We happily harvested our first dozen tomatoes. All were eaten outside as a snack break during choring time. Speaking of choring. We did a big weeding blitz on Friday. Normally, the kids have to do 45 minutes of a garden chore (or complete a garden task, faster than 45 minutes if they hustle). On Friday morning it was drizzly and cool. When I did my garden walk I saw a lot of prickly amaranth and other weeds popping up.
I went back in the house and told the kids that we would skip school work that day and do a big weeding blitz. If they did a good job helping I offered Cafe Rio as a reward for dinner. The weather was perfect for pulling weeds, damp soil and cool overcast skies with a light breeze. We all were outside in the high tunnel and fenced garden from 9:30am to 2:30pm. Baby A slept about 3 hours of that for his usual mid day nap. I assigned a row to each child and they tried to keep pace with each other and were able to talk while working along. They did a great job and we got it all done!
We collected and destroyed our first twenty tomato hornworms this week.
I also noticed some blossom end rot on 4 of my 60 tomato plants. Our soil test showed that the soil needed more calcium and in the spring I added the maximum that it could absorb in a year, plus put some in with each tomato as I planted them. It was still not enough apparently -- since blossom end rot is a sign of calcium deficiency.
I decided to try foliar feeding a mixture of calcium and magnesium. Hopefully, that will give the plants a quick shot of what they need.
I uncovered/un netted most of my fruit trees this week. The top branches show some damage from the weight of the netting.
The bushes that had no netting have a lot of flagging (cicada damage), especially the blueberries. I think they will recover though.
Japanese beetles are out en masse now. I still am offering 5 cents each for kids who want to pick them off, but I also bought a couple traps. My friend told me that she thinks their beetle population is a lot less than last year thanks to serious trapping and I decided it was time for me to get serious. There are doing a lot of damage. We had to change the bag on one of the traps after only 3 days -- there are about a thousand beetles in a full bag like this. It's also nice because it's not poisonous or dangerous to other insects. It's a pheromone scent that just attracts the Japanese beetles.
Brother M is very into bug photography. Here is a spider that we spotted in the kitchen and he followed it around taking pictures.
Our Silver rabbit kits are one month old and just adorable.
A friend called them Beatrix Potter rabbits and now I always think that when I am handling them.
A couple years ago our friends shared some wineberry cuttings with us. We planted a small patch and got our first harvest this year.
They are so delicious. We all agreed that we like them better than raspberries. We will work on expanding our patch over the next couple years.
More bug pictures from brother M. He found a "huge" ant and went out to document it.
Another dead groundhog was delivered to me this week by my garden protector:
This is her third one. She's such a good hunter!
A cool moth that Brother S spied and wanted to document.
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