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Monday, September 30, 2013

Things have slowed down. . .

. . . but they haven't stopped.

Today's harvest
The tomatoes are still going strong. I was out of town for four days over the weekend. When I came home, I found quite a few overripe ones that I tossed in the composter, but I was still able to pick about a pound of good tomatoes today. I'm really not sure what to do with them at this point.

The peppers have apparently decided it's time to do something. I've always heard that peppers love heat, but mine seem to be responding well to the cooler temperatures we've been having lately. The poblano plant has been covered, and I picked several today. As you can see, I also got a couple nice green peppers.

I cut down the cherry tomato plant last weekend.

The garden September 30th

You can see the empty spot in the tomato jungle. I just didn't need any more cherry tomatoes, and I felt guilty every time I saw the ripe little ones on the plant. They were cracking as soon as I picked them, so I couldn't even really give them away.

That picture gives a good view of the radishes, both inside and outside of the garden. The plants you can see on this side of the marigolds are the radishes I planted when I pulled out the beans. They are growing very well. The plants you can see in the foreground, up against the cinder blocks, are some of the first radishes I planted. Some of them are getting very tall.

My sage looks amazing.


This is the single plant that survived being trampled by Scout during the bunnies-in-the-potato-patch fiasco. It has doubled in size over the past few weeks. I dried some sage last year, but haven't used much of it, so I think I'll try to use most of this fresh this fall. I bought a couple squash at a pumpkin patch yesterday, so I'm thinking I can use some with them. Sage is such a beautiful plant, I think I'd grow it even if I didn't want to eat it.

Other than that, we're just enjoying the beautiful fall weather.

Looking out for bunnies

Monday, September 23, 2013

Tomato sauce Saturday

The time had finally come over the weekend. I had to get the tomatoes out of the freezer, so Saturday was designated tomato sauce day.

I didn't remember until Saturday morning that I was out of canning jars, so after weighing the tomatoes, I left them on the counter to start thawing while I ran to the store.




Back with the jars, it was time to get started. All of the tomatoes went into the biggest stock pot I have. 26 pounds is a lot of tomatoes.


I slowly heated them until they thawed and then simmered them for 20 minutes.


After running all of that through the food mill, I had 10 quarts of tomato juice.


If you're paying attention to the clock on the stove, you can see it's been 2 1/2 hours since they went in the pot. From here, I divided this into three pots to save time and set them all to simmering. After several more hours, I was down to just under six quarts, and I decided it was done (or at least I was).

I put six pints in the canner and the rest in jars for the freezer. Unfortunately, one of the jars popped its lid during processing, so I ended up with five sticky jars of tomato sauce. I'm not sure why it failed, but the rest all sealed. In the end, I got five canned pints and six frozen ones.


Look at that tomatoey deliciousness. It looks better in person, I promise. I'm not a food photographer.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

I won something!

Mary Ann at Calamity Acres had a giveaway, and I won this awesome book:


Guess what I'm going to be thinking about all winter.

Thank you, Mary Ann!

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Failure to Thrive

I mentioned my strange Pink Caspian tomato plant earlier this summer. This is what it looked like on June 15th:

Pink Caspian on the right
Three months later, it looks like this:


To put that into perspective:


The other tomatoes grew to 6-7 feet tall, but the Pink Caspian didn't get over two feet tall. The strange thing is, it didn't die. The leaves are still green; it just did not grow.

I don't know enough about tomato plants to have any idea why this happened. The upshot is that I now know that seven tomato plants is enough. If this one had grown and been even half as prolific as the others have been, I wouldn't have room for its tomatoes.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

A beautiful Saturday

Saturday was pretty much a perfect day. The sun was shining, the high was in the mid 70's, and I had a whole day to spend with the garden.

The garden September 14th
I started by picking several pounds of tomatoes and deciding what to do with them.



With a whole day in front of me, I opted for oven-drying and roasting.

Oven drying:

before
after
Roasting - with onions and peppers:

before
after
All of that yummy, tomatoey goodness is now tucked away in the freezer. That's going to be a real taste of summer when the weather turns cold.

The beans were looking worn out.


So I pulled them. Once they were out, the bean goal post went, too.


I threw some groundhog radish seeds into the empty spot. There probably isn't enough time for them to grow fully, but that corner really needs better drainage, so I might as well try.

The tomatoes are just amazing this year.




We had quite a bit of rain last night and some of them were splitting this morning, so I picked a lot of them. Some went to the neighbor, and most of the rest went into the freezer. I've got over 20 pounds in there now, and I'm running out of room. I need a few more pounds before I make sauce. I also need a bigger freezer.

Today's birds: cardinal, mourning dove, sparrow, white-breasted nuthatch, blue jay, purple finch.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Checking in

It's been awhile since I last posted. On the one hand, it seems like there hasn't been much to tell and on the other hand, I've been busy.

The garden September 11th

The tomatoes have started ripening so fast I can't keep up with them. In the past week, I've roasted them (with a lot of other garden vegies), oven-dried them, frozen them, canned them, and given them away. I picked 11 pounds on Monday and got seven pints out of that. I've now got 15 pints of canned tomatoes. I've also got quite a few pounds in the freezer waiting for tomato-sauce-making day. Since the red furry bastards finished off all of the sunflowers, they have started to steal tomatoes. I've found several on the ground, obviously chewed on. I suppose I have plenty to share, but it's annoying, all the same.

I'm still getting some green beans, although the plants are starting to look worn out. I've got 1.5 pounds in the freezer, which is the most I've ever had.

In our most recent heat wave, the peppers really started to ripen.


I picked quite a few good looking ones tonight. I also have a lot that are rotting on the plant, like the ones on the right.


I have to admit that, since I already made some salsa, I really don't know what to do with these. I'm contemplating cutting them in slices and pickling them. Several of my "green" peppers seem to be going straight to red. My red pepper plant, on the other hand, isn't doing much at all.

Lastly, I seem to have a white fly infestation in my broccoli.


I squirt the plants with an alcohol and water mix tonight. We'll see how that works.

Now I'm off to check on the basil that is drying in the oven.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Another experiment

I've mentioned before that I have a lot of clay in my back yard. In the spring when it's wet, I practically have a creek running across my yard. In August when it's dry, there are spots that are like concrete. I don't really care that my back yard isn't full of lush grass, but I don't like the swamp/concrete thing, and the bad drainage affects a corner of the kitchen garden. This picture was taken right outside the garden fence on June 9th.



Last fall while doing research in preparation for the garden, I came across Groundhog Radishes. They are used as a cover crop, for wildlife fodder and for soil improvement. The story is that these radishes grow fast, and they can get huge. They are reliably winter-killed and decompose quickly. Because they grow so large, they can help break-up compact clay soil and increase drainage. When they decompose, they add organic matter to the soil. They sounded like the perfect answer to my backyard clay dilemma.

I thought about the radishes all winter, and after this wet spring, decided they were worth a shot. The first issue I encountered is the fact that they are normally used for pasture improvement. Therefore, the smallest package of seeds I could find was five pounds. That's enough for about a half acre of new pasture. To put this into perspective, my entire city lot is about one-sixth of an acre, and the area in my backyard that I was considering planting them in is about 1/15 of an acre. I've got a lot more seed than I need.

My first idea for planting them was to aerate the yard and spread the seed around with a spreader, hoping that the seeds would find a safe place to sprout in the holes. Then I did some additional reading and discovered that the radishes smell while they are decomposing. One of the articles even mentioned making sure to tell your neighbors what you were doing because the smell would be obvious. So, the stench, coupled with not being able to mow the entire yard made me go with plan B, which was planting them in isolated areas that need the most help.

Several weeks ago, I took out a handful of seeds and sprinkled them into the cracks in the soil. After a few days of watering, I had sprouts. This is them after about a week:


They're off to a good start.



In the couple weeks since these pictures were taken, they've grown a lot. They're now at the point where I probably need to do some thinning. As the experiment progresses, I'll keep you posted. Since I have yet to find any information about someone using these in a yard, I might be making a complete fool of myself. It's okay, I don't mind. If I can't make a fool of myself in my own backyard, where can I?