Busy Week

It has been a week since I posted anything here.  A very busy week. 

It's been cold and rainy all week, and it looks like it will continue to be cold and rainy.  Both the hummingbirds and the bees are gone, at least for now.  I'll fill the feeder again this weekend and see if any of them show up.

There was a threat of frost for Tuesday morning, so we went into the garden Monday night and picked all of the tender stuff.  It didn't actually get down to freezing, and that's a danged good thing.  There are a lot of green tomatoes still out there, and a lot of itty-bitty cucumbers.  I think that the cucumber is about a goner.  That's it on the far left in the picture.  It sure has been a producer this year.  This one plant has supplied me with probably 50 good sized cucumbers - the seedless, soft-skinned English kind.  It's leaves are all turning now, but it's still putting out blossoms.  What a trooper.

One of my pepper plants had just took off about a month ago.  It sat there doing pretty much nothing with it's brothers all summer, then this one just took off.  I got 4 peppers off of it when we took all of the veggies out Monday night, and it had a lot of little ones starting.  It's got all kinds of flowers on it, too.

I don't know what kind of pepper it is.  It's not a bell - its peppers are darker green and longer.  I haven't tried them yet, but I'm going to be making goulash this weekend, and will throw them in there.  I don't even know if it's a hot pepper.  If it is, the son-in-law will be pleased.

This is how dismal the weather is now - it looks like the picture of the pepper plant was taken at night, but I took it at 8:30 in the morning.  This is apparently all the sun we're going to get today.

We got a happy surprise in the mail on Monday.  Apparently, we made a mistake on our taxes.  The IRS sent us a check.  I went a little crazy and spent about $500 of it on new clothes and a haircut.  The kid came with me, and she was all kinds of excited about seeing me buy clothes.  She's tired of seeing me in home-made pull-on pants and hubby's Hawaiian shirts.  So now I'm wearing actual girl clothes.  It's nice that this year's colors are my colors.

My favorite purchase was a pair of Sorel winter boots.  It has been decades since I had a really good pair of winter boots.  My feet will be warm and comfy all winter long. 


 


FT

A Nice Treat for Hubby

I'd forgotten all about the radishes I'd planted about a month ago.  They were obscured by a nasturtium that decided to start growing right in the middle of them.  Hubby loves radish sandwiches, so this will be a happy surprise for him.

I don't think that I planted the seeds deeply enough - they're kind of sitting on top of the soil.  The shade from the nasturtium kept them in good shape, though.  They're big, plump, beautiful things.


FT

Today in the Garden

I got some nice stuff out of the garden tonight.  The tomatoes are ripening up nicely.  I'll be making sauce again pretty soon if the weather stays nice.  It looks like it should - the forecast says sunny and 80's for the next four days.  No rain, so I'll have to get on the watering. 

The beans (Kentucky Wonder pole beans) are starting to flower again.  They'd pretty much stopped producing for a while.  It may have been too cool for them to set blossoms.  It looks like I'll have a nice crop in a week or two.  I'm going to let some of the last pods mature and dry, and save the seeds to plant next year. 

I'm starting to contemplate getting the garden beds ready for winter.  I didn't clean one of the beds up too well last fall and had a batch of cutworms this spring.  They're disgusting.  They eat through the stems of small plants at ground level.  That's it.  They don't eat up the leaves, just eat enough of the stem to completely destroy the plant.  I lost beets and romaine to them. I'll be collaring my young plantlings this coming spring, but seedlings are a bit tougher to protect.  I found that the best method was to dig out the roots of the plant that was severed the previous night, find the little bugger - he'll be close to the roots of the plant - and squash him.  It's definitely a satisfying thing to do, of a little gross.  They're fat, juicy 1.5" furless catepillars.  I understand that cleaning the beds well in teh fall will help prevent this.  The bed that got infested had quite a bit of detritus left in it.

I'm going to be looking at where I want my new beds pretty soon.  I want a big bed for strawberries.  I've got a couple of June-bearing plants that are lost in a bed of grass and weeds, and they need a better home.  I want a few more beds for veggies, and some room for pumpkins, gourds and sweet corn.  I've got room for at least 60 square feet more of raised beds inside my current garden space, and as much of a couple acres as I want to use outside of it.  That would pretty much double my space.  I've got two 4 ft x 4 ft beds, a 1 ft x 16ft bed and a 1 ft x 8ft bed - 56 square feet in all.  It produces a fair amount of stuff.  Right now I've got 7 tomato plants, 5 feet of beans, one cucumber, 5 peppers, 100+ carrots, 5 dozen beets or so, a couple of potato plants, some lettuce...  We've got a variety in that small space, and enough coming out to provide for our veggie needs for now, but not really enough to put any up. 

Next year I'll have space to grow veggies for storage, so I'll be making some different choices.  It's fun to ponder what next year's garden will look like.


FT

What I've Learned About Wild Grapes

It's been really interesting working with the wild grapes.  Here's what I've learned.

5 pounds of grape bunches yeilds about 3 pounds of usable grapes.  While there are some bunches that are full of ripe grapes, most have a combination of ripe grapes, green grapes and rock-hard little former raisins.  Occcasionally there's an actual raisin.  In any case, there is a lot of detritus.

While it only takes minutes to gather up 5 pounds of bunches, it takes a couple of hours to pick the ripe ones from the stems.  They stain fingers blue and purple.  It comes off after about a half-dozen hand-washings or so.  My hands were really pretty after squeezing the pulp while I was making juice, but that's another story.  The blue is mostly from that.  That's from the skins, I believe. 

It's a really pretty blue.  I've got some white cotton gauze material that I haven't decided what to do with.  I have a hard time with white - it always ends up with some food stain or other.  I might see if I can dye it with the grape skins.  Then again, it's not like I'm looking for a new hobby just now...

There aren't many bugs in the bunches, nor is there much bug damage on the fruit.  I suspect that this is because any nice, well-packed bunch of grapes is going to have a little spider silk at it's center.  There were little white/yellow spiders still in the grapes as I was pulling them off the stems, having a hard time deciding whether to try to hide back in the grapes or take off and look for new digs.  I don't kill them.  I'm not a big fan of spiders, but they eat bugs that I'm less fond of.

The grapes range in size quite a bit.  It's wonderful to find a bunch of big, fat juicy ones.  They're about the size of a plump blueberry.  On the other end of the scale are some that aren't much bigger than elderberries.

I've made some of the grapes into liqueur - about 2 pounds of them - and the rest are being turned into juice that will be turned into jelly as soon as I have all of the necessary equipment to do it. 


FT

More Grapes

Hubby and I went back out tonight and got about 3 pounds of wild grapes in about 15 minutes.  Now that I've got a lot of grapes, I'll have to figure out what to do with them. 

I hadn't planned on working on jams this fall, but maybe I'll have to.  There are a LOT more wild grapes out there along the edge of the woods.  If I got busy collecting them, I could make a buttload of jam.  Yummy!




FT

Today In The Garden - 9/5

There was nothing to harvest in the garden today.  I took some newspaper and covered up the bits of the boxes where I'm not going to be planting anything else this year.  The newspaper should kill the weeds underneath, and help get the spot ready for next spring. 

There's still some lettuce in this bed, both some soft stuff, which I don't really like all that much, and some romaine, which I'm rather fond of.  There are a bunch of beets, too, although they''re still pretty tiny.  I hope that the weather holds out until the beets are a bit bigger.  I really like beets, particularly little, sweet ones.

I've got a lot more tomatoes coming.  There are a lot of green ones, and quite a few starting to turn red.  I'm really happy with the way our trellis system worked this year.  We have the tomatoes, beans and cucumbers planted in a narrow raised bed with a beam about 6 feet up.  The beams were the outline of the garden our first year.  We got some 4' x 8' galvanized repanel (used to reinforce poured concrete) and attached it to the planks on both sides of the raised bed and to the beam at the top.  It's got a 6" x 6" grid, so it's easy to reach in to weed or harvest.  It was seriously cheap and much easier than putting up string to support the crops.  It may be a bit tough to clean off this fall - the beans in particular have wound themselves tightly around the mesh, but I figure that a wire brush ought to clean the stuff off once it's dead and brown. 

It's been a good year in the garden, despite the rather cool weather.  I'm already looking forward to next year.


FT

Too Late For Gooseberries, But...

I went out today to look at the gooseberries.  I'm too late - they're all gone.  It is the season for wild grapes, though.  They're mighty pretty right now.  I got a whole bunch of them that are nice and ripe - more than a quart once I've got the good ones picked - in about 10 minutes from one small group of vines.  There's a lot more of them out there.

I haven't done anything with wild grapes before.  The grandkids were fascinated - they tried them out several times, followed by much spitting to get the sour things out of their mouths. 

I am going to look for some more out there and look into making some wild grape jam.  And some wild grape liqueur.  I'm not going to try wine - that looks like a lot of work.

While I was picking grapes I discovered that I have a wild plum tree in the back yard.  At first I thought that it was crabapple, but the fruits were kind of squishy and plum-looking.  Hubby tasted one.  It was pretty astringent, but he said it tasted pretty plum-like.  I'm not going to get too excited about it - it looks like the grapevine has pretty much killed the wild plum tree.  It's singing its swan song this year, I think. 

I thought that we could collect some pits to try to grow some more wild plum trees, but hubby thinks it would be better to get some non-wild plum trees.  He's probably right about this. 



FT

Today in the Garden - Mon 8/31

Only tomatoes today.  I picked the big one I was nervous about.  It weighed just shy of one pound.  A couple of the Romas I picked might not have been ready, but they were sitting on the ground and I didn't want some bug to get to them before I did.

There weren't any beans tonight.  I saw a couple of blossoms, but not many.  I think it's just too cold.  They're not happy, so they're not reproducing.

My peppers are really unhappy.  I just don't seem to do too well with peppers.  Right now I've got 5 pepper plants and 3 peppers, and it looks like that's all I'm going to have.  That's just not right.  Although it does square with my experience with peppers.  The two years prior to this that I planted peppers I got one fruit per plant. 

Next year I'm going to set aside a little pepper bed and coddle the danged things, and see if I can get them to set more than one fruit per plant.  If I can't, that will be the end of peppers in my garden and I'll use the space for something else.  This isn't that big a loss, really.  None of us would really miss them if we didn't have them.  If we got a bumper crop of them we'd end up giving them away, which, while a nice thing to do, doesn't fill up the freezer for the winter.  And that is my goal - to grow enough veg to feed the family year-round. 



FT

Yesterday in the Garden - Saturday, 8/29/09

It's sunny out today, but windy and a bit chilly.  It's 11AM and not yet 60 degrees out.  I didn't spend too long out there weeding this morning.  Bucky the cat came along, as he usually does.  He likes to patrol the garden.  There was a hummingbird in there that wasn't too happy to be sharing the space with us, but he moved on.

I did get some nice stuff out.  Here's today's load.

The cucumbers are really taking off.  There has been a lot of rain recently, I imagined that helped.  I really like the seedless, burpless, soft-skinned nature of these cucumbers.  I don't remember what variety they are - I'm sure the nursery tag is around here somewhere.  They don't have a whole lot of flavor, though.  They're almost too mild.  They miss a bit on the nice, fresh cucumber-y aroma, too.  I think that next year I'll plant some of these and some regular cucumbers, too, and see which I prefer.

The beans are Kentucky Wonder pole beans.  They're slowing down a lot recently.  I think that the cool weather isn't encouraging them to keep setting flowers.  I let the vines get a little too tall.  I'm going to have to get a stool out there to pick the beans or cut off the tops or I'll have some of them getting too mature up there.

Only a couple of tomatoes today, but I got a bunch yesterday.

 I think that I have enough Romas to make some sauce.  And enough cherry tomatoes to make the family happy at Sunday dinner.

I have one big Celebrity tomato that's just about ripe -

He's got to be getting close to a pound.  I  just have to make sure that I get to him before the bugs do. 

From now on, I'm going to start my tomatoes myself instead of buying plants.  This year I started some, but I was inconsistent with the grow lights and they got to be kind of spindly.  I didn't think that they were going to do very well, so I bought some plants, too.  The plants that I started are doing better than those I bought.  Big, fat healthy stems, and they're setting lots of fruit.  Next spring I'll start all my own plants, but I'm going to have a timer on the lights so my seedlings should do better.

FT