Are you still here? It’s always interesting to see what you’ll return to after a week’s vacation.

This time around the finds included: 2 dead baby chicks, 3.75 pounds of peas, 4 pounds of bush beans, 5 BIG heads of broccoli, a million tiny green tomatoes and other sundry things. If I’d known how far behind the garden would be I would have asked Mike if we could take our summer vacation earlier in June. Oh well.

Lucy’s first egg hatched just as we were leaving last Saturday. I gave my mother-in-law, Sharon, a heads up to check on her when she came by on Sunday. On Sunday she heard peeping, on Tuesday she heard none but Lucy was still sitting. We were home for 24 hours starting Thursday night and when I checked on her I found two dead chicks and 6 unhatched eggs. I’m not sure if she didn’t get off the nest and get them food and water or if another bird attacked and killed them.

Goes to show that you should always look at the calendar to see if you’ll be in town when the eggs hatch before you humor a broody hen. I’m not sure that it would have made any difference if I’d been here except that I would perhaps have been keeping a slightly closer eye on the goings on than Sharon could.

To humor Lu, who’s still sitting on a now empty nest (the unhatched eggs were duds), I had the hatchery add 5 day old Welsummer pullet chicks (not the hatchery I’m using) to the broiler chick shipment coming this week. The last thing we need is more hens, but I’ll figure something out later.

As for the garden, wow!

I picked every shelling pea I could before we left to try to get ahead of it but it wasn’t enough. I picked a gallon of them (unshelled) on Thursday and another gallon plus today. It took me more than an hour to shell them all and it came out to 3.75 pounds of shelled peas - or almost enough to fill a gallon ziplock bag. I’ll be freezing most of them tomorrow night - anyone have any tips for the best way to do that?

The bush beans went crazy while we were gone, which I knew would happen. I picked 2.5 pounds when we got home Thursday and another 1.5 pounds tonight. And that’s just off the beginning of the first section. I think the freezer is going to be full of green beans!

I thought that the broccoli wasn’t coming for another couple of weeks, but I was wrong. There are a number of really big heads out there and some smaller ones still working on it. I think I’ll be giving broccoli away again as I don’t want any more in the freezer. Next year I will do a better job of staggering it’s planting times and I’ll plant less.

There are baby cucumbers forming, although I think I made a mistake putting the cucumbers where they are. They’re being shaded by the monster heirloom tomatoes on one side and the pole beans on the other. We’ll take what we get this year but I think I’ll be buying most of my cucumbers for pickles. Bummer, but that’s what happens with a first garden and a spatially challenged gardener (I didn’t think about height when I laid things out).

The pumpkin vines are taking over the world and I spent some time today beating them back with a hoe. They have quite a bit of room to spread and can have the pathways to a certain extent, but I have to be able to get to the bush beans…

The corn has tassels peaking out, the Brussels sprouts are forming the very earliest sprouts, the peppers have tiny green fruits, my solitary tomatillo has the first papery pods forming, the leeks are putting on weight, the Walla Walla sweets have fallen over, the carrots are going gangbusters, the potatoes are starting to die back and there are a bazillion tiny green tomatoes on every vine. Wow!