Lots of fun new things this week, namely Elderberries and a new garden bed!

This past week has been HOT! It’s not even quite summertime, but we had 100°F temps for several days. It’s cooled off a bit now, thankfully, but it’s still delightfully warm. To get out of the heat on one of my days off work I decided to go on a hike at a higher elevation. It doen’t take long from where we live to get to the Pacific Crest Trail at 6000ft elevation, so that’s what I did.

I was hoping to see some mushrooms, morels specifically, and right off the bat I saw what I thought was a puffball mushroom, which is edible. I didn’t have my book with me and I wasn’t totally sure if that’s what it was so I left it alone.

Alas, no morels to be found, but to be honest I wasn’t looking that hard for them. They most commonly grow in recently burned or disturbed areas and this hike wasn’t either of those things. I did see many other cool things as there was quite a bit of diversity around. I saw sagebrush which is a heat and arid loving plant one minute and water loving willows the next.

Seeing these huge Lupine buds was exciting and reminded me of the Sierras.

They’ll be blooming like crazy in a week or two, so I might have to come back! There were also literally fields of Corn Lilies. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many in one place!

It will surely be spectacular when they go to flower! Another reason to come back… But the biggest reason I’ll be back is because of this:

It may not look like much from this picture, but upon further inspection I discovered that they are Elderberry trees! More like shrubs, I guess. And the had they very beginnings of flowers on them.

You know what this means, don’t you? Elderberry mead is in our future! On my drive down the mountain I actually noticed a ton of huge Elderberry trees that were flowering. Exciting!

Around the homestead we have things bolting from the heat, namely the spinach and radishes.

More and more raspberries are turning red, soon we will be inundated! I can’t wait for the feeling of “what am I going to do with all of these dang raspberries!” Not a bad problem to have.

We also planted a whole bunch more seeds of some warmer weather plants like green beans, summer and winter squash, cucumber, basil, cilantro, nasturtium and calendula flowers.

But the biggest garden news is this new permaculture garden bed that Joel made, complete with a (hopefully) deer proof cage!

Besides the obvious squash plants you should be able to see a lot of things sprouting in there. We will be doing a whole post on what this bed exactly is and how he made it next week.

Well, that’s about it for this week. Hope you all have a lovely weekend and I’ll be meeting back up with you next week for some really cool new projects!