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Despite the heat (way into the 80s) and humidity (way into ugly), I spent a bit of time in the garden today doing a little harvesting (tomatoes, cucumbers, kohlrabi) but mostly clean up.
I ripped up spent bean plants, sweet peas and some other flowers that had given their all. Did a little weeding but we haven't had much rain in the last week or so which seems to be keeping even the weeds from growing well. (Sorry, Erin.)
In no particular order, here are some pictures I took to show how things are doing at the end of the last month of summer.
I've got a nice crop of beets coming along. Forono cylindrical beets are the only kind I plant anymore. They stay nice and smooth and are perfect for slicing for pickled beets . . . or anything else.
My fall broccoli isn't as sturdy or robust looking (shape up, you wimpy little guys!) as I had hoped it would be by this time. I planted it by seed in the garden on July 29th, a month ago already.
I think the morning glories may be at the peak of their glory right now . . . so lovely.
What the heck is with the lettuce this year? Can't even count the number of times I've replanted it. This is my bed of fall lettuce and I've replanted it once. The germination on all the different varieties has been just plain poopy.
On the other hand, the cherry tomatoes . . . wow! I've never had cherry tomatoes get this big. And they are, finally, ripening like crazy.
Our experimental corn (multi-colored and supposedly good to eat fresh like regular sweet corn) has two or three ears developing on each stalk, but the ears still look skinny and not very filled-out as of yet.
Here's a bed of fall Swiss chard closest in the picture, then kohlrabi in the middle with spinach at the far end. My spinach early this summer bolted when it was about 4" high so I'm hoping we get our fill for fresh eating from this planting.
I have got some BIG pumpkins growing into what should be nice jack o' lanterns. I've never been successful at getting pumpkins of this size before.
And look at this one! Almost all orange already.
Here we have the skyscrapers of the homestead. And, lo and behold, way up there I do believe there are finally (FINALLY!) some blossom heads forming.
How tall are these giants? Well, Papa Pea is 6'3" and it looks like the sunflowers have about four feet more height above his head. We're gonna need the chainsaw to take these stalks down.
All in all, the garden is in as good shape as it's ever been at this time of year. Which I guess is saying something considering the wonky start we had, the plethora of insects present, the intense heat and bad germination of seeds. Our strawberries, raspberries and blueberries all had a shorter than usual season and gave us a less than bumper crop of fruit. But good rains came for us at just the right time and I don't think I hand watered nearly as much as most years. I know many of you have been dealing with really bad conditions so I feel very fortunate and appreciate that my garden has done as well as it has this year. Remember, NEXT YEAR we're all going to have fantastic gardens!
Okay, so only "itinerant" in the sense that we traveled to the front yard to make like apple pickers.
Last Wednesday afternoon (or was it Thursday?) we decided that, ready or not, we needed to harvest our apples. A hard frost was forecast for that night and we didn't want to chance losing the whole crop. (We had a temp of 26 degrees the next morning so it did get right down there.)
A couple of the varieties tasted ripe, but more of them didn't. Too bad, the time had come for all good apples to come inside to cold storage where Jack Frost couldn't find them.
Papa Pea, exhibiting the ever-adventuresome spirit he has, decided to leave a few apples on some of the trees we thought might need more time to ripen. He checked them out after the frost and they seem none the worse for their chilly experience. Since the apple trees still have virtually all their leaves yet, I wonder if the fruit was protected a bit by same?
This is just part of our harvest, but for a wonky growing season just past, we're thankful for all we get from the trees.
Well, kids, here's a good one on me.
So I went out to the garden to do some weeding and cleaning up this afternoon. I was pulling out some radishes that had gotten totally away from me ('bout the size of tennis balls they were) when I saw what I thought was a HUGE radish.
I had completely forgotten that at the end of the radish bed I had stuck in one 4 foot row of turnips. Turnip seeds that were from 1999. That means they were twelve years old! I don't think I ever even got around to thinning them once I saw that they had germinated.
I must not have thinned them 'cause most of the turnips were misshapen and teenie-weenie, but I did find the above pictured nice sized ones. (Teaspoon in the picture for size comparison.) I know the biggest might be hard and woody . . . inedible perhaps, but I'm sure gonna give them a try.
A little aside story to share with you . . . a turnip tale.
When I think of turnips, I always remember fondly a gal Papa Pea taught with in one of his first years of teaching. She was a beautiful Japanese woman who was born in the state of Washington during World War II. Her parents were U.S. citizens but because they were Japanese the whole family was put in a detention camp for the years the war was going on. She said they were treated well but were given an awful lot of turnips to eat. You would think she'd have developed an aversion to that particular veggie, but surprisingly enough, she was very fond of them as an adult and often brought one in her school lunch and ate it raw just like an apple.
I think we'll eat a raw turnip tonight in her honor . . . and in honor of my luck growing more than I thought I would in this non-gardening year.
I took a walk out through the gardens early this morning --- something I do just about every single morning during the gardening season of a normal year. I've really missed my early morning wanderings and talks with the vegetables this year since the garden was relegated to next to nothing status because of our huge remodeling project.
I know I post a picture every year of this silly Virginia Creeper that's planted next to our front deck. But I get such a kick out of the fact that it always makes a beeline for our little bathroom window and eventually covers it completely by the end of summer. This doesn't particularly please one member of our household, but I think it's cool.
My bed of salad greens has run amok. Of course, I planted way more than we could use.
I had to put a tee-pee trellis in the middle of the fallow field garden for the volunteer morning glories that popped up this spring. They've grown so tall they are about two feet above the trellis now and heading in an eastward direction. Doesn't the whole thing look like something out of a Dr. Suess book that is about to take off ga-lopping across the field?
The bed of volunteer cherry tomatoes are still green. They've been in this same state of un-ripeness for a month now. I think they will still be that way when the frost comes.
I'm still amazed at the growth of the Jerusalem Artichokes planted this spring. They must have about 500 pounds of artichokes under them. No?
Maybe I'll get a couple more small pickings off the blueberry bushes. This particular bush looks the most promising at this late stage of the season. Other varieties have as few as only 4-6 more berries coming on.
I could possibly get one more decent harvest from the raspberries if I wanted. But to illustrate how dry our conditions have been, can you see the half-formed berries here that have just dried up? In a normal year, we would have watered them, but have chosen not to take the time to do so this year.
The apple trees have a potentially nice crop on them but because of the very, very cold, late spring we had, they are still too small and under-developed to reach maturity this year, I'm sure. The killing frosts will get them before that time.
I'm actually going to take some time this afternoon to play out in the garden, mostly to do some weeding. Maybe the dirt will wear some of the ever-present paint off my fingers.
Crikey, where did this day go? Okay, she says, pulling herself together and shaking her head to try to jiggle all the brain cells into place. One of the things I did accomplish today was to check out the root vegetables to see how they are storing and what quantities we have left.
The white potatoes seem to be storing a teensy bit better than the red ones.
I've found a few eyes starting to sprout on the reds so have been using those up first.
The above spuds pictured aren't all we have, but just the top layer of other boxes of them. Looks as though we'll have plenty of taters for a long while yet. (If I can talk the reds into holding off a little on that sprouting.)
Sorted through the box of bagged onions and found them to be in good shape. A couple here and there are trying to send out green shoots but for the most part, they are fine. And as you'll notice, I even found another little bag of red onions. Yippee! I thought I had used the last of them a week or so ago.
I didn't save many fresh beets. I either pickled them or blanched and froze them for quicker and easier use with meals. This is the last bag I didn't process and they are looking almost as good as when I bagged them up.
Oh my, do we have carrots! Who the heck planted so many this past year? I have them all stored in the back of the bottom shelf of my admittedly humongous commercial spare refrigerator and, as you can see by this one bag, once again this seems to be the best way for us to keep them. I've been concentrating on using them the last several weeks and find they've retained a beautiful color, crispness and seem to be growing sweeter in storage.
Between these stored root crops and all the veggies I have put by either canned, dried or frozen, we shouldn't be lacking for vegetables on our plates any time soon.
P.S. Just got up a post on my quilting blog if you're interested. Progress on my daughter's winter wall hanging . . .
Yesterday we finished up the last work on putting the garden to bed for the winter. Whew. Even though we had a long, late fall the fates kept getting in the way of the project.
Hubby has spent any spare time he's had for the past week getting all the poultry pens and our little chicken house cleaned out, lined with fresh bedding and ready for winter. He took the composted materials on the floor of each structure out to spread on the raised garden beds and field garden. We'll let it sit there until spring when it will be tilled in.
Each year we wait until after about two good hard frosts to mulch the strawberry plants for the winter. Yesterday morning was the second one (really late for us this year) so we deemed it time to get that job done.
Up here where we usually have lots of sunshine in the winter (although temps can go down to 30 below), not providing a thick covering for the berries means that they experience a surface thawing from the bright daylight sunshine, and then freezing when the sun goes down. This constant freezing and thawing is harmful to the shallow rooted plants so the mulch we provide doesn't give protection from the cold as much as keeping them at a more constant temperature with shade to keep the direct sun off them.
Straw has always been our choice for mulching the strawberries but we've been avoiding purchasing the straw bales we needed this year because it's going for $5.95 a bale in our area. Ouch. We have a good supply of oat straw which is perfect for poultry bedding but it's full of oat seeds which would cause an awful weed problem (in the form of a healthy stand of oats!) in the strawberry patch come spring if we used some of that for mulch.
Since our bad wind storm a couple of weeks ago, we've been cutting downed trees (many of them evergreens), chunking up the wood that's big enough to burn, and hauling branches to a big pile out in our little hay field to burn after we get a couple of inches of snow on the ground.
My uber-smart husband had a flash of genius yesterday morning. He suggested we use some of our copious quantity of evergreen branches to mulch the strawberries this year. Hmmm. Well, they do like a slightly acidic soil. We grabbed Rodale's Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening off the shelf and sure enough, they even suggested using evergreen boughs for mulch!
Okay, back out to the field where we'd JUST FINISHED HAULING THE LAST OF THE BRANCHES for the burn pile. (Geesh, if only we were just a teensy bit smarter.)
We filled the garden cart as full as we could and I think it took us only four or five (or seven or eight) trips to bring enough boughs back up to the strawberry patch.
Here the berries are about one-half covered.
And here the job is done, completed, finished. Now if we don't get another terrific wind storm that could blow away the boughs before a nice snowfall to weigh the boughs down for the winter, we'll be home free.
Good feeling to have the garden completely ready for winter. Now it can start to snow and pretty up our very drab, gray November landscape.
I don't understand this.
This is a geranium that is in a pot that's sitting on a deck table on the south side of our house.
These are geraniums that are planted in a garden bed in the middle of the yard.
Why are the potted geranium's leaves almost all maroon in color while the ones in the garden are green as you would expect them to be?
The one on the deck gets maybe a little less sunlight each day, but not a whole lot less than the ones growing in the bed.
Anybody wanna explain this to me?
Today was a balmy, sunny 60 degree day . . . with a stiff wind. You'd never have know it was as warm as the thermometer read by my outfit for painting.
I got the siding painted today. Good job, Mama Pea!
I was working on the north side of the house where the sun don't shine. Add the breeze to that and I had to dress up to be comfortable. I had on a turtleneck, heavy flannel shirt, polar fleece vest and and my painting shirt. And stocking cap. I was not trying to make a fashion statement.
Meanwhile, out in the sunny south yard where it was warm and pleasant, hubby and daughter were harvesting apples. Daughter had volunteered to come help pick. Smart girl. She wanted some apples.
We're expecting a hard freeze first of this week so decided the apples had better come in this weekend.
First the netting had to come off.
It came off much easier than it went on, believe me.
Chicken Mama's dogs, Maisy and Tucker, provided entertainment by putting on a wrestling match.
Methinks we should have done a bit of judicious thinning a few months back? (Thinning. That's not the word. What is the term when you pinch off some apples as they begin to form?)
Apples, we have apples . . .
. . . we have lots and lots of apples.
Hubby fears all of them are not yet quite fully ripe, but they've had a chance to mature much more this year than in any year in a long time. We're mighty pleased with the harvest.
I see applesauce, and dried apples in my future. Any ones we deem unripe, the poultry will happily scarf up. Potatoes and apples. These birds are living pretty good.
What was I thinking? Trying to process all those worm damaged potatoes and putting them in the freezer in the form of mashed potatoes or cubed potatoes or shredded potatoes?
I've got better things to do here, people. (Lots and lots of things to do!) Especially since the good, sound potatoes we've got in storage will be more than the quantity we'll need for the whole year to come.
But fear thee not, they are not going to go to waste. Dear husband remembered reading something in an old book we have in our library on poultry raising. We found the book on a high shelf, pulled it down, and blew the dust off of it.
The book Is "The Right Way to Keep Hens, Ducks, Geese & Turkeys" by British author Robert H. Holmes, copyright 1958. In the book the author talks of feeding cooked potatoes to chickens . . . even saying that they can provide a hot mash (not too hot, I would hope, as we don't want any burnt beaks, for goodness sake) which the hens appreciate in winter. Apparently during World War II, feeding cooked potatoes to chickens was popular not only in England but in our country as well.
So to assure that I suffer no guilt pains because of "wasting" all those potatoes with worm holes, we are going to start cooking up a bunch of potatoes each day to serve to our poultry.
I just hope they don't insist on having them mashed with milk and butter and seasonings. Maybe a sprig of fresh parsley for decoration?
I know this is going to be the highlight of your weekend so I'll keep you in suspense no longer. Here's the straight skinny on our just completed potato harvest.
First off, above is a picture of the sum total of all the potatoes harvested from my experimental potato planting in a 4' x 8' raised bed, potatoes covered with mulch rather than hilled up with dirt. Success? Not so much. This clump of potatoes is all I got from what would be equal to a 28' row of potatoes. Omigosh. How pitiful. I planted 28 potato eyes in the bed, each in a little hole, covered with about 3-4" of soil, then mulched with straw when they started to grow. A couple of them came out honkin' huge although the quantity was definitely on the - yeah, I'll say it again - pitiful side. But, happy to say, we found not one single sign of wireworms in the soil in the raised bed.
Okay, adding the raised bed experimental yield and the potatoes we've stolen from the garden in the past couple of weeks to those harvested in the past two days from our main crop, the yield from the red potatoes was 93 pounds of good, solid, medium to large potatoes which should keep in storage through the winter. However, ([shudder] please pass me the smelling salts) we also harvested 42-1/2 pounds of red potatoes that have some infestation from the wireworms. That looks to me like about one-fourth of the harvest of red potatoes was attacked by the worms. Sigh.
The white potatoes yielded much smaller potatoes and only 53 pounds. But only 8 pounds of the 53 were bothered by the wireworms. For some reason the whites fared MUCH better than the reds as far as not attracting the wireworms.
That means we have a total of 138 pounds of really nice potatoes in storage which is plenty for the two of us and for sharing.
The bad news is that I have 50-1/2 pounds of potatoes with wireworm damage to process by either canning and/or freezing if I want to get any food value out of them. Our daughter says she will take some of them to make up into mashed potatoes for her freezer because that will be a real "convenience" food for her this winter. I'll do the same with some for us. (My husband, the mashed potato lover, is thrilled thinking he'll get mashed potatoes whenever he wants if we have a freezer full of them all ready to warm up.)
Bottom line, the experimental "cage" of potatoes grown under mulch in the raised bed didn't work for me this year. Would it give a better crop under different conditions in another year? Certainly might, but I don't know if I'll try it again soon.
The wireworms were a nasty little surprise but I've never had any trouble with them before. And we didn't lose our whole crop of potatoes to them either. We ended up with more potatoes than we'll need for the year so all is well.
I've got a nice crop of beets coming along. Forono cylindrical beets are the only kind I plant anymore. They stay nice and smooth and are perfect for slicing for pickled beets . . . or anything else.
My fall broccoli isn't as sturdy or robust looking (shape up, you wimpy little guys!) as I had hoped it would be by this time. I planted it by seed in the garden on July 29th, a month ago already.
I think the morning glories may be at the peak of their glory right now . . . so lovely.
What the heck is with the lettuce this year? Can't even count the number of times I've replanted it. This is my bed of fall lettuce and I've replanted it once. The germination on all the different varieties has been just plain poopy.
On the other hand, the cherry tomatoes . . . wow! I've never had cherry tomatoes get this big. And they are, finally, ripening like crazy.
Our experimental corn (multi-colored and supposedly good to eat fresh like regular sweet corn) has two or three ears developing on each stalk, but the ears still look skinny and not very filled-out as of yet.
Here's a bed of fall Swiss chard closest in the picture, then kohlrabi in the middle with spinach at the far end. My spinach early this summer bolted when it was about 4" high so I'm hoping we get our fill for fresh eating from this planting.
I have got some BIG pumpkins growing into what should be nice jack o' lanterns. I've never been successful at getting pumpkins of this size before.
And look at this one! Almost all orange already.
Here we have the skyscrapers of the homestead. And, lo and behold, way up there I do believe there are finally (FINALLY!) some blossom heads forming.
How tall are these giants? Well, Papa Pea is 6'3" and it looks like the sunflowers have about four feet more height above his head. We're gonna need the chainsaw to take these stalks down.
