July 4, 2024

 I've really fallen down on the job on keeping up this blog.  I've been spending too much time knitting to the detriment of everything else. 

Our garden is going well, so are the weeds.  We've had more than usual rain this spring, 4" in this last week, and plenty before then. Other parts of the state have had more rain, plus tornados, hail and high winds. We've been fortunate to miss all of that. 

I've been putting brown wood chips on the flower gardens. I'm having my usual trouble of getting things to grow. The soil is not the best and it's shady. On a side note, the two ash trees that produce seeds, in the flower garden and the front yard got shriveled up leaves that turned black when they fell off. My son said it was emerald ash beetle. I looked it up and a fungus does the same thing. Emerald ash borer infected trees usually die top down, and fungus damaged trees grow new normal leaves. Ours regrew leaves so my diagnosis is fungus. The tree in the backyard that doesn't produce seeds, was not affected.

I have picked all the lettuce and spinach and put it in the freezer for smoothies. We've had a couple messes of beets before this and I'm using onions.  A few of the yellow onion are already affected by the usual fungus. I intend to pick more at a time than I need and freeze what I don't use. 

Today, Jim braved the mud and picked 1 3/4 buckets of beets. I pickled 5 quarts and saved a few to take to my folks. I got a white beet, the second so far. 

Jim had butchered 4 chickens and plans to do more tomorrow. 

Beet photos:

Beet greens -- not bad

I washed these beets outside, they were so muddy.

 

May 1, 2024

 Gardening season has started, albeit a little late on our end. Jim has been sick with a very tiring and coughing virus and finally has enough energy to get some planting done. He planted potatoes two days ago, onions, beets, peas, lettuce, carrots and swiss chard yesterday. We don't have spinach seed. We got almost 2.5" of rain last week, which was nice, but also hindered the planting. I have been slowly weeding and getting trash out of the flower gardens. It's been windy the last few days and it hasn't been a fun job. Today was cloudy as well as windy, so I didn't go out at all. I planted a couple of perennials. One I don't remember just now and the other was and ice flower plant. Our mix of shade, sun and clay soil limits what and how things grow. 

I have what I think is a spaghetti squash plant growing in a pot in my dining room. The last spaghetti squash we opened to cook had two sprouting seeds and I planted them. One came up and is blooming. Since it grew among all our other squash it could be cross pollinated and who knows what we will get. 

September 30, 2023

 Summer if over, and I haven't blogged much about gardening this year.

We had a prolific year. I had more cucumbers than I needed. We ate them as salad every day. I use equal parts of mayo and sour cream and sprinkle in a little sugar and a little more garlic powder. I have a lot of pickles left over from last year, so I only made as many as I though we would need besides those, and we pulled up most of the vines. Our tomatoes, too, did really well. I made 60 pints of tomato soup and 50 quarts of juice. I canned and froze two lugs of peaches. We also put away 101 quarts of corn in three sessions. I am out of jars. Usually, I put tomatoes in the freezer and when I want juice I take out an ice cream bucket of frozen tomatoes and make some. The freezer this year is full of chickens, beef and deer. We need to be having some company to help us eat it. Both of us eat less than we used to. 

In the flower garden realm, I am feeling a real lack of interest in doing any more weeding or cleaning up, so I haven't. I'm also very disappointed in the petunias I planted in my big flower garden. I don't know whether it's the soil or the shade. I think pinks do better. 

Next year I want to budget enough to go hog-wild on bedding plants and crowd them in, since they don't seem to spread, just hang on. 

I'm glad Jim likes to do the gardening. I don't do very much picking, but as the tomatoes and beans come on, I usually help. 

Our peppers are all in the freezer, and so is the okra. Jim forgot about planting beans until the summer was half over, so when he planted them, they took forever to get going and we picked a few now and then and then ignored them. A week ago, those bean plants were burgeoning with beans. We picked them and it was such a tiring job, that we pulled up 2/3 of them, intending to pick the ones left to eat. We haven't. I put 7 quarts in the freezer. 

June 29, 2023

It's a beautiful day out today, and I hope to get out and do some more weeding in the flower gardens. 

We were gone a week and with the rain we got just before we left meant the weeds had taken over, especially the last two rows of corn which were completely hidden. We are getting a few peas now and I pulled all the spinach and lettuce because it was going to bolt soon. What we couldn't eat I put in the freezer. Our lettuce didn't come up very well at all, and the first photo is about a third of the spinach. 

We haven't had very many hot days, and a decent amount of rain, a little over 2" this month, had made weeding easy and everything, including weeds, grow. Our grapes seem to be doing well, we are out of both juice and jam. 

 

May 3, 2023

 Spring has been a slow starter this year.  We've had plenty of cold springs of late, but as soon as we get a bit more green or a few 'soft' days, we start hoping the cold is gone and warm and growing days are right around the corner. Hope springs eternal. We had some hot days in April, but more often we've had chill and wind. A lot of wind. Several days with 30+mph wind made it unpleasant to want to be out working in gardens or at all. 

Yesterday was a very pleasant day, with 57 degree temps and little wind. I even felt warm digging out a few weeds and planting seeds. I planted moss ross by the mailbox and some more in our little corner plot at the front of the house, along with some snapdragon seeds.  I'm not sure I'll have much luck with growing things from seeds, except zinnas which a harvested myself. The alyssum I planted under the flag pole are tiny things just starting to come up.

Jim says that the peas are coming up as well.  

April 15, 2023

Spring is coming, although it doesn't look like it from these pictures on March 26th. We woke that day to a surprise of 8" of snow on Sunday morning. 

Now, nearly a month later, our garden has been covered with chicken manure and compost, chiseled, tilled and planted with early crops. Potatoes, spinach, lettuce, beets, peas and onions.  We have been having a problem with two kinds of fungus on our onions, root rot and black mildew. The online solution is not to plant onions where there is fungus for 6 years. Our solution is to plant fewer onions and harvest them before the fungus does. 

We bought a dozen JetStar tomato plants. We really liked the way the produced and stayed healthy last year, so we are trying them again. We have 2 milk jugs of the 12 we need to cover them, and we plan on getting some yellow tomato plants later. 

I have planted alyssum seeds by the flag pole and the spot by the driveway. I planted snapdragon seeds there also.  (by the driveway) I intended to plant them in two spots, but when I was half done I noticed I spilled the rest onto the edging, so now I will have plants were I don't want them. If they come up, anyway. 

After three hot days last week, two of which the temperatures approached 90. we are expecting frost for the next couple of nights.  We had drizzle today, which was welcome.  We are very dry around here at the moment. 

 

September 5, 2022

The gardening season is coming to a close. Beans are done, cucumbers are done, summer and winter squash are done, (having never gotten started because of bugs) and the tomatoes are finally getting red.  I've put up a a dozen jars of juice already and today 10 more quarts.  We bought one of those thingys that spit out juice and pulp one way and skins and seeds another.  It makes the whole process a whole lot faster. 

Part of today's.

These have been our best producers. No bugs or cracks.

Aaron and the boys (enthusiastic helpers) cut 6, SIX, mind you!! Walmart bags stuffed with elderberry heads  After reading that the stems are toxic, I painstakingly stripped the berries off to get 12 cups of the tiny berries to make jelly. I got syrup because the recipe called for sure-jell (powdered pectin) not Certo (liquid pectin) which Jim has been eating enthusiastically on toast. So I did it all again, 3 hours of picking over (no help from Jim this time) and using sure-jell, I have beautiful jelly.  I wish I could taste it. Mom has been unenthusiastic from the start, saying she had elderberry jelly when she was a girl and it was awful. I wonder if it was really elderberry, or less sugar was used, or as om said, she was a girl, not grown up.

This is how I froze most of my apples.

Jim has half the potatoes dug.  I like the Yukon Golds the best of any we've ever planted. They keep well, too, as well as you can expect any to keep in our less than ideal conditions.  We have no cellar and our basement being walkout and our storm cellar damp, we are lucky to keep any.

August is usually dry and it seems to be heading that way into September, at least for us.  Others around us have had some rain.