Dang! So much has been happening here on the glamstead…not all of it good…but a bunch of it good stuff.

Garden –

Amazing is the best word to use. We have been eating out of the garden for a couple of weeks now. Strawberries, tomatoes, pea pods, raspberries, a few blackberries, green chilies, and cucumbers. Within a week we will enjoy our first cantaloupe!! We have 15 of them on six vines now. The cantaloupe got off to a slow start due to pollinators. Or more correctly stated…the lack of pollinators. We’ve been short of bees this year. Seems so around the entire area. They have been drawn in by my lavender and purple sage. I will plant more of that next spring.

Our first watermelon maybe a week behind the cantaloupe. Same slow start as the cantaloupe. We have 4 total on 3 vines…not a good showing. Not sure why. Butternut squash got off to a really slow start as well. Now we have maybe 5 squash on 4 plants…kinda puny showing if you ask me. But, it has picked up in the last week. Zucchini, same thing…slow start, picking up…eaten a couple already.

The cantaloupe, watermelon, Zucchini and butternut squash are all in the new melon patch. And boy has it been interesting. This is the first really big and intense use of “in-ground” gardening. My first couple of attempts were spectacular failures. The ground is dead organically and nutritionally. And there is a complete absence of water. And it is really, really hard to water this ground…wants to run off or soak in and dissipate too quickly. Yeah, that’s due to the lack of organic matter in the soil. The soil is basically hard-packed fine sand. Terrible for gardening of any kind.

I’m pretty sure I was writing about this last fall when I started prepping the soil for the melon patch. I basically rotor-tilled 4 rows of soil; added compost, soil conditioner, organic fertilizer, perlite, and rotor-tilled again. I repeated that about 3 times total. This spring I did it once more. Then planted. Each planting hole was good quality soil but the ground around it was still pretty poor. Drip irrigation topped it all off.

Couple problems showed up; 1) the drip irrigation was okay…at best. I had to increase the time quite a bit to really get the ground around moist enough. Otherwise the dry surrounding ground just sucked up all the water. Then a hefty layer of straw to help retain the moisture. 2) The nutrient quality of the soil sucked. I had to use liquid fertilizer a couple times and then some serious nitrogen to bring the plants back from extinction.

Appears that they are doing well now.

Before I talk about the disaster, let’s talk strawberries. And I know I wrote about this earlier in the year. I put in a bunch of bare root and live plants…1/2 died. I don’t know if I just didn’t do a good job or the plants were not the best quality. Doesn’t really matter…they died.

However, the ones that lived are doing fantastic as are the ones from last year. I’ve started about 25 daughter plants in plastic cups and another 10 or so direct into the ground. All from runners. Looks like I will do another 25 or so in a few weeks. That will fill in the beds for next year and some to pass around to neighbors. Yea!

Oh, the raspberries are doing ok, just ok. They are struggling a bit but look like they will come on. The blackberries were transplanted from the main garden to their own patch. They are not doing too bad, not great, at all. They will recover and do well next year with new canes coming on. Bad part…I gotta fence in the patch. Turns out our new dog loves blackberries and grazes on the bushes before we can get to any ripe berries.

Now, the tomatoes. Damn! If you remember from a post this spring I lost about 2/3 of the tomato starts in the greenhouse to a freeze. I just couldn’t keep it warm enough. And I only had about 10 tomato plants left besides the ones I gave away. Well, it didn’t turn out well.

We had a really hard late spring with intense sun, high winds, and low humidity. The plants struggled but hung on. Well, hung on till some beet leafhoppers came through. They did their thing and I now only have 2 unhealthy plants left and one pretty decent plant left but is way behind the season. The rest…dead…dead and gone.

Then to add insult to injury…I was out in the garden last week inspecting the plants I was trying to save…and there he was…a 3” very fat tomato hornworm eating away like he was at a Chinese Buffet. I took great pleasure in smashing him into something unrecognizable. Then pulled that plant as well.

So as far as tomatoes go…a complete bust this year. Well, other than the 2 Celebrity Cherry tomatoes in the north garden. They are doing amazingly well and loaded with unreal tasting fruit. They will sustain us.

Beans…doing great. The Anasazi will produce a huge harvest if they keep going the way they’re headed. The Rattlesnake beans are doing okay. I will reserve judgment on those till later. And the few green beans we planted are producing like crazy. My wife is eating them like she’s a goat. Please don’t tell her I said that.

Garden Summary –

Hard to put it into words. It’s a combination of really great fresh food being produced, eaten, and shared. But…also a season of disappointment. And…a season of learning…again. I think I will do a complete post on this year’s lessons learned so I will hold off here for now.

Best thing for me…we finally picked the right strawberry varieties (Eversweet and Albion) for our area and they taste amazing! We will eat some this year…but next year…the beds will be loaded with plants and abundant fruit.

Orchard –

This is an easy update…nothing. Well, that isn’t exactly true. I had found a single apple that managed to get to about ½ the size of a golf ball. Last week I also saw it on the ground. So the entire orchard was a complete bust this year.

Also, I ordered 4 new trees. Two Liberty apple trees and two Harrow Sweet pear trees. They will be delivered in mid-March next year. I probably should write a separate article about that as well.

Bottom line…no fruit at all from the orchard this year.

Pine Tree Meadow –

This is a truly bright spot…the pine trees are doing amazing and growing like crazy. The automatic irrigation has been the key I think. I managed to get the fertilizing timing perfect. I fertilized with an evergreen fertilizer right after a rain…and then it rained two days later. Perfect!

Misc –

Everything else is pretty much doing really well. Lilacs getting settled in. Yard grass kinda sad but could be worse. I’m trimming up the junipers to make them a little more “park-like”. Yeah, going pretty well.

Water Well –

This is kinda misleading. It’s actually the glamstead’s water supply. Yeah, I thought we had it whipped with the additional storage tank a couple years ago and then the better control box this past winter. But, adding several hundred feet of supply line and using it to run automatic irrigation has taken its toll. So I am back to trying to resolve the water shortage.

Actually, that is kinda misleading also. We don’t have a shortage of water. We have the inability to pump enough water from the well into the storage tanks fast enough to keep up with irrigation on cloudy or even semi-cloudy days.

I have purchased a “tracker rack” for the solar well’s solar panels. If it works according to its hype it will start producing power earlier in the morning and later in the afternoon/evening. That might/should possibly/maybe keep enough water pumping to make it all okay.

I have two additional plays to make. 1) Add an additional storage tank to the two I already have. Give us more margin when we hit cloudy days…maybe. 2) The company that sold us the solar pump sold us the wrong pump. The well is only about 220’ total feet, they sold us a pump for 750’ well. The pump can do a max of 5gpm…kinda sad. The pump we should have been sold will pump about 12gpm…GREAT!

So, if all else fails I will have to upgrade the pump for the additional flow. I really don’t want to have to do that. It means pulling the pump and re-plumbing the new pump and putting it back down hole. It would only be about a day’s work but it is cumbersome and a number of things could go wrong. So I want to avoid it if at all possible. And yes, I am not crazy about spending that kind of money either.

I will keep you updated on all of it, including a post on how I get the tracker rack put into service. It’s actually kinda cool and the technology is really pretty freaking crazy easy/simple but it works.

Website –

Gee, I hope you’ve noticed the difference in the website. If not…dang, I failed big time! Maybe I should just save all of that for a separate article. But for now, I hope you see it as not just better looking, but also far more functional and easier to use when finding information. I will include a survey with this post for you to share your thoughts, questions, and opinions with me.

Summary –

That’s about it. A lot has been going on here at the glamstead, but it’s only a small part of a world in turmoil. And that about sums it up folks. Hope you are doing better than the country…and better than my tomatoes.

Hang in there and keep praying…

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