2023 How Does Your Garden Grow?

[Watchman]

Happy New Year! PLEASE DO NOT START A NEW SUBJECT - just reply to this posting and everything will stay in order. Thanks.

2023 is here - its gotta be better than 2022! Grow the food - our lives depend on it.

[Watchman]

2023 has not been better than 2022 - it is worse! After the incredible snowfall of the winter, the summer is hotter beyond belief. I am not using my well or town water to water grass or any other optional task. Let the grass die.

[Toepopper]

Oregon has seen a mild and dry summer up until last week when the temps jumped up to 106 degrees. This heat wave lasted 5 days and it cooked the garden. My green bean plants fried in the sun, cukes too. I had already dug up the potato bed. Tomato plants survived and are producing large, tasty fruit. I planted Big Beef variety and they have done well this year. Corn plants have some fried leaves but are producing ears of corn. Not a drop of rain since last May so the garden and fruit trees must be irrigated. Went out there this morning and picked a half bushel of Satsuma plums. The Italian plums will be ready to harvest in another week. These will be dehydrated into prunes. I have 5 apple trees and they are all loaded with fruit this year. Had to prop up some branches to keep them from snapping. Pears are a bust, only one pear on 2 trees! These pear trees were loaded with blossoms but perhaps the pollen got washed off in the spring to prevent any fruit from happening. Had a bumper crop of red raspberries and am picking black raspberries now. I fill mason jars with them and stick them in the freezer for later use. Lots of man hours delegated to the garden. Its all done by hand, no tractor because the garden is on a hillside where I have dug terraces to create growing beds.

[Watchman]

You sound like fruit did fair - technically tomatoes are a fruit Believe it or not, here in the high plains of Wyoming we have had rain 2 or three times a week but I still did not plant anything. HOWEVER, the Russian rag weed has proliferated so more work pulling them out by the roots. I have not even turned on my well this year.

[Toepopper]

Last night the temperature dropped to 30 degrees, so that's it for this years gardening. I had picked all the green tomato's and have them sitting on the window sills to ripen. Last week I harvested the remaining apples but left about a dozen up in the top of one tree that I could not reach. The next morning I packed a ladder up the hill to the garden to pick them but they were gone! So were all the apples that had dropped onto the ground. A bear had climbed over the fence and devoured them. I know it was a bear because he left me a large deposit of bear doo doo in the garden. He pulled down and snapped several large branches to get those apples that were high up in the tree, so I was forced to prop them back into place and tie wire them so hopefully they will heal and grow back. So far they look good and have not shown any dead leaves. This is the first time I have had bear problems. I have extended 2 raised beds by 16' and must fill them with soil to plant more red raspberries in the spring.