The harvest gears up

 One day last week, I saw an animal in the field after supper. At first, I thought it was a fox, but Terry said it was too big. In fact, it was a coyote. Terry gave me a minute to take some pictures and then went out to shoo it away from the chickens. You can’t be too careful.

Coyote in the field

The meat chickens are nearly as big as we want them to be. It’s been hot the last few days. When I went out to get this picture, they were all sitting in front of the fan in the coop, panting. I ordered straight run chicks this year, which means that they aren’t sexed. Hilda always ordered all males because they grow faster, and she wanted the best value for her money. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: no one needs a seven-pound chicken. When I ordered the straight run, I suspected that there would be a lot of females, assuming most growers shared Hilda’s attitude. It’s hard to get a good count of moving chicks, but it seems that we are close to the predicted 50/50 split. The females are lighter in color and have less of a comb.

The hen is the lighter brown chicken with small comb on the left. The other three are roosters 

The pullets are still far from full grown. I hope they will be all right when we put them in with the hens. Six of the hens will be butchered with the meat chickens, and it’s best to introduce the pullets to the remaining hens at the same time that the old hens are removed. In this way, the new pecking order is established with all the players at the same time.

Four of the pullets. The two on the right are Americauna;
 there are actually two Dominiques behind them, dust bathing

A good thing about having chickens is that you never have to feel bad when you let cucumbers or zucchini get too big. This video is evidence that an overgrown cucumber is the Best Thing Ever!

I dug up another two potato plants. These potatoes were even better than the 4^th of July batch. It is looking like a good potato year.

Second harvest of two potato plants

The beans in the garden have started producing this week. And how! I am a chronic over-planter. I bit the bullet and removed all the beans except that 12’ tall pole bean from the high tunnel. This picture is the first harvest from the garden. It was about 4 pounds of beans, which together with what I froze from the high tunnel is enough to meet our needs for the year. A rational person would rip the rest of the beans out right now. Instead, I am plotting ways of foisting them on friends and acquaintances.

First picking of green beans

I ordered seeds of a pepper specifically bred for greenhouse production. It’s called “Sprinter”, and it is producing some lovely, huge peppers. This one weighs in at 12 oz. and is destined for beef and peppers tonight, one of my favorite meals dating back to childhood.

A perfect pepper weighing in at 12 oz.

My big news is that I took the money I saved when I never went anywhere during the pandemic and bought a Chevy Bolt. I’m keeping my Volt in case I want to do an extended road trip before there is enough charging infrastructure to make me comfortable driving without gas back-up. I will no longer need to use gas on my trips to Elgin! 

Driving on sunshine, baby!

Midsummer harvest

 Terry and I have different approaches to weeding. I like to keep up with it. I love looking down a weed-free row when I’m done. Terry tends to put it off. In his defense, he also has to keep the weeds out of his nursery trees. Not being able to bear tossing out the onion seedlings that didn’t fit in the north garden, he planted two rows in the south garden. At present the purslane has gotten so bad that he can’t weed the onions without pulling them up with the purslane. It's okay. We won't be short.

My onions

Terry's onions

I know that purslane is edible because in c. 1970, when Euell Gibbons’ classic, Stalking the Wild Asparagus came out in paperback, I made purslane pickles. They were very, very salty. Having all this purslane on hand, I thought I’d give it another try. It’s supposed to be a super food. Gibbons described the purslane as “mucilaginous,” which, with synonyms of “snotty” and/or “slimy,” does not make it sound appealing. However, I loved okra and tomatoes when I was a kid, and okra is also mucilaginous. I thought I’d sauté my purslane with a tomato. Like so many greens, it cooked down to nothing. It tasted like tomatoes and did not seem to noticeably thicken the juice.

Purslane and tomatoes

“I like it better than kale,” I told Terry.

“That’s not saying much,” he replied.

The beans and peas in the garden are growing rapidly. I expect to be harvesting in a week or so, depending on the weather. It’s pretty hot today, and that will speed things along.

Left to right, peppers and cabbage, beans, peas, and onions

All of the beans I planted in the high tunnel were supposed to be a variety of stringless bush beans called Slenderette. Another variety clearly contaminated the package. For one thing, it is a pole bean that has reached the purlin ten feet off the ground.

One of these beans is not like the others

Also, the pods are flat rather than round and stringy. If I was more practical and had no sense of adventure, I would have pulled the plant, but I trellised it instead. I’ve given up harvesting it for green beans because of the strings, but the dry bean should be a white navy-type bean.

Slenderette, below; unknown interloper above

I had to pull out one of the trellised cucumbers in the high tunnel because it was collapsing under its own weight. Also we are awash with cucumbers at the moment. I harvested over 80 cucumbers from the pulled vine. I kept some of the little ones for sweet pickles and the medium for dill pickles.

So many cucumbers!

All the carrots in the high tunnel were ready for harvest. I’m not sure why carrots develop two roots. I suspect it is two carrots growing together, but have no way of proving it. They do take on interesting shapes.

Carrot in Repose

Two of the beds in the high tunnel have an interesting mushroom growing in them. I don’t know what it is, but it only lasts a few days.

Unknown mushroom, yesterday

Unknown mushroom, today. Tomorrow it will be gone.

I pulled the garlic, which is now hanging in the rain shelter to dry.

Drying the garlic

Most of the tomatoes are doing well. A new variety that I tried this year was Siletz Early. It is early, I’ll give it that. I’ve gotten three small tomatoes from it so far. There is not much else to recommend it. It looks pathetic.

Sad, sad Siletz Early

The cantaloupe is finally starting to grow. It seems late this year, but it was hot and dry when we planted. Terry thinks that none of the melons/pumpkins/squash like the heat much.

Cantaloupe

The corn is coming along. Note that on this ear the silks are drying up.

Silks on this ear of now-pollinated corn are drying up

I have noticed that some of the chicks shelter through the heat of the day in the landscape-cloth-covered dog kennel in the middle of the run. It must be a hundred degrees in there. You would think they would fry their itty brains! Most of them are in the coop sitting in front of the fan.

It's shady, sure, but it's got to be hot in there!

I took a walk looking for pollinators yesterday morning. There were a lot of them, but they moved too fast for a photo. There was a skipper on the bee balm.

Skipper on the bee balm

Terry doesn’t mow part of the field where there are many milkweeds. I looked for monarch caterpillars, but found none. 

Milkweeds

There were a lot of red milkweed beetles, though.

Red milkweed beetle

And a few monarchs.

Monarch on milkweed

This monarch kindly posed for me on a purple coneflower this morning.

Monarch on purple coneflower

 That's all for this week! Stay cool.

Bald eagle and corn sex

 It’s fun to have early vegetables from the high tunnel, but it keeps me busy. Here’s a picture of the harvest from June 30. Normally, I don’t harvest much before the middle of July. The bin has carrots, peas, green beans, zucchini, and cucumbers. Even this early, there’s more than we can possibly eat.

High tunnel harvest on June 30

My pollinator garden is doing very well. I did spread more seeds this year, but because of the drought, they have just recently germinated. All of these plants are either perennials or seeded themselves from last year.

My pollinator garden

Most of the coreopsis are yellow or yellow with a brownish red center. There is one individual with all red petals. Probably a mutation. I wonder how it will impact pollination. I’ll never know.

An unusual all-red coreopsis in front of the more common yellow-with-red-center

Terry called my attention to an iridescent green bee on one of the purple coneflowers. The pollen sacs on its legs were stuffed to the max. If my research is correct, it is a rather common green sweat bee (because they are related to sweat bees, but are actually uninterested in sweat) of the genus Agapostemon.

Iridescent green bee on a coneflower

I was pleased that two plants gave me plenty of potatoes for the traditional 4^th of July new potato salad. The red potatoes are so vibrantly magenta when they first come out of the ground. Digging potatoes is like finding buried treasure.

Lovely new potatoes

On July 6, I harvested the first Early Girl tomatoes from the high tunnel. That is at least three weeks ahead of our usual schedule. I’m getting some cherry tomatoes from the high tunnel also.

Ripening Early Girls

Here's one of my two watermelons.

The melons are getting big

And with all those high tunnel cucumbers, it wasn’t long before I lugged out the canner and made pickles. I’m going to try to only put up as much as we might reasonably eat. Three quarts is probably enough already, but I imagine I’ll be tempted to put up more. The outside cucumbers have just started to blossom. God knows what we’ll do with all those.

My first three quarts of pickles for this year

The corn is flowering. Here are some fascinating facts about corn sex that you might not know. First, the tassels are the pollen producing (boy) parts. Each little anther hanging down releases pollen.

Tassels with the anthers hanging down

The pollen needs to land on the silks of the ear (the girl parts) in order for the kernel to develop. Each kernel has its own silk. Think about that for a minute. If you have never grown corn, you have probably not seen the luxurious silks that emerge from the ear. They are a bit sticky, the better to catch the pollen. After pollination is completed, the silks dry up into the form that you’ve seen before. Next time you have corn, look for the silk scar. It’s a tiny bump on the kernel at the opposite end of the cob scar, which not surprisingly is where the kernel attaches to the cob. Duh. If a particular silk does not get pollinated, there will be no kernel. If you see a gap in the row of corn, that’s what happened.

Long, flowing tresses of silk

Even though the corn is far from ripe, the deer thought it would be a good place to forage. Terry and I put up the fence around it yesterday. We like seeing the deer, but wish they would stick to eating the grass in the field. Or, as Terry pointed out, “They could eat all the field corn they wanted across the street, but NOOO!”

A well-behaved doe foraging in the field where she belongs

During supper one day last week, Terry mentioned that he had seen a crow and a vulture in the middle of the field that afternoon. He hadn’t had a chance to go see what they were picking at. The next day I saw a big black bird in the middle of the field and thought it was probably the vulture. Until it lifted its head. A bald eagle! Don’t see those every day.

A bald eagle in the back yard

Terry investigated and found it to be a raccoon “that stinks to high heaven.”

The eagle came back the next day, and I also saw a fox in the same area at dusk. When Terry checked on the carcass again, something had dragged it away. All gone.

The ancestor of the domestic chicken is the red junglefowl. You can take the fowl out of the jungle, but the chickens still don’t like to be out in the open. Here is what the chick run looks like in the middle of a sunny afternoon.

The run is absolutely deserted in the middle of the day

But where are the chicks at dusk when it’s time for them to roost so I can go to bed?

Answer: Everywhere other than in the coop

I’ve gotten pretty good at herding them in with the walking stick that Hilda left in the coop for that purpose. No one has escaped the fence yet, although they are clearly able to fly up to roost on the windbreak by the door.

For the first several years we lived here, the orioles left during the last week of June. Here it is July 13, and I have purchased the last jar of grape jelly for the year three times. The orioles are still abundant. Here’s a fight between a juvenile male orchard oriole (on the left) and a male Baltimore oriole (right). The Baltimore oriole won.

Juvenile orchard oriole confronts, and loses to, an adult Baltimore oriole

We see many fledglings as well, so it might be that there will be four “last jars” of grape jelly this year.

Baltimore oriole fledgling, still looking mottled

 It won’t go to waste, however, because just about every other bird we have has learned to eat grape jelly, including a red-bellied woodpecker that has an enormous beak that could easily put out an eye. He has no challengers when he wants to eat jelly.