It’s Lindsey and I am back on the Urban Farm. I’m gonna give you a seasonal tour of what everything looks like in the summer. And I wanna share with you what our plants are doing and what’s ready to be harvested, and just how everything is faring in the summer heat. And to share with you some of the good and the bad that we’re experiencing this summer.
This is our plum tree and plums are the next fruit that we’re expecting to be harvesting from our trees. So as you can see, they’re just starting to get that nice purple color. So hopefully in a week or two, these will all be ripe and be ready to be picked. So this tree is more established. We water this tree with deep flood water about every two weeks in the summer. So that just gives it that nice hydration and it has such an established root system. So it’s able to hold onto it, that water really well.
This is our guava tree. So this is one of our tropical staples on the farm. We actually got fruit for the first time last year. So now you can see there’s a lot more fruit coming in and they’re really small. So they just came from the flower, but we’re really excited that this year we’ll have way more fruit production from this tree. And like most of our tropical trees over the summer, we just wanna make sure that it’s getting enough water. So it gets deep water about every two weeks. And we just wanna make sure we keep really on top of that because our tropical trees are a little bit more delicate in the summer heat.
This hedge besides me is our cherry hedge. So we have two varieties. We have Surinam cherries and Barbados cherries, and both of these varieties produce in May and June. So we’re just getting them to the end of our season, but I wanted to highlight them because this is one of our favorite summer fruits. So the Surinam cherries taste a bit more like a tomato. They don’t have that innate sweetness that like a thing cherry would have, or a cherry that you’d get from the grocery store. And then the Barbados cherries have a little bit more of that sweet taste. So these are more like a traditional cherry, but both are great hedge plants. They are vigorous growers and they’re really hearty here in the summer heat. So they’re just very adaptable to any landscape.
This was one of our experiments that we planted this last year. This is Cardoon. So it’s a relative of artichoke. And what you do when it’s its normal size is you eat the stems. So it kind of resembles more like celery and you eat the stems and they have a similar taste and texture as an artichoke would. So it’s a great substitute. It’s really fast growing and you get a lot more yield from the actual plant. So these plants are going to seed and you can see the flower heads starting to form. So we’re kind of just waiting to see what they do. And if we can collect seed from them at their maturity, when you would harvest them, they are about this tall. So as you can see, they get very big in order to produce their seeds.This is something that will definitely be growing next year.
Along this wall, we have our grape vines. So we have green grapes. And as you can see, our grapes are formed and in a couple more weeks, they will be ready. So right now they’re just still pretty hard. So we’re just waiting for them to soften up and get really juicy and ready to be harvested. And hopefully we will get them before the birds, because that is always a struggle. So we just wanna keep really a close eye on them and just monitor them every day so we can make sure we get them at their perfect stage of ripeness.
As promised, we showed you some of the good and exciting things happening on the farm, and here is one of the less exciting bad things that we are dealing with. Somewhere in our pond liner, there is a tear. So what we’re doing right now is we have our filter turned off and we are letting the pond naturally drain to a certain point. And when it reaches that point, that’ll give us a good indication of where the leak is. So we are just trying to problem solve and figure it out. And as we do, we just wanna make sure that we’re caring for our fish. So we have additional filters to supply air and just making sure that everything in the ecosystem can still function while we’re going through this process. But this is one of the less fortunate things that we are trying to fix right now. So stay tuned.
