Summer Garden Notes, August 21, 2015

Not much happening in the garden right now.  I've been monitoring my little seedlings in the greenhouse and have even repotted some of them up to the next size pots.  Having some germination problems with a few of the varieties, but I'll get some of each type.

My last check on the elderberry wine revealed that it is starting to clear, with a deeper color and sediment on the bottom.  The 3 week date is Monday, August 24th, and I think I'll move to a 2nd bottle with a siphon and add the campden tablets, then let it sit another few weeks.  I'm just winging it at this point. I'll take a little taste on Monday, too.  Fingers crossed!

 Some of the veggies that I've saved for seeds are drying nicely.  I collected two types of okra seeds this week, the Buck's Big Buck and the Stewart's Zeebest.

John and I had a couple of the little butternut squash from this year's garden the other night.  Delish!!

 The two mulberry trees that we added this year are really growing fast! They started at about 4 inches (tiny little plants) and one of them is about 2-1/2 ft. tall now, the other just a tad smaller.  I know its a long term project, but I'm happy with their progress in only one summer.

Someone tell me what's wrong with my morning glories this year.  At this point of the year, they are usually covered in beautiful blue Heavenly flowers, but this year I'm lucky to get a flower a week.  Usually it looks like this.  Nada. Weird.

The Malabar spinach is sending out these thick vines all over, there must be 6 or 7 of these trailing out from the plant.  I'm picking a few young leaves here and there to use in eggs or salads.  This is an amazing lush plant.

Those little peach trees that we planted in February have grown like wildfire.  They seem to really like where we planted them.  Looking forward to seeing how these will perform next spring.

That's about it from here.  We'll be tilling up the raised bed (John cleaned it out for me the other day, removing the fencing and supports that were in there from the peas this spring) and adding compost to get it ready to plant the garlic.  I'm going to try to get this bed in the first week of September.