Harvest Time!

Hello from Grants Pass Real Estate. This is a wonderful time of year in the garden. Just take a look at what God grew for us.

We have sweet corn, lots of juicy tomatoes, sweet red, yellow, and orange peppers, cucumbers, hot red cayenne peppers and still some honeydews getting ripe.

Everything is organic, bug free and full of taste that you cannot get from food in the store. Fertilizing with compost makes the plants strong and bug resistant. The one pest that we have problems with is ground squirrels. They take one or two bites out of a tomato or cucumber or melon and then move on. The only thing to do is to cut off the bite area and eat the rest. Not that big of a deal.

It is a joy to go to the garden to see what is new today. Beautiful colors, great smells, fresh air, sunshine, and God's bounty. What more could you want? A great use of real estate.

One of my daughters will not eat tomatoes from the store since they taste somewhere between a piece of cardboard and a piece of plastic. But a couple of years ago when she was six, we went to the garden and I gave her a yellow cherry tomato which she ate and then said, "Now that is a good tomato!"

So long for now from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck

Ahh Summer!

As you can see the garden in Grants Pass Real Estate is growing greatly. My dad used to say about the corn, "Knee high by the Fourth of July." Our corn was a bit above knee high on the Fourth, but now two weeks later it is shoulder high. A couple of weeks ago I put some compost around the bottom of the corn stalks. That may have something to do with the great growth. The melons are setting. Squash and pumpkins are setting on the vine and blooming. We have started picking cucumbers. Tomatoes are on the vine and growing. Peppers are on the plants and growing.

It is a great time to sit back and watch God grow the garden. Although I did have to take a run through the garden with the tiller again. And my wife pulled some weeds as well. But all in all we watch. The grapes are growing and getting bigger. The blackberries (these are o

nes that I planted and want) have set fruit and are ripening. The plums are growing.

Here in Grants Pass Real Estate, plums, apples and pears are usually consistent producers. Other fruit trees bloom early when the weather gets warm in the spring and then have their blooms frosted off with a late frost. If you can protect the blooms on other fruit you can get beautiful crops as well. I have tried turning on a sprinkler when frost comes with some success. The sprinkler will coat the blooms with a layer of ice. The ice will melt slowly when the sun comes up and this slow warming will protect the bloom. Whereas if the bloom is coated with frost, the frost will melt quickly and the cells in the bloom will burst and kill the bloom. I have a friend who says that he has put a light bulb in the center of the tree and turned it on when frost comes and the heat from the bulb has warmed up the tree and prevented frost damage.

This is a picture of the sunset over the mountains here in Grants Pass Real Estate. As is very evident here only God can make a mountain like that and a sunset like that. We are blessed to live here.

Bye from Grants Pass Real Estate for now.

chuck