Applesauce and Cleaning Up

Seven pints canned plus two quarts in the fridge

I know this is a weird time to be making applesauce. I usually make applesauce in the fall. And I did last year. I think I made 29 pints of sauce last year. That ought to be more than enough in a usual year for us. But not this year. My vegetable and fruit hating husband actually likes applesauce and he is trying to put more fruit into his diet. So many nights after dinner he has a cup of applesauce. Well once he started to do this it used up my stores very quickly. I even made a couple of quarts about a month ago. Luckily I could still get bags of IPM Macintosh apples. To me applesauce just isn't applesauce without at least half of them being Macs. I like to mix apples though as it makes for a tastier sauce. Since the other kind they had that was IPM was Empire apples. I got those too. Last time I could find some Cameos which makes a great combo as it is a sweeter apple.

After lunch it was clean up time. I had two beds I wanted to clean up so the soil could warm up better before planting. The first was the old broccoli and chard bed. It was the last bed that hadn't gotten any compost.

After pulling out all the old plants I dumped the two bags of compost on it and spread it out. It will get turned into the first few inches of soil when I fertilize and plant in a week. This bed will have corn and squash.

The other bed I wanted to clean out was the spinach. This bed will be my sweet potato bed so it needs to be very warm before planting. I usually plant on June 1st, but I always take a look at the long term forecast before doing so. If we are having a cold spell it is better to wait.

I also cleaned up my three thyme plants, my rosemary, and did some weeding. The above thyme was the worst off. You can see it just has a small part that had any growth. So I ripped the rest of the plant out and just left those branches. I layered the thymes that were a little better off to make more. If this doesn't live, that is fine, I'll just transplant more here.

Gratuitous Johnny-Jump-Up Flowers

I also layered my dianthus. I'm trying to get my perennial dianthus to cover the area around a little path in the garden. Last year I broke up my plant and put little plants all over. Some lived and some didn't. So this year I'm layering more of them to get the area covered. I think in a few years it will be very pretty.