What's Growing In The Field Garden

It's the time of year when the garden seems to be busting out all over.  The harvest is starting, and it seems something is ready to pick and process nearly every day.  Yesterday I made my first picking of shell peas, have them shelled, blanched and in the freezer.  Good feeling!  While I was sitting at the table shelling the peas, Papa Pea commented that he thinks fresh frozen peas are our favorite vegetable during the winter months.  I agree. 

These are the three sixteen foot long pea trellises in the field garden.  I plant on either side of each trellis.

Here are half of the green cabbages.  The others are farther on down the row.  I went easy on the green cabbages this year as we seem to prefer the red ones.

This is the row of the red cabbages.  The red never seem to grow quite as big as the green ones, but that's just fine.  Also, they're a little slower than the green ones to develop heads.

I planted on either side of only one sixteen foot trellis of pickling cucumbers this year as I still have an ample supply of bread and butter pickles, so I'll make only dill pickles this year.  They've been slow to germinate and get growing big and tall, but I think they'll make it with no trouble.

The Brussels sprouts are coming along nicely, and we should have a good crop.  There are eighteen plants in this row.

I squeezed four "leftover" Brussels sprout plants and two red cabbages  that I couldn't fit anywhere else in this space.

Lots of blossoms showing on both the green and yellow bush beans, but I still haven't found any beans yet.

On the right is a twenty foot row of potatoes I planted from "old" potatoes left over from last year's crop.  (There's a big cosmos plant in the forefront of the row that was a volunteer from last year.  It was healthier looking than the ones I started inside and transplanted so I couldn't bear to pull it out.)  I haven't seen one single blossom on this row of potatoes.  I've never had potato plants that didn't blossom, but I understand they will still produce potatoes.  We hope.

I usually plant a row of cosmos flowers because they make such nice bouquets.  These on the left of the picture are just starting to blossom.  They look a little denuded in the pic 'cause I'd just picked some to have in the house.

These are two rows of sunflowers.  The taller ones in the back are starting to show their pretty heads and add so much to the field garden.  The shorter, bushier ones in the front haven't opened up yet.  They're more of a bronze color, smaller and well-suited for cut bouquets.

That's most of what I've got planted and growing in the field garden.  At this point, everything is looking purdy good!

How Fast The Summer Is Going

Just everyday things going on around here.  Regardless, time continues to fly by, and I can hardly believe we're coming up fast on the month of August.

We've had more hot, humid weather this summer than I can remember.  Also, few mosquitoes and very, very few black flies.  The no-see-um's, on the other hand, have been simply vicious.

They've kept me mostly indoors for the past two days.  Although we need (again) a good dousing of steady rain, all we've been getting are intermittent, very light, short showers that make everything wet in the garden and seem to encourage the biting bug population once the dripping stops.

I realize playing among the wet leaves of the garden won't make me melt, and I've tried to do what needs to be done out there, but the bugs are so bad I've given up each time I've tried to venture forth.

One job that I need to get done is to get the clumps of Johnny-Jump-Ups out of my mint bed.  Since early this spring, they started showing themselves right among the mint plants.  These little volunteers are so pretty and cheerful that I hated to pull them out.  I've now realized they're crowding out the mint!  And here I thought mint was so invasive you had to be careful it didn't take over your acreage.  Maybe it's the Johnny-Jump-Ups that might take over the acreage.  I've got them mostly "weeded" out of the bed and am hoping the mint can recover.

The dehydrator has been full of parsley.  This last batch took a couple of hours longer than usual to dry.  Although I thought the parsley felt dry when I picked it, perhaps it had more moisture within the leaves than usual?  Or it may be suffering from the humidity as we humans are.  At any rate, it's done now and as soon as the plants grow back sufficiently from the buzz cut I gave them, I'll do some more. 

I needed to make a run yesterday to the farm to restock our dairy products.  Dear daughter had the rental cabin she care-takes to clean and since the dairy is only a couple of miles from where she'd be working, she offered to go to the farm for me.  Such a good girl!  That saved me an hour's round trip.

We had a good friend over for dinner Wednesday night which was easy-peasy as I served some of the last Stuffed Green Peppers from last year.  I served them with corn and also experimented making breaded and fried zucchini slices.  J and I really liked them, Papa Pea ate one and said, "Okay, I tried them."  He said they tasted just like the breaded eggplant I make.  (He does not like eggplant.)

As we were sitting down to eat, daughter stopped by to drop off a quart of wild blueberries (yum!) a friend had given her.  Silly girl doesn't much care for blueberries and knew we would enjoy them more.  I asked if there was anything I could make with them that she would eat and she said she would like a slice of Freshy's Blueberry Pie if I made that.  Which I did yesterday while hiding from the humidity and bugs.

But back to the dinner table, daughter is also a lover of breaded eggplant so she grabbed a plate and ate her dad's share of the breaded zucchini with gusto.  Gosh, I'm getting hungry just thinking of it.  I'll be keeping the recipe for future use.  At which time I'll serve another vegetable for Papa Pea.

Our day here is starting out very gray, but none of the weather sites are calling for rain.  (Darn.)  We'll have to play it by ear to see what the day brings . . . and how hungry those nasty no-see-um's are.  The harvests in the garden are coming in and time is flitting so I'd sure appreciate some balmy, sunny (but not too hot, please) days soon.  After a day of lovely, drenching rain.

In The Garden (Where Else This Time Of Year?)

Growing California Poppies is something I do most gardening seasons, but the orange/gold coloration of the blossoms was the only one I was familiar with.  (Yes, I am a bit uneducated when it comes to flowers.)

So I was really excited when I stumbled upon this packet of seeds showing multi-colored California Poppies.  Pinks, reds, bi-colored!  Wow, I had to try them.

Uh, where are the pinks, reds, and bi-colored blossoms?  Oh well, at least I got some white ones.

The scarlet runner beans saved by Chicken Mama for me from her plants last year have grown, reached the tippy-top of the tepee trellis and are starting to bloom!  I'm hoping mine will bloom now until frost as hers did last year.  (Carrots showing in the foreground of this bed.)

Can you see (behind all that jungle) the hoop trellis with the sugar snap peas growing on it?  (I did not do a good job of placement of the bed with the hoop trellis in it.  The tall dill and cherry tomatoes in front of it obscure most of the view.)  Anyway, the sugar snap peas only want to grow straight up, reaching their little arms skyward.  I've had to ratchet them down (using soft twine) every step of the way trying to encourage them to grab on to the trellis and climb up it themselves.  If this last foot or so of their vines were on the trellis, I think they would have nearly covered the whole thing.  Now they're so tall, I'd have to take a ladder out to tie down this last growth.  Maybe I'll do that.  Or not.

My bush beans are getting scary.  I've never had such lush bushes.  (The blossoms look good, and the little beanies are just starting.)  This row is made up of green and yellow beans.  The ones closest (I can't remember whether they are the green or yellow ones, and I've convinced myself I marked them incorrectly in my garden book) have spread a good four feet across while the ones farther down the row are more upright.

I wanted some small colored gourds for decorating this fall so planted this eight foot trellis of them down the middle of one of my raised beds.  They took so very long to show through the soil I was sure they weren't going to germinate.  But after the longest time, they started popping up.  Better late than never?  Don't know if they have a chance of maturing now but the leaves certainly look huge, don't they?

My Siberian garlic is starting to show yellow/brown leaves so it won't be long before I harvest it.  That's nicotiana in the foreground which is blooming its little head off this year.

The shell peas (no picture) are going to be ready to start harvesting at the end of this week, I think.  Some of the pods are filling out nicely and the vines still have scads of blossoms.  Yay!!

Dehydrating Days

The dehydrator has been humming away.  We even tried to dry some haskap berries.  (Why do we keep trying different things with these %#$*! berries?!)  I tried to convince Papa Pea that if a berry is sour right off the bush, drying it is not going to improve the flavor.  Yep, you guessed right in that I won that little dispute.  He got by with saying, "It was just an experiment."  I'm a reasonable person (okay, who just snorted?), and I do agree, there's nothing wrong with trying new things.  (And remember the haskap berry pie I made a week or so ago that was soooo good!)

However, a surefire, easy success with the dehydrator is trays full of mint.  I didn't know if the mint I dried last year would be enough for the whole year for Papa Pea's morning cup of mint tea, but it did last with a whole two cups to spare.  Success!  I can actually grow and preserve enough mint for a year!  Now I'm starting on this coming year's supply and have five cups already stashed away in the pantry.

Speaking of the pantry, good thing I started cleaning and sorting it yesterday.  I didn't get as far as I would have liked, but I did discover in sorting one cabinet that we didn't have as much parsley left from last year as I thought.  (Should have known as I used a LOT of dried parsley in my cooking.)  Fortunately, I've got two luxurious parsley plants out in the garden that will more than fill the eight trays of the dehydrator so I plan on doing at least one filling of it tomorrow.  Two if time allows.

  Not dehydrated but I did blanch and freeze five more servings of broccoli (from side shoots) tonight that are quick freezing as we speak.  (Kinda dark in the freezer, isn't it?)

When the garden harvest starts coming in, it somehow makes all the work worthwhile, doesn't it?

Will We or Won't We?

In the forty-some years we've lived here in northern Minnesota, we've heated our home almost exclusively with wood.  We have the capabilities to heat with wood, and we know how to do it.  

But this year, we're contemplating heating with L.P. gas utilizing the gas furnace in our basement.

Why are we thinking of doing this?  Contrary to what one might think, heating with wood is not free in a financial or energy expended sense.  We either purchase eight foot lengths of cord wood from a local logger and/or use trees harvested from our own property.  Our own trees may be "free" but one has to figure in the cost of time and energy (both human and fuel-wise) to fell the trees, bring them to our wood working area, work them up into usable sized pieces and then stack them in one of our wood sheds.

Obviously, L.P. gas would also require a financial outlay.  What wouldn't be required would be the time and energy Papa Pea and I put into the wood fuel.  We really have no idea how much we would spend on heating gas for a season or if we would even be happy with the "different" heat the furnace in the basement would put out.

In the meantime, we're still working towards having a two year supply of wood cut, dried and stored right here on the property.  To give you a simplistic idea of what this entails, here's an overview.

We start our wood fires with a few sticks of dry kindling on top of some crumpled paper.

As soon as the kindling catches fire, we add three or four pieces of what we call "small" wood.  The picture above was taken yesterday as we were working at splitting larger pieces of softwood (balsam and popple this time from our woods) into proper sized pieces.  The small pieces of softwood catch fire quickly but also burn quickly and don't give off as much heat as hardwood does.

Our hardwood (which we split into bigger pieces than the small wood) is a mixture of maple and birch we ordered and worked up into the right sized length for our stoves.  The hardwood (in the bigger pieces) burn for a long time.

We also save whole, bigger log pieces of hardwood to put into the stoves at night when winter temperatures are at the coldest.  Papa Pea places one of these logs on a bed of hot coals before we go to bed, and it burns slowly and keeps us toasty until the next morning.

How much would we spend over the coming heating season for L.P. gas?  Would it be comparable to what we know we spend for wood for fuel?  And how do we figure in the effort we both expend working up the wood for heating?  Would we miss the unique heat that a wood burning stove radiates?

If we do make the decision to heat with gas this winter, we'll still have the option of knowing we can go back to using wood at any time because of the ready and available wood we'll have as a back-up.  (Good thing we both honestly enjoy wood working!)

What Happened to the Strawberries?

I've never had trouble growing strawberries and getting a BOUN-tiful harvest from them.  Well, this year this Queen of the Strawberries really got knocked off her peg.

The season started with blossoms appearing much earlier than normal.  Then the first berries were ripe a good two weeks before the usually expected first week of July.  Hmmm, something doesn't seem right here considering the very cool spring and early summer we had.  Why would the strawberries be early in a year like this that lacked both warmth and sunshine?

The current plants are only three years old, and I've been consistently able to keep a strawberry patch producing well for 6-7 years before needing to replant them.  This year's whole harvest was like that from elderly plants that needed to be replaced. 

Looking at the total poundage of berries for the past three years:

2016 - 124 lbs. 12 oz.

2017 - 117 lbs. *

2018 - 47 lbs. 12 oz.

*The total for 2017 should be a few (several?) pounds higher because the patch suffered a couple of invasions of little people who came and picked while eating their fill.  (But what else are red, ripe, juicy strawberries for?)

So, looking at the comparison of the last three years . . . drat and blast, was this year's harvest downright dismal!

But you know what?  It happens.  And sometimes the reason for a "down" year of a particular crop cannot be discerned with any certainty.

It does make me wonder what a pick-your-own outfit or someone raising them to sell for needed income does in a year like this.  It's certainly not the blow to our little homestead as it would be to folks depending on the year's income (or part thereof) from strawberries.  

Bottom line, although we're disappointed in our strawberry harvest this season, there's always next year!