{Homestead Notebook} June 2022

Here’s the update to the Homestead Notebook for June. I’m using it to track what I planted and how much I got from the plantings. This was such a long, cold, wet spring that it really messed up my crops. When it finally warmed up, almost every single cabbage went to seed. But I did manage to get a decent amount of spinach, and the snow peas were great, but neither was enough to preserve and use through the year (one of my eventual goals is to grow and preserve almost all of our produce needs for the year).

Most of the herb garden is still struggling, but the transplanted sage, thyme and oregano are great. Everything else wimped out in the rain.

I also made time in June to do a page of nature study with my favorite book, the Handbook of Nature Study. I LOVE this old book for learning nature study. It’s written for school children, but it is really in depth. My old copy is falling apart, but I just peeked on Amazon and see that there are new color versions of my book but separated out into individual books! (The single volume copy is a thick, inconvenient book, but I love it.) I might pick up a copy of the garden plants book (now in color!) and see how I like it.

The pea harvest is coming in too! The snow and snap peas are done, but the shelling Burpeeanna peas are still coming on strong. So far I’ve frozen 11 cups of peas! (I enjoy shelling them while watching gardening videos on YouTube.)

And the hardneck garlic put out scapes that I harvested. I was going to make pesto, but my basil is still struggling, so we’ve eaten almost all of the scapes just cut up in stir fries and added to dishes that call for garlic. They have a nice mild garlic flavor.

That 1870’s Homestead on YouTube has a video for their Garlic Scape Pesto here.
Here are the rest of the pages for June, kinda unexciting, but practical.

I printed out this copy of Garlic-Mint insect spray from one of my favorite blogs, An Oregon Cottage.

The next page has a redo of some of the garden plans that got messed up from the weather. I know I won’t remember next year so I’m trying to document everything well.

I’ll add the harvest totals here on this page. And I printed off and taped in An Oregon Cottage’s no blanch freezing guide to keep handy. And that’s it for June’s pages! Thanks for taking a peek!