The start of my red neck

I officially have started my farmers tan / red neck. Note to self: buy a large brimmed hat, but not a ten gallon hat just to be clear. So I have a lot of exciting things to post this time around. I will start with we finally got another crop! Turnips and some small beets since they needed thinning.

Here is a west and east view of the garden. In the first picture you can see the two rows of sunflowers we have growing. They are to the right of the turnips. Next to the sunflowers are popcorn and broomcorn. Yes broomcorn, derek is going to show sean and I how to make some brooms. I'm pretty excited about it. In the second photo you can see the almost done raised beds. Unfortunately we didn't get these in in time to use them for tomatoes so we'll probably use them for this fall's crop.

This last picture is a better glimpse of the raised beds. These were HEAVY to carry out.

Here is the progress of the carrots, turnips, beets, ground cherry, and zucchini.

Since we are creative and crafty, derek had an old fence he wanted to take down so he had the idea to take the steel fence and make tomato cages out of them. We made 20 cages and ran out of fencing. We thought for sure that would be enough cages, turns out we have 30 something tomato plants.... oh man that's a lot of canning of salsa and tomato sauce.

A week ago Darlene and I planted ~15,000 basil seeds. Derek had the leftovers so we decided to plant them. Here's how they look so far. I can't wait for PESTO!

I hope you were able to read to the end of this post because I have a SURPRISE!!! The next two pictures will let you know the highlight of my weekend.

YES yes yes!!! Cherries! On sunday Greg and I spent 6 hours helping out. Our payment/reward at the end of the day was a slice of derek's homemade cherry pie with a scoop of ice cream. It was delicious, unfortunately I did not get a picture. BUT here is what I decided to make with the cherries that we picked. Cherry Crumble.

What happens when you pit 5 to 6 cups of cherries with your thumbs...

The finished product: DELICIOUS