sure where we should be by the fourth of July…certainly not knee-high; maybe, mid-shin high? If so, we’re almost there. I am especially excited about this variety because it is a sweet fresh-eating corn that is a deep blue that stays blue when you cook it, unlike those disappointing purple green beans that leach all their beauty when heat is applied.

Speaking of green beans, we went all green all the way Providers this year. Hoping for a really great haul for the freezer. I tried dehydrating them last summer…awful! So many things dried very well, but green beans? It’s like they just can’t rehydrate, even in a soup.

The 2nd planting of onions has gone in. I trenched with a hoe and laid compost in before planting. It’s a very efficient method; two flats out in no time. We ran out of room in the onion bed, so there will be a row keeping the celery company. Celery! I wish I had more than one little row of it, but that one row is looking fantastic. Celery + rain = friends.