June is still an early month into our growing season, so this months comparisons are mostly about what we were harvesting to process. The numbers on some of the plants listed in this post could be much higher harvests if we harvested the entire plant, but most of what is ready this time of year is continual growers like rhubarb or herbs. We will continue to pick from those all summer long.

Lets get started!

Garlic scapes are of course first, and contradictory to what I just noted above. These are only ever ready in June and do vary from year to year. Go figure they would be first up to make a liar out of me.

This year we had a good harvest and the garlic is coming along great. The higher weight on the harvest is partly due to a slightly higher number of garlic being planted and the stalks being much thicker this year, with slightly longer/larger scapes being produced.

I believe we will have much larger garlic than we had last year, but this is our second year growing it and we learned a lot last year, mainly around weeds and ensuring no competition for plant growth.

The stalks are huge on most of our garlic with just a few being on the smaller side. I think those few were blocked from water from some of the larger stalks. We’ve already taken note and will adjust our watering next year.

All of our scapes promptly got turned into jelly since that stuff was semi-liquid gold this last year. Luckily we were just finishing our last jar from last year as the new stuff was made.

The herbs are on par with last year for the most part based on photo comparisons. Where the higher harvest comes in this year is the oregano overgrowing some of the neighbouring herbs that hadn’t quite started exploding yet. So, I harvested a good chunk of it and dehydrated it.

Now it is more reasonably sized and has given the Thyme and Basil an opportunity to really get growing.

Kale is new this year, so not really so much a comparison but rather a record for this year. I ended up with 2 kale plants and they are amazing. I can just barely keep up with them and I am eating kale in my salads every day.

I have also managed to give some to some coworkers, which is likely to happen often this summer based on the way the kale is growing. It is definitely going to be a yearly addition to the garden.

We harvested more green onion this June, partly due to some new recipes I have been enjoying. Usually it is just harvested for egg salad sandwiches, but this year I have been doing some delicious asian salads, which are topped with some chopped green onion. I am hoping to dehydrate a bunch of it again this year for use in soups and other recipes in the winter months.

The fall planted onions have been great and is now going to be part of our fall planting along with the garlic. I actually could have harvested quite a few onions in June, but I wasn’t ready to use them, so left them in to get just a tad larger. Though I now may regret that since a few went to flower with very large, fat stalks. I haven’t cut into them yet and am hoping the centres are not green.

The rhubarb totals being drastically different shouldn’t be much of a surprise if you have been following along with posts in the last month. I have been testing out new rhubarb recipes with the intention of using more rhubarb consistently throughout the summer while it is growing.

Due to all that testing, the amount harvested is double what I harvested last June. I also gave some away to my parents and some co-workers. Hopefully this will be more consistent throughout the summer.

Our ever-bearing strawberries are almost on par with last year. They are as delicious and aromatic as usual. We did lose a few plants over the winter, but were able to get some of the runners in to replace those few that we lost, as well as a couple newly purchased ones from the nursery we purchased the original plants from.

Our little volunteer patch of wild strawberries in our driveway is thriving. We are actually wanting to get the driveway scraped so that we can put down a bunch of new crushed gravel, but before we can do that, we are actually going to build a little garden wall around our unplanned patch.

They patch has grown in size a bit, but the main change to the amount of berries that we got this year, is the rain. We had a lot more precipitation this June, which I think helped the plants continue producing right to the end of June this year. Last year, it got hot and the plants rely mostly on water from the roof down-spout, so they started to focus energy on staying alive earlier in June last year.

Looking at July stats, I can already tell we are going to be lower or short on some of our harvests. My cucumber plants got eaten by magpies twice before I finally got a little flashy spinner that I put in the garden to keep them away. They are finally flowering now, but we are definitely almost a month behind on them.

I’m concerned about the broccoli. We don’t have any heads, except one plant, forming. Out of the 4 that should be producing now, it’s not looking good. I do have 4 more that I planted a month later, which should produce in mid-August. Hopefully we see some heads on those.

Same thing with the cauliflower, I believe I have finally seen the hint of 2 of the plants growing heads, but I have to wait a bit longer to see if they actually develop or if I just have some hopeful thinking.

The cabbage moths have been intense this year. I am picking 10-30 caterpillar/worms off by broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage almost every other night. We are definitely building a frame for fine netting over those next year. I don’t want to keep battling them, so I just need to be smart and cover my plants instead. What we built over our strawberries will be the perfect frame to use, so we will build another of those.

Thanks for following along!