Fall garden, take two

A few weeks ago, I proudly proclaimed that I had a fall garden.

Shortly after that, it started to go downhill. The beet sprouts disappeared. I could see that some fell over and shriveled up, but the rest just disappeared. I'm not really sure if it was too hot or too dry or if bugs got them, but they're gone.

The peas are still around, but not fairing much better.

This is one of the best-looking ones. It's been brutally hot, and several of them look cooked. I've been trying to help them stay cool with water and mulch. After today, temperatures are supposed to get cooler, so maybe some will survive. You can see in the background that the weeds aren't suffering.

Lucky for me, I went to the garden center this morning. What a pleasant surprise to find fall vegetable plants for sale. I got some Southern Comet broccoli and Red Acre cabbage. Then I just had to squeeze them into the garden.

The broccoli moved into the area recently vacated by the disappearing beet sprouts.

The cabbage is squeezed in between the basil and the zinnias. I pulled one of my two cucumber plants to make room. I sure hope these guys do well.

Today's birds: blue jay, mourning dove, brown-headed cowbird, chickadee, white-breasted nuthatch, sparrow.

Rabbit

Look who I caught doing something naughty:

Better that he eat the ornamental sweet potato than anything in here

though, so I left him alone.

The most fun to harvest

Potatoes win the K's Garden 2013 prize for the most fun edible to harvest. You probably didn't even know there was such a prize. Well, I made it up last Saturday while I was digging potatoes.

This was the first time I've ever grown potatoes. As with everything I grow, I was excited to see the first sprouts.

And then I was somewhat shocked at how fast they grew.

I quickly ran out of the topsoil I had for covering them and decided to try straw. That $10 bag of straw from Tractor Supply might've been my best gardening purchase of the year.

The potatoes kept right on growing, but then they started to fall over...

right about the time they started to bloom.

Shortly after, this happened. I still can't believe it myself.

When the plants started dying back, I stopped taking pictures, and began waiting. When I couldn't take it any more, I carefully dug some up. They were so good, I dug up some more. Last Saturday, I decided it was time to dig the rest of them.

Is there anything as exciting as gently pulling away the straw and seeing this?

Or pulling a plant out of the ground and having this come out with it?

I dug up 12 pounds on Saturday, giving me a total of 15 pounds from six plants. I don't know if that's good, bad or average, but it was enough for me.

The potatoes are all different sizes, but every one I've eaten has tasted wonderful. I don't have ideal storage conditions so I've shared some of them. My neighbor said they were awesome.

My kind of Saturday

Twelve pounds of potatoes,

two pounds of tomatoes, two cucumbers,

a half a pound of green beans,

a handful of peppers,

and five pints of salsa

Please ignore the dirty towel.

all in one day.

A thing of beauty

Seven pounds of tomatoes on Wednesday.

Four more pounds today. Many of these have been put in the freezer to be made into sauce at a later date. The rest will go into salsa this weekend. I'm pretty sure I finally have enough peppers.

I trimmed some branches from the tomato jungle today. Those plants don't need to grow any bigger, and I want them focusing on fruit, not leaves.

The garden August 22nd

Green beans

It seems like I've been waiting a long time for this:

I finally got to pick some green beans last Saturday. These came off of the bush beans. Since then I've picked more from them and even a few from the pole beans.

My green bean situation has led me to do some thinking. I don't know if it was the late start or something else, but the pole beans haven't done much. They're about two feet tall. The bush beans look like this:

And the pole beans look like this:

Yes, I know you can't tell the difference. That's the point. The pole beans haven't grown very tall at all. I think my crazy tower is partly to blame. They did not seem to grasp onto the strings the way I imagined. I tried to help, but even then, they preferred to reach out and stick to each other. What little 'viney' growth they've had has been on the fence or other plants.

Before I planted this year, I thought about doing away with pole beans altogether and planting only bush beans. My dad plants bush beans and always seems to have more beans much earlier than me. This year's results seem to support that idea. Not sure what I'll do with the bean goal post, but I'll figure out some way to use it.

The good news is, by this evening I had enough beans to do something, so I dug up some more potatoes (two pounds 10 ounces from one plant), and made green beans and potatoes with pesto. The original recipe came out of a vegetarian Italian cookbook I have and also includes pasta. I skipped the pasta. The beans, potatoes and basil all came from my garden. It was delicious.

In other garden news, the marigolds are stunning.

I've pulled a bunch of seed heads, with the hope of not having to buy seeds next year.

The butterflies are enjoying my zinnias. The day I took this guy's picture, there was also a monarch flying around, but he didn't sit still long enough.

Today's birds: goldfinch, mourning dove, blue jay, sparrow. I should've posted last night. I finally saw a wren in my back yard yesterday!

Weekend garden rearranging

On Friday afternoon, I took a lunch break and ran to the garden center that's just down the street from my office. I had no specific plans, but ended up buying something that created a major weekend garden project. The culprit was this:

A little Canadian Red rhubarb plant that was half off. I've been wanting some kind of fruit but haven't quite figured out where I could put raspberry bushes. A rhubarb plant seemed like no problem. Then I realized I had no idea where to put it. It would eventually take up too much space in the kitchen garden. If I put it anywhere in the backyard it would have to be in a bed, with fence or block edging of some sort, or the dogs would run it over. I was envisioning a trip to the garden center for blocks and fence and compost, when it finally dawned on me. It could go here:

This is the neglected flower bed on the side of my house. It's home to lilies, hostas, irises and weeds. There's only about 10 feet between my house and my neighbor's, so it's pretty shady, but that very front corner faces south and gets a fair amount of sunshine. That very front corner, however, is full of irises. All of those irises, and a bunch on the other side of the bed, started with three rhizomes I pilfered out of a neighbor's yard about 10 years ago. They've done very well, but it was time for them to give up their prime real estate.

I started by trimming the irises and pulling all the weeds in the bed. I had a whole wheelbarrow load for the compost pile.

Then I dug out all of the irises in the front of the bed. Nothing like a little quality time with a spade and a pitch fork.

I had a huge pile of irises on the sidewalk. This is just a fraction of them:

I was able to replant most of them throughout the rest of the flower bed. With any luck, they'll grow well enough to fill out the whole bed and choke out the weeds.

With all of that done, I was able to put the rhubarb in its new home.

Now the bed looks like this:

A little less messy and with the promise of rhubarb pudding. :)

Squirrels are a$$holes

I'm sorry if my title offends anyone, but I'm very annoyed with those red furry bastards right now. I've tolerated them eating my bird food for awhile, but they've crossed a line recently.

Last Sunday evening, I noticed this:

That's an empty hook where a suet feeder used to hang. This summer I've been making homemade seed cakes for the downy woodpeckers and putting them in the suet feeders. When I mentioned the missing feeder to D, he said he'd seen a squirrel hanging on the feeder, pulling the food out. I assumed the feeder was laying on the ground, but when I finally went outside to find it, it was nowhere to be found. One week later and I still haven't found it. One of my neighbors is going to find that thing in their yard and wonder where the heck it came from.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the nasty squirrels are destroying my sunflowers. The volunteer that grew underneath the bird feeder looks like this:

Then there's my beautiful eight foot tall sunflower, growing in the cinder block garden.

It was lovely, until someone did this:

I know the picture is out of focus. My poor camera had nothing to focus on because a nasty squirrel chewed the flower off the top of the stalk! When I first noticed this, I saw the flower laying on the ground. The next day, all that was left was this:

Squirrels are dirty rats, and I'm thinking about getting a slingshot.

Potatoes!

Curiosity got the best of me the other day, and I decided to dig up some potatoes. The plants have not completely died, but I couldn't wait any longer. After the rabbit nest incident, I was pretty nervous about what I would find.

I dug out one plant, and I found this:

One pound, six ounces of potatoes. As you can see, their sizes vary widely, and they seem more like new potatoes than ones that have been underground all summer. What's important, however, is that I got over a pound of potatoes and I have five more plants to dig up!

It didn't take long for me to turn them into this:



Potato salad, in case you couldn't tell

I'm contemplating trying a different tactic for potatoes next year. I did find and evict the first nest of bunnies, but they weren't the last ones to show up in the garden. This little guy hung out for several days after Scout found and squeezed his sibling.

I had just gotten around to naming him (Adam, of course) when he disappeared. I didn't see any obvious nests in the garden, so I'm afraid he may have come out from under the potatoes. We'll see when I dig up the rest of them. My point is, I'm thinking about trying containers or a separate, more secure, garden for the potatoes.  Or I might just decide to hill them with dirt instead of straw. The spiders seem to like the straw as much as the rabbits.

Not exactly the garden

I didn't plant them, and they're not even in the garden, but I have to share pictures of these guys. They are baby mourning doves that were hatched in our gutter, the third clutch that this mama has had there this year. I found them on my patio umbrella Friday evening.

As you can see, a parent wasn't too far away.

At first, I only saw one.

But then the other one popped up.

I was out of town over the weekend, so I didn't get to see them fly away. I'm sure they'll come back and visit.

A gardening first

For the first time ever, I have a fall garden. Okay, it only consists of beets and peas, but it's a start.

 It's exciting to be watching for sprouts again, and I hope that whatever chewed up the peas this spring doesn't come back.

The rest of the garden is doing well. I'm still waiting for peppers to ripen.

These two plants are covered with peppers, so it shouldn't be too long before I have enough to make some salsa. You can't tell from the picture, but I'll be buried in tomatoes pretty soon.

The garden August 7th

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