The Garden Chronicles - Focus on Flowers - August 24, 2009

Backyard zinnias highlight the south end of the vegetable garden this month.



In the front yard, these newly planted mums are a preview of fall collors due soon.

My carpool buddy gave me a half dozen black-eyed susans from plants that he thinned in his garden this spring. Now they are blooming profusely in my yard, too.

I love tall sunflowers in the summertime. These 11-foot high Moonwalker variety are a treat for goldfinches and bees.

Next up in the garden harvest - Honeycrisp apples are approaching ripeness in another month or so. This will be the first harvest of apples from this tree in many, many years.

A modest harvest of vegetables this weekend. We seem to be a little bit between bumper crops at this time.

Later in the season we will have another round of pears from the other tree. Not as plentiful as the first pear tree, but these will be welcome when they are ready for picking.

The Garden Chronicles - August 21, 2009

The first of two pear trees yielded this much fruit in just one harvest, and we had as many each day for a week. Fruit size was larger than last year's, with fewer imperfections. Our only challenge was to harvest them before a new generation of baby birds pecked at them.

Surprisingly, the grape vines produced enough grapes to make something, either jelly or jam, this weekend. Last year, the birds ate them all before we could harvest them.

The rabbits are still around, but the vegetables are secured behind a fence. I photographed this one eating tall grass in the strawberry bed. They seem to dislike the strawberries, which are now filling in the bed after a few days of good rain.

Late August harvests have been good, helped by five inches of rain in the last week. New bean plants have sprouted, as well as lettuce. Flowers are finally blooming from the seedlings I started in the house last winter. The raspberries are already setting their fall fruit.

The Garden Chronicles - August 9, 2009

This is the last blog entry featuring apricots this season! The phenomenal performance of our trees yielded 20 pints of apricot preserves, a gallon of dried apricots, fresh apricots daily that we ate for three weeks straight off the trees, and this delicious apricot-raspberry pie. Not to mention the shopping bag and a half that we delivered fresh to our local homeless shelter when we ran out of time to preserve more apricots. Alas, apricot production is now curtailed, with just one tree continuing to produce somewhat sour and worm-ridden fruits. Nevertheless, this was one of our most astounding harvests of summer fruit.

I don't how to replicate this pie since I made it without a recipe from leftover apricot preserves and fresh raspberries picked the same morning. It could have been a contender at the fair, but we ate it all ourselves and enjoyed every bite!

We had a nice and reasonable harvest recently, enough to keep us fed this week, of string beans, zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, and pears. And one super-hot pepper that we are afraid to eat. It may go into a large batch of salsa.

It was a lovely day today which we enjoyed completely by taking a 10-mile run through our city and taking a dip at Lake Josephine.

What a wonderful summer we have had! The last few days brought us 4 inches of desperately needed rain, so no sprinkling of the garden today. The rain barrel overflowed, and we drained some of it into another barrel in case more rains come before we can use all the rainwater we have saved.