Blessed is the only word that I can come up with to express how I feel about getting over 4 inches of rain in the last 7 days. I had just thrashed the seed out of my dead spinach plants, and that seed has germinated like too thick … I’ll have to thin it when normally I’m just happy to have a reasonable germination rate.
We stopped at a garden market last weekend and they had little green apples for sale. They were not labeled as to variety, so I asked the vendor, and he said he thought they were Heralred. Ouch … that is a late-season apple and picking them now would give you flavorless “rocks.” That’s a problem, but so is the fact that anyone who buys them would assume that is what you would expect for flavor and texture for a Haralred apple, which is far from true. Haralred is an excellent late-season apple, but harvesting them this early is not professional on the part of that vendor.
My earliest apples are just reaching maturity. We have Beacon and Hazen which are good for baking but not so good for fresh eating. And then we have Zestar which was an introduction from the U of M from several years back. The trees are young so I’m not expecting a big crop, but for an early apple they have great flavor and a nice crispness. You can determine maturity of an apple by the color of the seeds. Dark brown seeds indicate that the apple has reached the harvest stage … so does the flavor!
Humidity and cool nights are prime conditions for blights and mildews that are eager to attack our vegetable and flowering plants. Be watching for the symptoms so you are ready to respond with the right fungicide to protect what you have been working the whole season to enjoy.