Growing things

Grapes - white variety. These are sweet and will probably be excellent table grapes in a week or two.

Unknown plum variety - this is a HUGE tree in the way back of the property. We think it's likely older than the house. These plums are tiny little things - but taste pretty good (they aren't quite ripe yet).

One of our two first watermelons! We planted 3 varieties and so far, this is the only one producing.

Our first full sized tomatoes - about to turn red! (we've already had some grape and plum tomatoes to harvest)

Grapes - this is the red variety - we have way more of these than the white ones. I forsee grape juice in our future.

Pears - the pear harvest will be HUGE this year. I picked the first 4 ripe ones today. The cold wet spring that affected the apple harvest apparently did not bother the pears!

Plums - these are prune plums. We need to harvest them and dry them as they taste weird in their current state - should be interesting!

These are one of 4 or 5 apple varieties we have. This one is very small. Small trees, small apples...but they taste a little like Cortlands (if I remember correctly).

We also have identified two red delicious trees, three tress of a variety that looks like fuji and one tree of a totally unknown variety that is tart and makes a good baking apple. That particular tree ripened well ahead of the rest of the apple trees. Lastly, we have a tree on the other side of the property that is well behind the other apples. The variety is yet to be determined as the apples are still small green things with only a slight blush on a few...

I also harvested our first potatoes last night. I've never grown potatoes, so I wasn't sure what I was doing when we started. We basically just took a regular potato that had sprouted in a few places and cut it into smaller pieces. Then I planted these pieces in the garden in a row. H said that his father used to cover the potato sprouts with dirt, so we did that for awhile. They bushed up nicely:

Potatoes on the right, corn on the left.

Eventually though, the potato plants started looking sickly. I'm not sure if it was lack of water, lack of sun (the corn kind of shadows them now), or some bug issue. They never flowered (I thought they were going to) and now they look sort of dead. Last night, I picked the worst looking one and pulled it up. I then dug into the mound. There were no potatoes in the mound at all, but there were 5 or 6 under the ground (below where I first planted the spud). How easy was that? I'm definitely going to leave the rest of them where they are for awhile yet. And we also have two types of sweet potatoes planted that don't look sickly or dying at all so we should be harvesting potatoes this fall. We definitely have plans to expand next year - both corn and potatoes.