Harvest Day

You'd never know it was the end of September... the high today was about 83. I love all this sunshine. But rain is in the forecast and most of the garden is done for the year, so I brought stuff in and pulled up plants.

First I picked the last of beans and zucchini, only to discover that the plants aren't quite done yet. So I let them stay to see what happens...

The beans, however, were done. So they got yanked...

I wasn't sure about the winter squashes but they hadn't gotten any bigger in weeks, so I just picked them, too.

My pumpkins came on quite late. I have 4 good sized ones but only one just started turning.  I guess we'll see what happens???

The tomatoes just don't seem to be getting ripe on the vine much anymore, so I picked them all, brought them in the house, and put them in a box with a few apples to force them. It's worked well in the past. I'm hopeful to get enough for a freezer pasta sauce that I tried last year and loved...

 But my favorite part of my harvest this year is that big laundry basket full of green apples. Those are our apples. We didn't even know we had an apple tree for the first 6 or 7 years we lived here. Then one day we saw an apple in our driveway. We couldn't figure out where it came from. We looked up and there were a couple of tiny green apples in the tree right above our garage.

This is the very first year we've had enough to even bother picking. And it was such a good year for apples, we got a bunch! Thankfully our youngest son was willing to climb up on the roof of the garage to pick them for me...

When I went to take a picture of my now mostly-empty yard, I saw I have new chives growing in my pot. Just in time for potato soup season... :)

Slug Bait Cover

This idea came from a sweet lady who lives down the street from me. She told me it works great for keeping the rain and her dogs out of the beer she uses for slug bait. Beer, by the way, is a phenomenal slug bait! See more about it on THIS POST.

Just save some half-gallon milk/juice jugs. Cut off the top and handle.

Then cut down the sides to create four “legs” on the corners.

 

Shove it into the ground over your sunken beer tub. Now you have a covered “Jacuzzi”… (you’ll have to read THIS POST to get it)

One down, three to go… Here’s hoping the slugs won’t be so bad this year. Yeah, right!

Seed Album

I found an idea for organizing seed packets in a mini album on One Hundred Dollars a Month.  It was such a fantastic idea that I ran up to the store and bought one right away!

But I really didn’t like the blue glitter. I took out the front and back panels and made new ones out of totally adorable farm scrapbook paper. Much better!

I added my garden plans to the first page…

Then I added general when/where of planting sections…

It’s pretty fat with all of the seeds still in the packets, but it will thin out once everything is planted…

I will still have all of my planting/thinning/harvesting directions. But best of all, I will be able to remember what I planted this year for next year and can slip in notes about what I thought/learned about each one. I always think I’ll remember but never do…

Unexpected Potatoes

As most of you already know, I didn’t do a garden this year. But the potatoes had different ideas. Obviously we left some potatoes behind last year and the decided to take root.

Earlier this year, I pulled up a “weed” to find potatoes attached to the end! So I left all the potato weeds to see what would happen. I didn’t water them, pile dirt around them… nothing!

There were only about 6 plants and they never got more than a foot tall. They all died back about a week or so ago, I so yanked them last night…

I must say that I was pleasantly surprised at the few potatoes I got for absolutely no work at all!

 

An Apple Surprise

It’s been a good year for apple trees in our neck of the woods. All the trees I drive by are loaded with apples! I have to confess that I am rather envious of people who are fortunate enough to have apple trees.

Yesterday, my oldest son was cleaning the moss and overhanging limbs off the roof and made a discovery…

We have an apple tree!!!

In the seven years we’ve lived here we had no idea that we had one! Never seen one single apple on it ever!

There aren’t many apples on it but it’s a start.

They look nice and are scabby or deformed. Zack cleared away some of the scrub trees that had grown up around it and I am going to do some research on how to encourage it to grow more fruit.

I won’t be canning jars and jars of applesauce this year, but you never know what the future may hold???

Bible Camp Bounty

We spent the last week at Bible Camp. I came home to berries on the vine (strawberries and raspberries) and three little brown eggs in the coop!!!

Two of three eggs, a bowl full of strawberries and what is left of the bowlful of raspberries  :o)

A Berry Big Slug Problem

I planted strawberries a couple of years ago but have yet to actually enjoy any of the fruit of my labor… The first year my chickens got them. The next year it was the birds.

I thought I had discovered the solution for the feathered fiend problem. Rocks. Paint rocks to look like strawberries.

Hide them in the plants before the berries get ripe.

they were good enough to fool my friends

The birds peck the rocks, think my strawberries are horrible and leave the real ones alone.

Unfortunately, slugs aren’t that smart…

They were ruining all my berries the instant they got ripe. Ugh! I needed cheap beer NOW!

Bury containers in the garden so they are level with the ground. Fill with the cheapest beer you can buy. These guys showed up after only about 10 minutes in the middle of the day…

After two days the beer Jacuzzis were full of drunken drowned slugs! HA! (in an evil maniacal tone)

My strawberries are now safe! I even had enough to fill a small bowl today! Hooray!!!

  I knew only slimeballs drink cheap beer… LOL

Super Strawberries

I decided to go ahead and let the strawberries take over the whole bed…

I think some of them are taking it a bit too seriously…

  I can’t believe the one little strawberry shoot was enough to knock down those three big rocks! They’re going to destroy my whole wall if I’m not careful! LOL

I hope the sun comes back out so all those pretty little blossoms get the chance to become pretty little red strawberries…

Bathroom Salsa

I just love going into the bathroom and collecting bowls full of red tomatoes! In case you are wondering what in the world I am doing with tomatoes in my bathroom, you’ll have to check out my previous post HERE.

Today and yesterday I collected enough of them to can another batch of our favorite salsa after supper tonight! And as you can see from the above picture, they were really green only 4 or 5 days ago…

this is only one of the three bowls I got

You know, “our favorite salsa” isn’t a very creative name… Maybe we should call it bathroom salsa? Kinda like bathtub gin, only totally different. We don’t have a tub in the basement bathroom and I don’t bootleg my salsa. ;o)

Goodbye Garden

It was time to say goodbye…

I had to come to terms with the fact that the stuff that grew was done for the year and the stuff that hadn’t produced yet wasn’t gonna. Last year we had great squash and no cucumbers. This year it was good cucumbers and no squash. Next year we are NOT doing corn! Corn has NEVER done well here, so I’m going to quit wasting space on it. Beans, peas, carrots, beets, onions, potatoes and tomatoes all did well though!

The hardest part of yanking up the garden is deciding when it is time to give up and pick the abundance of green tomatoes. I hate making that decision! I always second guess myself. I am always sure I should have waited a bit longer to see if the sun pops out again. And then when it does, I always kick myself for not waiting… I’m pretty certain I’ll be doing some kicking by the end of the week.

But for better or for worse I have three very large bags in the basement bathroom (it’s the only place I can keep them away from kittens and puppies that are just sure they are, in reality, balls) trying to turn red.

Threw some apples in the bags to speed them along a bit

If it doesn’t work out I have a few green tomato recipes in cookbooks and on Pinterest I can always fall back on.

Now my gardens just look sad and brown. But I’m already plotting and planning for next year… Can’t hurt to plan ahead, right???

POTATOES!

"P-O-T-A-T-O-E-S, Boil em, Mash em, stick em in a stew." Samwise Gamgee

This year we planted potatoes for the very first time. And they grew great! In fact the plants grew so tall and bushy that I was quite certain that they must have put all their energy into growing up instead of growing potatoes. They grew so large they crowded out everything else that I had planted around them. My suspicions were even verified by other gardeners. But I let them go, figuring I’d wait till they started to die off and see what pathetic little taters I would find…

This wasn’t even taken when they were at their peak

In the last week or so they finally started to turn yellow and fall over. I translated this into it was nearing time to pull them up and see what we got. Imagine my surprise (and delight) when I yanked up the first one and found these two behemoths hanging off the bottom!

Ok, so I was wrong! Andy and I got right into pulling and digging up the rest of the plants. The soil was obviously just right for growing potatoes! I’m thinking we probably should have harvested them sooner.

Now we just have to figure out how to store them all for the winter…

Harvest Time!

I love this time of the year in my garden! I love going out and finding new things to pick almost every day! I love having fresh beans or grilled zucchini for supper! I love making and canning our year’s supply of our favorite salsa!

This year’s harvest is quite late… But what did I expect when it wasn’t warm enough to plant until the beginning of July! I’m just hoping the warm weather sticks around long enough that I get a crop of everything I planted. Well, I’ve already given up hope completely on the corn and jalapenos. : o(

On the bright side, I’m home when the crops are ready! In the past I come home from one of our annual summer vacation weeks only to discover that whatever-it-is was ready 5 days ago and is now well past its prime… Always disappointing!

Here are just a few of the things I have picked so far this year…

This was our first harvest of the year from the garden! I now have in second crops of beets, carrots and radishes.

As you can see below… the above picture was just the tip of the iceberg of the peas.

Four days later we picked two even bigger bowls of peas than these! And we’ll have more in a couple of days from now!

Now the beans, tomatoes, cukes and zucchini have begun…

Yup! I love harvest time! All that hard work really pays off!