I've really fallen down on the job on keeping up this blog. I've been spending too much time knitting to the detriment of everything else.
Our garden is going well, so are the weeds. We've had more than usual rain this spring, 4" in this last week, and plenty before then. Other parts of the state have had more rain, plus tornados, hail and high winds. We've been fortunate to miss all of that.
I've been putting brown wood chips on the flower gardens. I'm having my usual trouble of getting things to grow. The soil is not the best and it's shady. On a side note, the two ash trees that produce seeds, in the flower garden and the front yard got shriveled up leaves that turned black when they fell off. My son said it was emerald ash beetle. I looked it up and a fungus does the same thing. Emerald ash borer infected trees usually die top down, and fungus damaged trees grow new normal leaves. Ours regrew leaves so my diagnosis is fungus. The tree in the backyard that doesn't produce seeds, was not affected.
I have picked all the lettuce and spinach and put it in the freezer for smoothies. We've had a couple messes of beets before this and I'm using onions. A few of the yellow onion are already affected by the usual fungus. I intend to pick more at a time than I need and freeze what I don't use.
Today, Jim braved the mud and picked 1 3/4 buckets of beets. I pickled 5 quarts and saved a few to take to my folks. I got a white beet, the second so far.
Jim had butchered 4 chickens and plans to do more tomorrow.
Beet photos:
Beet greens -- not bad
I washed these beets outside, they were so muddy.
