Lots of distractions away from here of late, but here’s a mini update for the moment.
The pencil cob corn is doing well. The older stalk has developed three ears, but unfortunately I jumped the gun harvesting the first ear. We’ve had some serious rain lately, so I thought as long as the tufts were brown, all was good. Nope. The ear was still developing. Fortunately we still have two more on this stalk. The younger stalk might not have a chance to produce before frost hits.
Speaking of, the pumpkins likely will not make fruit this year. The younger one died off, and the older finally developed a male flower only recently, with what looks to be female buds that may never open.
The volunteer grapes seemed to have survived the transplants, so now we see how they overwinter.
We have bean pods drying out from the rain (though we know they’re dry inside because they rattle), and there’s a few more scarlet runner bean pods we may yet harvest this year.
I’m reading up on what to do about the basil I let flower, and I need to also refresh myself on which herbs will overwinter here with help and which will need to be replaced or hopefully what few seeds I gathered may give us more next year.
After this last rainy spell, some of the wilder garden bits are in a hurry dying off.
A friend from an old house forum was ever so kind as to send me some seeds and a starter I hope will do well.
Unfortunately I have no pictures of any of the above as even my cheaper camera seems to be kaput now. I can’t complain, given what I paid for it. I may have found a shop for the better camera to see if it can be fixed. I have not had time to get there yet.
There is a lot more going on, but unfortunately I have not had time to share it, nor do I have time to share the rest today.
Considering our lack of experience and budget, I’m pretty darn happy with what we got this year from our kitchen garden.  One exception would be the berries. We have some thoughts on why there weren’t as many this year (mostly based on actual observation, but not all.)
I am very glad we held back this year and started small since we knew it would be a huge learning curve for us. We have completely revised our plans for next year’s expanded garden based on a bunch of factor which I hope to get into in detail after the late summer/fall cleanup is done. It still won’t use even a quarter of the yard space, but we have a feeling we’ll be making more mistakes next year too. So we’ve agreed to baby step each year as we learn.
We are constantly revamping our plans for the next year based on past experiences. It’s part of what makes it all so interesting and fun. I haven’t tried berries yet, there are so many things I want to try that I haven’t bothered with yet because we want to move out of the suburbs to a small farm first. Happy Gardening!