My two apple trees thanked me in their own quiet way for taking the load off their shoulders, actually their branches.
I thinned out the apples from those two trees and filled seven five-gallon buckets. From those apples, I made up 39 quarts of juice.
I left the remaining apples on the trees at six inches apart. Why am I telling you this? Because many people leave unused fruit on the ground.
The Fall Fair parade will soon be on, and the next three days will be full of excitement, including meeting old friends at the Fall Fair rounds.
I am reluctant to mention any garden work to spoil the fun, but perhaps just a little. The regular jobs around the garden appear to be about weeding.
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As the summer, we hope, will stay on for a while yet, it is an excellent idea to take the garden hoe for a walk to look for weeds, perhaps missed earlier.
It is a reasonably easy job to loosen the weeds and not to deal with them again. Then there is also the watering. In my vegetable garden, watering is essential for the rhubarb and the currant bushes. The latter is producing the buds for next year’s harvest.
This is the time of the year I believe our garden flower show is at its highest.
The carrots and other root crops should have deep watering once a week. The annuals did not get planted until well into the month of June. So even when the day temperatures were ok, the nights were relatively cool and therefore kept them stunted.
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The kale plants, from which I harvested leaves and processed with the dehydrator, are still producing.
The cauliflower is setting nice big heads. I planned to prepare some of the cauliflowers for the freezer, but because I used a seed mixture called “all season,” they do not mature at once.
The red raspberry bushes have now stopped producing, and it will be time to prune off those old canes. This prevents severe disease buildup. Remove small or weak canes as well. That pruning should be done close to the ground. When that is completed, trim the remaining canes to the length of five feet.
Later, when the tree leaves have started to fall, pile all available leaves along the base of the canes two to three feet deep. The leaves will compost and help to retain the moisture for next year.
Raspberry bushes have the fantastic ability to send their roots out several feet from the mother plant. If they are not needed, just cut them off below the ground level. If it has not been done yet, remove all fruits from trees to prevent the pruning crew from arriving, namely the bears. They do such a poor job.
If you have questions or suggestions for topics, please email me at e.jacobsen85@yahoo.com
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