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Friday, June 06, 2008

Hot Time In the Garden

It is not yet the solstice and already the weather has gotten HOT. After a long cool wet spring we have suddenly changed to hot humid conditions. Yuck.

I hate working in high heat. I have gotten heat stroke before and since than I do not do well with work if the temps get into the high 80's. So that means I don't do heavy work outside past noon or before 6pm. Eugene will and sometimes gets cranky with me for not going out into the hot noonday sun. I just remind him if I do there is a good likelihood that I will end up in the hospital and be useless for any kind of work for weeks or months. Oh and that he is nuts for working mid day when it is so hot.

Though I might not like the heat the summer crops do and the garden is thriving, especially after the 3+ inches of rain we got between Tuesday and Wednesday. Yesterday evening I helped Eugene put up pea fencing and noted that the garlic scape are ready to harvest on the Hardy German White garlic (and I did get in one bed of scapes so we now have them), the D'Avignon radishes are ready to pick, we have medium sized peas on the English pea plants and lots of flowers on the first planting of Snow and Snap Peas. The yellow beets look wonderful and next week I will be thinning them out so will have baby beet greens.

The strawberries are in full roar-we are getting around 15 pints a day from the 300' of berries that are producing and the strawberries we put in this year are desperately trying to reproduce by putting out runners and flowers. I dutifully pick off both. I will let them go to flower in about 3 weeks but since these are day neutral berries I will continue to take off the runners. By late July we should have double the output in berries and likely will be able to drop the price a little bit.

I will close here as it is almost 6am and the sun is just coming up enough so I can see to harvest leafy greens such as spinach, arugula and baby lettuce before it gets too hot today to do anything.

1 comment:

valereee said...

Lucy, I'm so glad to hear the heavy rains were good news instead of bad! I was worried that much heavy rain would wash the seedlings right out of the fields!

I can't work in hot sun here in humid Ohio, either. I garden in May, in mornings in June, and then for the rest of the summer only if it's unseasonably cool.