This is the sun three mornings ago. It was much redder in person. We had significant smoke here from the B.C. fires. My breathing is worse now so may be related. Thankfully the smoke has cleared (at least for the moment). I do not like all of the red sunset photos recently because to me they represent dead trees and likely other forms of life fried by the catastrophic fires.
This morning I wanted to show how tall our corn is. We have never had such tall corn before. Please try not to focus on me in the photo as it is not very flattering in my barn clothes, but I wanted to give height perspective ( ai roughly 5′ 7″). No ripe corn yet and some of the stalks have fallen over. I am worried that the sprinkler can’t really water it all.
And yesterday Tom noticed that all of our carrots were gone. He thought maybe I had harvested it. But I hadn’t. Every last carrot is gone, but the tops are still there. I am suspecting burrowing rodents have infiltrated our hot tub planter. It is so incredibly frustrating as that was a lot of work keeping those carrots weeded. We decided to pull the parsnips in the same planter before they were eaten too. The pigs enjoyed their tops.
The pole beans continue to die. I think it is rot from all of the weeds keeping the moisture near the ground. So I have weeded a lot, but they are still dying.
Here is our pathetic harvest of parsnips, not allowed to get to full maturity.
The next urgent issue is that the peaches have started falling from our tree. So I (incredibly tired after working overnight) climbed the really cool ladder my step dad gave us to pick them. It is a Portland Ladder Company orchard ladder, and it is so stable I didn’t even fall off it when I was incredibly tired (thanks again Al!). Quite a few peaches fell during the process though, and some were too ripe. Those all went to the hogs who enjoyed them immensely.
We have 3.5 boxes of peaches in varying stages of ripeness. I am hoping to eat some, cook with some and can the rest. I am guess the hogs will get more in the process.
That is the frustrating farming news here.
P.S. In non-farming news, there is a large fire, the Schneider Springs Fire, near the cabin that my great grandfather had built in 1927. The cabin is under Level 2 evacuation orders now, and I am terribly worried. It is still several miles from the cabin but has been growing quickly. Thankfully the winds are supposed to die down, and the temperatures cool tomorrow. So please send prayers and rain-making thoughts to try to save our cabin and many other cabins, homes, business, wildlife and trees. It is so sad to see the areas that I grew up hiking in turned to ash. But selfishly mostly I hope our family’s legacy will be preserved.
I’m sending best wishes for your great grandpa’s cabin – sadly I think these wildfires are our new normal now. It’s funny you mentioned the red sky and what it represented….I was on my evening walk yesterday and the sun was so red and I thought to myself how beautiful it was and then remembered WHY and it made me sad. I love life but sometimes it feels like the entire world is in a downward spiral😕
On a lighter note I’ve gotta say I had NO idea peaches could grow west of the Cascades! My neighbor has a tree loaded with them as well!
Take care and let’s hope we get through this summer without another heat dome ☀️😬
They are our new normal, but they were the normal before all of the fire suppression. Hopefully they can be a little less catastrophic in the future. A fellow blogger in Canada felt like we had three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I am not a biblical scholar to know, but one morning recently when I left work after dealing with the pandemic there and saw the red sun in the sky, it felt like the world was ending.
We planted a Frost Peach tree after we moved in here. It is now going gangbusters. So I am glad we planted it.
You take care as well. I am hoping for no more heat waves nor smoke. But mostly I am hoping that Conconully, the Bumping Lake corridor, and 410 corridor can be saved. Plus we can get through this pandemic without too many more lives lost.
That’s some corn! It has been a strange garden year, that’s for sure. My morning glories are beautifully thick, but no flowers! My parsley bolted, so I’m sad about that, but I’m going to try to cut it back. Worth a try!
I just hope we get some corn for the giant stalks. Morning glory is a weed for us here. We try to pull them up before they flower but often fail as there is so much of it. The parsley here hasn’t bolted yet. It is worth a try. We are getting tons of little yellow tomatoes and basil now. I am thinking of making roasted tomato sauce with it for dinner (pizzas). I have never made sauce with yellow tomatoes before so it will be an interesting experiment.
Ah! Roasted tomato sauce, so good!!! I think the yellow will be delicious, a little milder perhaps, but how can you go wrong with our lovely in-season tomatoes?
that’s some tall corn! sorry that critters got your carrots. I’ve got tons of tomatoes- could you use some?
We currently have tons of little yellow tomatoes. I am going to try to make roasted tomato sauce with them today. If it works, we are OK on tomatoes. If it doesn’t, I might take you up on some red tomatoes. Hopefully we will have some of those soon but for us it is always a race to see if the tomatoes ripen or the blight hits first.