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. 

October 4, 2021

                           

We took a trip to Illinois this week to pick up this tractor and implements that Jim bought on an auction.  He has an old and rusty John Deere MT that has been adorning our landscape for several years and he wanted to restore it to use as a tractor for our garden.  Our neighbor very kindly called Jim's attention to a plow for sale and Jim discovered that there was also a cultivator and a mower on the auction. The cultivator was what he really wanted, so we set a budget and he bid that amount and watched the bidding.  Somewhere in that process he decided to try for this tractor, an MT in MUCH better condition than we own, reasoning that the difference in price for the running tractor as opposed to the one needing restored wouldn't be much different.  I agreed on the condition that some of his unfinished projects and some of my projects would get done, pronto. This particular auction site continues after the ending time, resetting 5 minutes at a time until no one is bidding on anything.  Jim watched for an extra 2 1/2 hours, in case someone came close to outbidding him.  So, we went to get them, stopping on the way home at my folks.

When we got home, our neighbor came right over to see Jim's new purchases and revel in the idea of one more Old John Deere tractor in the neighborhood. Jim tried out the plow in the garden this afternoon.  He wants to clean up (sandblast, repair and paint) these pieces of equipment for gardening next spring. 

       

 

September 26, 2020

 I'm calling it end of the season.  I gave up the beginning of the month since I was tired of processing garden sass.  All we have left is peppers, carrots, potatoes, carrots and squash.  We've eaten our two good spaghetti squash. I've started cooking, pureeing and freezing butternut squash. 

This is the first time we had a carrot bloom.  Jim pulled up, rather dug up, the culprit and we ate it for lunch.  This carrot is actually two entwined.  We don't thin our carrots, we just let them take their chance and we get some pretty strange configurations.  The really big carrots are very woody, and aren't as nice when cooked. 

Our okra thrived this hot dry year.  They were watered and grew taller than we've ever had okra grow before. Even Jim can't reach the top to harvest.  We have more than enough so we are letting them grow, they still are blooming, way up there 9ft. 9in. from the ground.  

November 1, 2017

"Harvest is ended, and summer is gone," quoth Anne of the Island, I think.  

Only it is a lot nearer winter than we want to think, having had our first snow October 31st.  The Old Wives say that we will have 31 snowstorms this winter, or is it 31 inches? I think I'll go look it up.

Well, I found a bunch of tales I never heard of, but this one comes close:

• As many days old as is the moon on the first snow, there will be that many snowfalls by crop planting time.

Jim dug the sweet potatoes at the end of October and we got some huge ones.

We also got some funny looking ones.  We went looking on Google for some answers to this phenomenon, but we didn't get any.  We did find out that this happens to other people. This particular shape grows directly at the base of the plant and then as other roots go down, traditional looking sweet potatoes form.  We planted six plants and got more sweet potatoes that regular potatoes in the two rows that were about 4 times the length of the sweet potato row. 

It tasted just like a sweet potato.  I scrubbed it well, and baked it with the peel on.  It peeled easily after it was cooked. 

That weekend, which was the last nice day we've had, being sunny with no wind, albeit cold. I cleaned up the rest of the flower garden that I was going to.  I got rid of the morning glories and swept leaves off the patio and the porch.  We put away the deck chair cushions, and the rest of it will have to wait until spring.

The last thing I hope to do is cover the base of the roses when the ground freezes. 

End of Season 2013

I found these photos on a post that was never published.  It was some of the last harvest we had, and it all went into the freezer to be made into the juice and jam and soup stock previously mentioned. 

September 24, 2013

Fall is here.  The garden is nearly done.  The yellow tomatoes are finally producing.  I made a second batch of tomato soup and got 24 pints. I made 2 quarts of tomato juice yesterday. I have some tomatoes in the freezer that I will make into juice also.  I have been putting tomatoes in the freezer to made the soup when I had time, and that worked really well.  

We picked the rest of the peppers, I've put most of them in the freezer to use in soup.

I tried a mixed pepper seed package and got purple peppers, this one is starting to ripen and is a pretty shade of dark red.  

We had a low of 49 degrees about a week ago.  We've had several days right around the equinox with cool, sprinkly weather.  Not rainy, since we haven't had much of that this year.

Our neighbor has just finished combining his corn, after which we had two days of high wind to make sure that shucks are cleaned out of that field and blown into our yard, patio and flower garden.  

This has been a pretty nice summer, without very many hot days.  The beginning of September we had several days nearing and over 100 degrees. 

We seem to have given up on the flower gardens.  I am hoping that I will have energy enough next year to start from the beginning of the season. 

November 20, 2011

I planted some spinach seeds by the front step in  late summer, forgot to water them and forgot all about them.  One plant came up and have been slowly producing a few leaves.  It has been doing fine, until these last few days.  We are getting lows in the teens now.  We have had a lot of very lovely 50 degree days.  It was 32 for the high today.  Growing season is over.  If I had some sort of cover, I could keep it going a while longer.

October 21, 2011

This growing season is about over.  We had our first freeze, with no warning frosts on the 19th.  We had 24 degrees. Not everything froze.  The marigolds did, and the volunteer cantelope.  And of course, anything left in the garden, which wasn't much. I gave up on the tomatoes weeks ago.  There was a couple more zucchinis, so we ate one in zucchini scramble and the other one is still sitting on my counter waiting to be grated and frozen for zucchini bread. So, I still have flowers to look at, my pansies, and mums, and my petunias in the planters on the west side of the house.

I've been wanting to clean the leaves and cornshucks off the deck and patio, so I did that today.  It was gorgeous, and 70 with no wind.  I brought in all the deck flowers and cleaned up some extra things that live on the deck in the summer so it looks bare out there.  I want to bring the the deck cushions, but I'm going to wait until this very nice fall is over.  We've had some very nice weeks, 40ish nights and 60 and 70ish days. It has been a beautiful fall.

Finally, the mums are in bloom, just in time to freeze, thank goodness they do well in cold temps. 

A few pansies are still hanging in there.  

And finally the mum by the front walk.  Blooming at last.

And it very likely will be goodbye until next spring.

Oh, wait. I picked some mint and dried it to use for tea.  It took just a little bit in the dehydrator, and then I stripped the leaves.

And I planted some nasturtium seeds in my window box in the kitchen, where a basil plant has died.   

October 10, 2011

I haven't done anything else in the flower garden since the last weeding, which was late enough, that there isn't much weed activity going on.  The corn shuck blowing event missed us this year. 

 This is what it looked like last year. 

I guess the wind was in a little different direction.

Anyway, there are bright spots of color around this time of year, and STILL my mum by the front walk isn't blooming.  I better remember to get a photo.

October 6, 2011

I've been busy and it hasn't been with gardening.  We haven't had frost yet, we've had beautiful, sunny, 70-ish days, and they have been lovely.  Today however, is a different story.  We've had 30-35mph winds with gusts to 60 mph.  They corn shucks are blowing off the field south of us and piling up everywhere.  Last year we had a big mess of them on the patio.  We are getting some little tomatoes from our pots.  We get more plant that tomato off those.  I'm not picking tomatoes anymore. They were about done anyway, and Lynette and I went to Wisconsin.  Jim brought in the rest of the peppers tonight, two cucumbers, and three big zucchini.  I was supposed to write down when I planted them, but I think it was the last week in July.  Next year I would like to try middle July.  Our patio flowers are limping along. We've been forgetting to water them.  My big flower garden has been looking nice, but it won't anymore after the wind and corn shucks.  I still have a big mum out there that hasn't bloomed yet!! It is the one by the front walk.  My terrace flower garden has been over taken by volunteer cantelope.  There is one that might be ripe before frost.  I need to check it.