Just in from the Garden

You've heard the tales of six foot asparagus plants. This will give you the idea that we are not the best at staying on top of our garden. We are the kind of folks who tend to forget about it for a few days and then come back to discover strange things. I neglected to check on the green bean patch for a week or so and came back to discover gigantic green beans hanging from the plants. Lots of them. But at least they are still edible. The gigantic asparagus plants are not terribly tasty when they grow to such huge proportions. Even the chickens wouldn't touch them. Today we also found a couple of squash that were ready to pick. We left our cherries on the trees just one day too long and came back to discover that everything the birds had not eaten had shriveled up and resembled large raisins on the trees. Very odd. The children pretty much eat the raspberries and black raspberries as soon as they find enough edible ones on the bushes. We were lucky enough to find that the previous owners in this house planted several fruit trees. This year we are benefiting in the form of overflowing peach trees. Sadly, one tree was lost to severe storms this summer but the other 4 are producing wonderfully. The pear trees are also doing great this year but the apple trees are a little sparse. The grape vines also seem to be a little lacking in grapes this year. The walnut trees are still rather immature but are producing a few walnuts here and there. With luck, we will be able to convince the children to quit pulling the walnuts off the trees. I was told "But Mom, you said not to pull the fruit off. That's not fruit." I guess they were listening at least. We are hoping that over the next few years we will actually be able to learn enough about raising out own food and get better about keeping up on things to be able to produce a decent amount of our own food. We did harvest some lettuce and radishes in the beginning of the summer but other than that, we have not done so well. Live and learn I guess. Next summer we'll have to teach the children how to weed properly and see if they do better than their parents do at keeping the weeds under control. The kids are definitely more excited about some of this stuff than we are lately. After learning how maple syrup was made earlier this year, they decided that we need to tap our maple trees to collect the sap to make our own syrup. I'm not quite sure we'll be able to convince them that we don't have enough maple trees to make that worth the effort.