tomatoes!

We finished pulling out our tomato plants yesterday :( The tomato blight has been devastating in our area this year. I've had a few tomatoes to enjoy that we picked green and let ripen, but if they were picked after the blight got to the plant they just turn black before ripening.
The glads have been gorgeous this year - I've been enjoying them cut in bouquets for the house and honey house.
My pie pumpkins are all starting to turn orange, so hopefully I'll have some to freeze.
The shell beans, black turtle, aren't looking too healthy but I'll wait for them to dry and hopefully have a few for the winter.
Yesterday I canned some summer squash (an experiment) and some dilly beans. The day before I made a batch of sweet relish, hopefully I'll get enough cukes to make some dill relish too.
The corn is DELISH this year, at least the honey select is - it was the first to ripen. The peaches are starting to ripen and we should have about a bushel of them sometime this week. Between the deer and the rain we'll have zero shiro plums.

august garden notes

The garden hasn't gotten all of the attention that it needs the last couple of weeks, but it continues to grow - especially the weeds. It seems like I pull a 5 gallon bucket full of weeds and three times as many grow, if only the veggies grew so well! This year has been a battle with the weather and pests. Zip counted 27 blue jays in the blueberries this morning - it's no wonder that we've only gotten about 5 quarts this year! This past week we've harvested more than enough zucchini and summer squash (I wish there was some way to preserve the squash). We're also getting lots of fresh cucumbers to eat, but not enough to pickle or relish :( I'm still picking green beans, we picked about 19 lbs. this week - I've canned 65 pints of beans this year. Of course we're still digging potatoes and I've pulled some of the onions. The texas sweet onions are huge delicious things!
We've pulled the first planting of peas, but the second, smaller planting is just getting started at the honey house. I picked 9 oz. (shelled wt.) of those yesterday. I've lost track of the amount of broccoli that we've gotten so far.
Our tomatoes aren't looking too good right now. I think that we may have the tomato blight - in the last three days we've started to develop a lot of yellow leaves. There's lots of tomatoes on the vines, so if I have to I'll pick them green and let them ripen on the back porch.
The flowers are blooming nicely in the garden. We have glads, sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos and dahlias.

thursday July 23rd. 2009

The garden is starting to reward all of our efforts. So far to date we've gotten almost 7 lbs. of peas (shelled weight). The green beans are just getting started and we've gotten a total of 3 lb. 4 oz. of them. We've dug some red and white potatoes, given away about 10 lbs., and kept 3.5 lb. of reds and 4 lb. 12 oz. of the whites. I've cut 3.5 lbs. of broccoli so far, and planted a new batch for a later crop. Our Texas sweet onions look wonderful, and I gave 4 of those away yesterday. The 188 heads of garlic are drying nicely and I hope to be able to start cleaning and trimming those up in 1-2 weeks. The savoy cabbage has headed up nicely and we'll be able to start eating that soon. There is a disease all around us that is killing everyone's tomato plants, we're hoping that somehow we miss it, so far the plants look good.
We're still nervous about Loki, he's blocked up again. We'll know more after we see Doc Margie tomorrow.

whew!

It's been a busy weekend. My little dog Loki's surgery seems to be healing well. It was only Friday that we thought we were going to lose him, but Doc Margie worked her magic once again on this guy. He has a nasty looking incision on his belly, but she opened up his blocked intestine and sewed him back up. He'll be on antibiotics and steroids for a couple of weeks, but so far he seems to be doing well. Well enough that he and Jack got in a rather nasty disagreement this morning, with Jack coming out the worst - these dogs are making me old fast.
So...other than walking Loki frequently (which is good for both of us!), not much else got done this weekend. I did manage to weed 2/5 gallon buckets of weeds from the garden - where do they all come from?! We picked our first squash of the season, so far we've had 3 zucchini's, and 2 summer squash. I also picked the first green beans of the season, enough for dinner tonight, a half pint of blueberries (also the first of the season), and dug the first hill of potatoes which happened to be red pontiac's. It's a little early for digging potatoes, but we've got oodles of them planted and I hate to think about digging them all at once. And when I saw how many potatoes were in the hill, my back really aches thinking about digging them all :0) - we got 3.5 lbs. in one hill. Oh...and we picked peas again today, ending up with over 3 lbs. shelled weight.

garlic!

Dug up the garlic crop today - 188 heads!

fruits of the summer

Here's just a few pics of some of the fruits of this summer that we've been enjoying so far.

daylilies

I have MANY daylilies. They were established plants when we moved here, so I don't know the names.

mini garden

The raised beds garden that we have at the honey house is probably some of the best used space that we have. Zip built these beds at least 5 years ago, and we've managed to grow a lot of goodies in them ever since. Right now I have a second planting of spinach started, about 2 dozen broccoli plants, two volunteer tomato plants, a few rows of beets, a zucchini plant, two summer squash plants, oodles of green onions and some extra strawberry runners that I had to stick in somewhere last year. There's also some green beans planted and a couple of rows of peas. These beds have an irrigation system, so I'm able to water if and when necessary.

new garden pics

I finally got around to taking some current photos. The garden is finally starting to grow - our corn is finally knee high. I was impressed with a friends garden earlier this week because their corn is already in tassel! Our corn won't tassel out for a few weeks, but we have small tomatoes, the beans and peppers are in bloom and we're eating swiss chard and fresh peas. I'm still waiting patiently for the first squash, it looks like we'll have a yellow zucchini in a few days. The garlic is getting close, I pulled one out of the dirt today and it looks pretty good, but I'll let the leave die back a little more before I get the rest pulled.
Our strawberries were a little disappointing. With all of the rain the berries just rotted on the vines. We did manage to pick 71 qts. of strawberries. I've made bread and pies and fruit pizza - and froze a bunch! The spinach crop was small - 1 lb. 4 oz., but I pulled the old plants and replanted a new batch. We put 5 lb. 3 oz. of sour cherries in the freezer, and we've picked 24 oz. of peas so far (shelled weight). I picked the first of the swiss chard last night - about a pound.
Zip managed to get the whole garden tilled up this week, so it's not looking half bad. I pulled 6 - 5 gallon pails of weeds out of the garden this week. The first planting of potatoes and the peas are over run with weeds right now, but I'll try to pull a few more today.
My first glad is in bloom, it's a pale yellow. The day lilies are in bloom now too, if I feel ambitious I'll try to get out and dead head some of them. The poppies are starting to bloom, as well as the sunflowers.
My herbs are surprising me and look pretty good. With any luck I'll have my own dill for pickles this year.

been a while!

OK Esther...I know it's been too long since I've posted. I don't know where all the days go by.
Even with the lousy weather that we're having this year, we're managing to put a lot in the freezer already. The grand total on the asparagus that's been cut so far this year is 85 lb. 5 oz. I've been fairly creative in cooking it, but after you eat it every day for over a month it gets tiresome. Even our friends started to avoid us if they saw us approaching them with a bagful of asparagus!
We planted two different varieties of strawberries last year - Surecrop and Honeyone. We liked the Surecrop much more than the Honeyone. They're bigger berries and ripen to a much richer shade of red. The flavor of both of them is tart this year - probably because of the excess rain that we've been having. So far we've picked 69 qts., but there was probably at least another 20 qts. that just rotted on the vines :0(
We've also started to pick our small crop of sour cherries, so far we've picked 2.5 lbs.
The spinach crop was a big disappointment, it was a whopping 1 lb. 4 oz. total.
The varieties of tomatoes that I planted this year are: 6 Mountain Spring, 6 Mountain Fresh, 6 New Girl, 6 Big Beef, 6 prudence purple, 6 German Pinks and then I transplanted a couple volunteer plants, of the surprise variety!
Our daylilies are just starting to come into bloom and I'm expecting that they'll be quite colorful within the next couple of weeks. The glads are starting to bud up and should be in bloom soon. I planted cosmos, zinnia and poppy seeds that should be colorful, but not for a month or so.
The potato bugs were eating up all of our potato plants, but Zip powdered them with a 1% dusting of Rotenone (sp?) and that seems to have helped.
Our summer squash, zucchini, cukes, pumpkins and butternut squash all look pretty pathetic - we need more sunshine! The peas are in various stages of growth as there ended up being two different plantings that were at least two weeks apart. It looks like we should be able to start picking peas within two weeks. The garlic is starting to die back, so I'll be able to pull that pretty soon too.

strawberry dessert pizza

this is a really easy dessert recipe that I found on recipezaar.com. It's easy to make and tastes wonderful. The first time I made it, I used a pie plate because I didn't have any pizza pans, but since then I've made it in a pizza pan and it turned out even better. And I used about 1/4 c. of sugar with unsweetened frozen strawberries instead of the spenda.

By: CoolMonday
May 13, 2005

A delightful addition to that Friday night family pizza. Found this at Guide to Southern Food. If using fresh strawberries, mash, sprinkle with sugar, cover, refrigerate for 2 hours, and add 1/4 cup water when cooking. I had unsweetened frozen strawberries and added 3 packets of splenda while cooking.

SERVES 8
Ingredients

*

CRUST

* 4 ounces butter (1 stick)
* 1/4 cup confectioners' sugar
* 1 cup self-rising flour

FILLING

* 8 ounces cream cheese
* 1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
* 1/3 cup lemon juice
* 1 teaspoon vanilla

TOPPING

* 2 pints frozen strawberries, in juice
* 4 tablespoons cornstarch

Directions

CRUST
Melt butter, mix with confectioners sugar.
Add flour, mix well.

Pat out in pizza pan.

Bake at 350 for about 15 minutes, until lightly browned.

FILLING.

Beat cream cheese and condensed milk together.

Add lemon juice and vanilla.

Pour over cooked crust.

TOPPING.

Combine frozen strawberries and cornstarch in medium saucepan (or fresh, mashed, sugared strawberries, 2 tablespoons water and cornstarch).

Cook over medium heat, stirring, until thickened (about 5 minutes).

Cool and spread over cream cheese filling.

Refrigerate at least 4 hours.

still growing

Whew...this time of year always gets busy. The saying "hurry up and wait" comes to mind. We only have two more rows to plant in the garden, but we're still thinking about what we want to plant.
I'm not sure yet how many pepper plants will survive, but it's looking like we should have at least 30 - we hope to have "ancho", "green and yellow bell" peppers. I'm also not sure how many of the tomato plants will survive, but we should have over 30 plants and there are at least 5 varieties which I'll have to list another time because it's raining right now and I'm not going to waltz out and check the name tags. We planted three different varieties of corn - "early choice", "silver princess" and "honey select". Hopefully this year we'll have a good crop of beans, we planted "Jade green bush" beans and we're trying black beans for the first time this year - the variety name is "black turtle" shelling beans. The swiss chard, spinach and potatoes are all growing well. The peas that were planted didn't grow very well and the blank spots were filled in about a week ago and the new planting has started. The cucumbers that we planted this week are: "moringa pickling" cucumbers and "sweet slice" cukes. We also put in a few "spooktacular" pie pumpkins and some butternut squash. Hopefully all 177 of the glad bulbs that I planted will grow (they are starting), and I have three hills of dahlias too. We have 6 hills of celery growing too. I wanted some fresh herbs, so we planted a packet each of dill, sweet basil and rosemary. Hopefully I'll get some sage too - nothing is better than fresh sage!
Finally got around to mulching the flower beds in the front of the property, and while we were at it decided to transplant some Hosta's and Columbine to fill in where plants died out over the winter.
Today while we were waiting for it to start raining, we decided to tear out the old shrubbery that was planted beside the house. Luckily we did get the old shrubs out, but the rain started before we had the opportunity to replant with Hostas. On the bright side...with the rain...I won't have to water the plants in the garden for at least a few days!
We survived the cold temperatures this week - one night the temperature fell to 28 degrees. Fortunately we had the strawberry plants and potatoes covered. Some of the strawberries were lost, and a few potato leaves got burned with frost, but unless we have a really late season frost things are looking pretty good.
Oh...and the asparagus tally for the year is up to 54 lb. 3 oz.!
I'll try to post some current photos soon.

slow wet spring

This has been a difficult spring to work the garden. It seems to rain all the time (we just had 10 straight days of rain), and it's been pretty cool. Tonight the weatherman is calling for frost and freeze warnings. Our potatoes are about 6" tall, the peas have been slow at starting and Zip replanted 1/2 of one of the rows yesterday. I planted three hills of dahlias, and 177 gladiolus bulbs. I still have a few hundred baby glad bulbs that I'll tinker with this year so that MAYBE next year they'll be big enough to flower.
So far we've cut 36 lbs. 4 oz. of asparagus this year. I finally started freezing some and have put about 12 lbs. of it in the freezer.
The strawberries are looking wonderful, hopefully we'll be able to protect them from any potential frost damage tonight.
Our lilacs are in bloom right now and their fragrance is wonderful - hopefully the rain will stop for a few days so that I can enjoy them!

May 2, 2009

Thought that you might like to see a picture of my dog Loki smelling the flowers - and a close up of him with his mud colored face!

Our asparagus is yielding well enough this year that we're eating it daily, soon I'll have to start thinking about freezing some. It's SO much better fresh though! And the garlic is growing like crazy too. I don't know what I'll do with it all if it yields as well as last year. Last years crop kept during the winter quite well, and we're still eating it.

I cut my first batch of rhubarb last week and made a pretty good coffee cake. Hopefully I'll have enough time to day to cut some more and make a couple of pies.



We've had some wild changes in temperatures in the past week. On Monday and Tuesday the temperatures were in the 90's, but today the temperature is only supposed to reach a high of about 60 degrees. The warm temps. really encouraged the blossoms to appear on the fruit trees. Our plum and cherry trees are now in full bloom.

Here we go again.

We started planting the garden today. I didn't count them, but I'm guessing there were 100 onions in the bunch of (walla walla) onions. We planted a pack of (bright lights) swiss chard, two 60' rows of potatoes (one row of kenebec whites, and one row of red that I think are pontiacs). We also planted two 60' rows of peas (one row of sugar snap and one row of wandos). While we were at it, the order came from Miller's orchard so we planted the 10 (super male asparagus) plants in the established row of asparagus that we have, and planted the 12 (taylor) red raspberry canes too. The raspberry plants that wintered over in the garden are looking fantastic! Hopefully in a year or two we'll have more raspberries than we know what to do with.
In the raised beds at the other property - we started planting yesterday. We planted about 25' of spinach (springer), and 2 lbs. of onions that I can't remember the variety. We also transplanted about 20 strawberry plants from that garden area to the larger garden here at the house. Some of the established plants here had died out over the winter, so we just filled in where they were needed. With any luck, we should have plenty of strawberries this year, the majority of the plants look healthy but we'll have to watch for deer.
My seedlings are looking pretty good, the broccoli (super blend) was the first to start, then the cantaloupe (athena) and now most of the tomato seeds (german pink) have germinated. Nothing has it's second set of leaves yet but I'm glad just to see them growing. Hopefully we'll be able to set the broccoli out in a couple of weeks. The peppers (nathalie bell and ancho/poblano hot) are refusing to sprout, but it looks like the watermelon seeds (pony red mini) are starting.

April 27,2009
Been gone for a week to North Carolina, it's amazing how big a change in the weather there's been here. Yesterday was near 90 degrees, and today must have been pretty much the same. All of my seedlings are up now and I should put them outside soon so that they can thrive. The peas, potatoes, onions and spinach are also started in the garden. The daffodils have also started to bloom better and the rhubarb has tripled in size. When I get a chance, I'll cut some and make a pie. Yesterday was the first day that we were able to cut asparagus, and more was cut today. It seems to be coming like crazy and I should be able to stick some in the freezer soon. The fruit trees are starting too. We got home around 2 p.m. yesterday and there were a few cherry blossoms out, but today the cherries are in full bloom with the plum trees on the verge of opening their blooms. Spring is really here, the yard got its first chopping today!

this is a cute video on utube

I found these on utube and thought that they were pretty clever!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOIP0UPiLvA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=445m_ohiWCM

here's some more information on colony collapse disorder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH9mpHNawSs&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59DlKW0XDM4&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_XnvZAcM0U&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajmqUrJtmOg&feature=related

Happy Easter!

The garden looks pretty sad this time of the year, but hopefully we'll have some spinach, onions and Bright Lights swiss chard planted today or tomorrow.




This will be the first year for rhubarb, Fred and Chris gave us some to plant last year and it seems to be doing very well.



The cool weather hasn't been too encouraging to do much outdoor work, but most of the Daylillies did get a new layer of mulch applied to them. The mulch still has frozen chunks in it though!


Happy Easter to everyone. It seems like my daffodils are usually in full bloom by now, but they seem to be waiting for warmer weather. I do have a few that are starting to volunteer a little of their color, so I thought I'd share a bloom with you.