June 2026

A good mix of rain and sun in the last few weeks has the transplants settled in, and seeds germinating quickly. We pulled one tomato plant where we suspected disease, but the others look healthy. Because we’ve had various tomato diseases in the past, we observe them closely and quickly remove any that aren’t thriving.

Our fruit season has started rolling, which means there is almost always something tasty to grab and snack on without effort. Honey berries were plentiful on all four bushes, but we realized too late that Mother Robin taught her fledglings how to snatch them. They were all gone before they ripened fully. We’ll try to net the bushes next year so we can harvest a crop. We’ve been enjoying strawberries and the first of the white and red currants. Gooseberries and black currants will be next, followed by red and black raspberries and blackberries.

The woodchuck seems to have died of natural causes? Left on its own accord? How could we be so lucky? I think we did make it feel unwelcome by constantly filling in the holes it dug to access its apartment under the garden shed, but we hadn’t resorted to more extreme measures yet. We were sure we’d have to borrow the live traps that were offered to us. We haven’t seen it for about two weeks; let’s just hope its gone for good.

Harvesting & Preserving

We’ve been picking strawberries and red currants for fresh eating. I won’t have enough strawberries to preserve this year because we moved the bed and production is low this year.

For salads, we still have lettuces and an assortment of herbs. For cooking greens, we have kale, amaranth, sea beet, and broccoli.

I’ve learned that garlic scapes have a fairly narrow harvest window—maybe about two weeks—before they loose their tenderness. Of course this might also have to do with if/when there’s rain.

Pea shoots are an abundant delicacy when we harvest from the peas and oats cover crop beds. When I have time to harvest a lot, I grind them up in the food processor with other ingredients to make a pesto-like sauce that freezes well. This week it was pea shoots, garlic scapes, olive oil, salt, and a soft goat cheese. We enjoyed it on pasta and chickpeas and garnished with handfuls of pea flowers, which are so sweet tasting!

I’ve completed the first round of tea (chamomile, mint, anise hyssop, lemon balm, rose petals) and kitchen (oregano, parsley, savory, sage) herb drying. This is really best done in this early part of the summer before the herbs flower and get insect damaged and before I get into preserving the mid and late season vegetables and fruits.

Rose & chamomile flowers to dry for tea

Outdoor Planting

We pushed ourselves for a few days early in June to plant out all the basils, eggplants, tomatillos, okra, ground cherry, tomatoes, and peppers. These are among our usuals, but we also added fenugreek transplants in this round. Just recently, several hundred transplants came our way from a local greenhouse. I managed to squeeze in 70 extra pepper plants and re-homed the rest to community and home gardens in our network.

Our friend Lynn gave us a few sweet potato plants, which we’ve never grown. I’m not sure we have the right conditions or soil, but we will try anything and am looking forward to watching them.

We direct sowed cucumber, melon, bitter melon, summer squash, winter squash, seed pumpkin, zucchini, sesame, soybean, lettuce, carrots, beets, and peanuts. Peanuts in Wisconsin? Yes, “Argentinian White Valencia,” and it’s Oshkosh-grown seed from Chris Hoetschl, which is now part of the Oshkosh Seed Savers’s Collection. We had good germination and are really excited to see how this works. We do have the bed netted with light weight mesh, which keeps it a little warmer and keeps off the critters.

Soissons Vert bean, Argentinian White Valencia peanut, Gaspe flint corn

Outdoor Tending

Tomato Training
We’ve removed discolored lower branches of tomatoes to mitigate spread of soil-born disease, and we’ll get more aggressive in removing side shoots to maintain one or two central stems on the indeterminate plants. We prune and trellis indeterminate tomato plants with the “Florida weave method,” and at this point we have up the first lines about a foot off the ground. We’ll continually add lines as the plants grow. We don’t prune determinate plants, but they get one or two lines to support them.

Pepper Pinching
The pepper transplants looked so elegantly formed with small new leaves on top and larger ones at the bottom, and then shortly after we settled them in outdoors, we pinched off their heads. It seems wrong to take off new growth and it makes them look stupid for a week or ten days. However, the pinched tip branches sideways which reshapes the tall central stem. This results in bushier, sturdier plants which can more easily hold themselves up during wind, rain, and hail that sometimes comes our way in summer. It is a crying shame to see a pepper plant loaded with ripening fruit snapped off and laying in the path after a storm, and this is how we guard against that.

Potato Hilling
It’s kind of like a game. We cover up the plants with soil, and the plants grow taller. We do it again, and they grow taller still. We run out of soil in the beds and haul compost from the pile, and then grass clippings, and then some wood chips. Then we give up and the plants win. . . until we harvest all the potatoes we tricked them into providing us.

Fruit Thinning
We thinned apples and pears to remove those with obvious pest problems and to increase the size of the fruits that eventually ripen.

Spraying
We are committed to organic practices for many reasons, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t control for pests. We spray brassicas with BT, a bacterium that is deadly to cabbage loopers but harmless to us. And, we use a holistic mix of clay, karanja oil, and kelp extract on the orchard trees.

Mulching, Again and still
This on going process is a major priority for us because it builds the organic material in the soil, discourages weeds, and holds in moisture. In the planted beds we use compost, half finished compost, cut cover crop (peas and oats), grass clippings, leaf litter, marsh hay, comfrey, and weeds or tall plants that can be trimmed and added to the garden beds directly. We use wood chips on the garden paths between beds.

Ripening fruits on Northstar Cherry, Stanley Plum, Unkown Apple

Seed Saving

Rhubarb and chervil are the first seeds collected this year. There will be many more to come (about 50 varieties this year).

Up Next

We’ll be adding trellis lines to the tomatoes and watching carefully for any signs of disease. Weeding, and mulching will continue . . . and then more mulching so we don’t have as much weeding.