At Summer's End

Well...it's hard to say that summer's ending here, when it seems it never really started. The last week has been gorgeous, but you can't help but feel the arrival of fall imminent in the mornings when the air is crisp and the dew heavy.
I know, I know...we've been terribly lax in posting the goings on here at Three Lil' Acres. Let me see what I can do to bring you up to speed!

Mike warred with the weather to keep the garden alive this year. He had a little more luck with the squash and cukes than last year, but they were still hit really hard by the plagues of various mildews that the cold damp summer encouraged. He had similar problems with the tomatoes and countless were lost to blossom end rot. We're finding that the soil here is rediculously out of balance and will be amending quite thoroughly this fall.

But, we had some successes.

An okra flower. This is an experiment to see if we like them. We're hoping to try some okra pickles!

These are the flowers for Purple Podded Pole Beans. Aren't they pretty? While these will never replace Kenntucky Wonder for flavor, they were still better than storebought and really neat to grow.

Now, one part of the garden that has been a resounding success is the peppers! Mike put in Jimmy Nardello frying peppers(the long red ones), Bull Nose and King of the North Bell Peppers, Czech Black hot peppers and Jalepeno peppers. We're still harvesting steadily on these, and enjoying them thoroughly!

The beans were another success. Mike has put up somewhere close to ten pounds of green beans, and that's beyond what we've been eating fresh. The tomatoes are producing, though not as well as we'd hoped, and the flavor is...well, flat. And that's for ALL of the varieties grown, Blue Beech, Rutgers, Cherokee Purple and Speckled Roman. We're not sure if that's because of the deficient soil or because it didn't get hot enough up here.

On other fronts, our new laying flock is freeranging and should be laying eggs in about a month. It looks like we got one rooster in the bunch - a Barred Rock that has been dubbed "Rocky"(of course). And I still maintain that there's nothing funnier to listen to than an adolescent rooster trying on his crow. Here in a month we'll sell off the extra pullets to bring us down to our 15 hens.

The three laying hens are doing well, though they do enjoy picking on the young pullets. They've been paying their own way(and then some) with egg sales since the spring and I can't wait for the pullets to start laying so we can expand our customer base. I've regular customers at work and a few others that buy eggs occasionally.

So...that's a brief rundown on the place! We'll try to get better about posting(I know...I say that all the time)!