Promising

Despite my lack of attention to the garden and surrounding areas, things still look promising around here. I am feeling much, much better these days, but I did have a little bit of a relapse yesterday after being stuck in the car not being able to stretch my hip out and extra walking around the stores running errands. I paid for that with more hip and back pain.





Half of my rhubarb is doing pretty good. I've had better years, but with the chickens pecking the young shoots as soon as they come out of the ground, I'm happy with what I can get. I hope once the chickens are fenced in, the other half of my rhubarb patch will bounce back.

My cherry tree is so-so. It's over-shadowed by two large dogwoods and they need to be cut down. Previous owners went crazy with the dogwoods and our property has many of them. I can definitely stand to lose a few. I'm out of my cherry-almond jam (so good!) so I'm looking forward to picking cherries at the local orchard down the road from us. I know for a fact that this lone cherry tree won't give us enough for even one pint of jam.

The mulberries!! This was taken last week and since then, I have a tree with ripe mulberries that I can see from my bedroom window! It's a recently discovered tree, with all the branches are high up, so those berries are for the birds. Meanwhile, right around the corner from the ripe mulberry tree, the one closest to the house is a.l.m.o.s.t. there! Maybe in a week or two. Mulberry trees by the driveway and in the garden area are soon ripe, too.

My cousin and a friend both want to learn to make and can mulberry jam, so I'm going to invite them up as soon as they are ripe and plenty of berries come down daily. They bring their own jars and I'll provide the rest. Will be nice to have company in the kitchen when making jam!

I See Rhubarb!

I see several rhubarb dishes on the table in the near future! Yum!

I love how even though I have neglected the rhubarb patch and the weed blocker fabric is all askew, the rhubarb will come up year after year, regardless. I had planned to move them to a different location, but too late for that now. I'll spread some compost over it and baby it a little and see if it does better this year than the previous years. I planted them in a sunny location, and they really do better in half sun / half shade. I have had nowhere near the amount of rhubarb I used to harvest at the old house before I moved them here and last year I made only a few pies and desserts with none extra to freeze or make jam with.

Stay tuned for rhubarb recipes!