In The Garden: July 29, 2014

 Asparagus Bed

The garden bed I'm currently re-mulching.  We should keep a layer of mulch on the bed year round, but it's getting very thin and the red sorrel is invading the bed.

Tomatoes

Our tomato plants were looking really good earlier in the season.  Now, the leaves toward the bottoms of the plants are dying.  Also, some critter(s) is eating more than it's share of tomatoes before they ripen.  Most of that damage occurs relatively low on the plant, so we assume it's rabbits.

Surprise Lilies

Blooming for a week or so at various places in our yard.  Planted by previous owners, but now some clusters expanded and relocated by Jo

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In The Garden: July 29, 2014

Garden 2011: Recap #3

It just wouldn't be spring if we weren't running behind with everything.  The photos above were all taken on May 5.  The main feature of all of them is that it's obvious the grass needs mowed.  Between preparing for art fairs, traveling to art fairs and all the rain we've received, I'm very much behind with my mowing.  I was finally able to attack our garden area with the mower on Tuesday (5/10/11).  Now we can at least venture into the garden without having to wade in almost knee-high grass and weeds.


Clockwise:  

• 1.) Tomato plants are still under cloches.
• 2.) The cloches need to be removed from several tomato plants.
• 3.) Cauliflower.
• 4.) Chinese cabbage.
• 5.) Lettuce, spinach, chard, radishes directed seeded into the garden.
• 6.) Broccoli.
• 7.) Potatoes.

Our irises are well into their blooming sequence. We don't grow a lot of flowers, but have gotten into growing irises because friends gave us rhizomes when they thinned their beds. The flowers are beautiful, and irises are one of the few flowers deer won't eat.

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Garden 2011: Recap #3

A Little Miscellaneous

Dogwood leaves and berries.















Turn out the lights; the garden's over.














Our road out ... up near the gate.













The dill was the only plant in the garden not damaged by our light freeze.






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A Little Miscellaneous

Garden Flowers: The Last of the Season

Jo picked a few more tomatoes, dug some volunteer potatoes and cut a few flowers to bring inside this afternoon. I suspect that tonight's temperatures really will finish off everything still growing out in the garden. The forecast is calling for temperatures down into the mid-twenties here and a freeze is predicted almost state wide.

The dogs helped Jo in the garden while I changed the oil in the van.

Garden Flowers: The Last of the Season

Pepper Harvest

We've only experienced the very lightest of frosts so far this fall, with only the most tender of vegetation getting a little leaf burn. However, the weather forecast called for temperatures at or near freezing Thursday night. It was time to harvest what remained out in the garden or risk losing it.

Peppers were the main crop we had to harvest. Various hot peppers (jalapeño, poblano, salsa) went into plastic bags and directly into the freezer. They'll be fine for cooking. I'll eat a lot of fresh bell peppers for a week or so. I don't particularly like them cooked and Jo doesn't like them at all. The cayenne peppers I'm drying and will grind into pepper flakes.

Jo also picked all the tomatoes that were still on the vines. Some will go ahead and ripen, many will end up back out in the garden compost and we will probably have some fried green tomatoes.

(Note: The weather forecast was wrong. Imagine that! The temperature never dropped below 40º. Oh, well. Picking all the peppers was a job that needed to be done and we had a nice, sunny day for that chore.)

Pepper Harvest

Fly Attack on a "Tomato" Hornworm

I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, but I seen it several times before. The fly makes repeated attacks on the hornworm. My best guess is that the fly is trying to lay eggs, but I'm really not sure.

We've recently been under siege by the hornworms. They are a yearly event, but this year there seems to be more of them and they've been a problem longer. Our total "kill" of hornworms has got to be well over 100. There were several days that we picked off and squashed over a dozen. Hopefully, the hornworm invasion is coming to an end. Last evening we only found two.

By the way, the hornworm pictured above isn't actually a "tomato" hornworm, even though that's what everyone (including me) calls them. The caterpillar pest most often found consuming tomato plants is actually a tobacco hornworm, the larvae of a Carolina Sphinx moth.
A tomato hornworm is the larvae of a Five-Spotted Hawk moth. The quick and easy way to tell the difference between the two is that a tobacco harnworm has a red "tail" while the tomato hornworm's tail is black. There are also slight differences in the pattern of the strips.

Fly Attack on a "Tomato" Hornworm

More Fun With Tomatoes

An online friend has suggested another use for our tomatoes. Thanks, Marlene, I needed that.

More Fun With Tomatoes

Tomato Sauce and More

Bubble, bubble, Toil and Trouble

All those tomatoes we grew are now beginning to get ripe so we've got to deal with abundance of our garden. This past week we've canned 40 pints of tomato sauce, 15 pints of stewed tomatoes and 8 pints of Rotel-style spicy stewed tomatoes. Just to give you and idea of how many tomatoes that is: It takes a quart of tomato juice to produce a pint of sauce. And, it takes around 2.5 pounds of tomatoes to produce a quart of tomato juice. So, it took around 100 pounds of tomatoes to produce the sauce we've canned thus far.

(I do use the pronoun "we" loosely. Jo does all the actual canning, but I help by running the tomatoes through the hand-cranked strainer that separates the seeds and pulp from the juice.)

And, wouldn't you know it, now that the time has come to process tomatoes, we experiencing a heat wave. Our daily high temperatures have been near (or over) 100º for several days now, and are forecast to continue in that range at least until the end of next week. Sunday our thermometer recorded a hight temperature of 108.7º, but that isn't really accurate because the pick up for the thermometer is located too near the pot of boiling tomato sauce.

Tomato Sauce and More

Garden

Corn and Squash: We kept the corn and squash covered with wire and protected from the rabbits for as longs as we could, but finally had to remove the wire. Some of the corn and especially the squash were really starting to suffer from the confinement. Besides, with the wire in place we couldn't weed or edge the bed and the weeds were about to get out of hand. So, we removed the wire tunnels and set the veggies free. The squash immediately headed for the aisle where it knows it isn't supposed to grow.



Since removing the wire, we've gotten the two corn beds edged, weeded and mulched. The cottontails have eaten a few of the shorter corn plants down at one end, but the damage hasn't been severe yet. Maybe the corn will make it.

Green Beans: Jo planted a row of green beans to see if we could get in a second crop this summer. We knew better than to tempt the rabbits with those. We immediately covered the beans with part of the wire we'd removed from the corn and squash. The beans are sprouting well, and they aren't getting eaten by the rabbits.

Cucumbers: The cucumbers are still producing like crazy -- many, many more cukes than I can get eaten. Jo has suggested we try drying them and burning cucumbers in the wood stove next winter. That's an idea.

Tomatoes: We've been eating a few tomatoes, especially the cherry tomatoes. We're getting close to getting into our major tomato harvest and doing some tomato canning. The tomatoes are suffering some rabbit damage. The cottontails are knocking off a lot of the lower fruits. They nibble on a few of them, but mainly it just seems as if they get under the plants and then jump up and down knocking the tomatoes off.

Garden

Saturday, 7/7/07

Sunflower out in front of Jo's studio.




Potatoes: Dug our Yukon Gold potatoes today, a total of 63 pounds. We've harvested more potatoes, but it's been a few years. While digging the potatoes, I uncovered a rabbit's nest. No wonder we have so many rabbits in the garden. They're raising their young in there. Or, I should say, they were raising their young. Rusty and Bucket may be lazy house dogs, but when those rabbits broke from the nest, those dogs' instincts kicked in. There are no more bunnies.







Tomatoes: Our first tomato harvest of the 2007 gardening season.







Internet: This morning the phone was working, but our ISP was down. It took a while, but we finally got our telephone and our ISP working at the same time.

Saturday, 7/7/07

Wednesday, 7/4/07

Tomatoes: The first tomatoes of the 2007 gardening season are almost ripe. These are a variety of cherry tomato.

Blackberries: Jo decided that today was the day to venture up to our pasture and pick blackberries. We'd been picking a few ripe berries off the plants closer to the house for a few days now. She figured she ought to be able to easily get a couple of quarts from the numerous berry vines that are taking over -- along with honey locust -- what used to be our upper pasture.

Dressing appropriately for berry picking is important. Jo couldn't take on the chiggers, ticks, snakes and berry vine thorns in the shorts and sandals she normally wears around our place during the summer. Instead, she donned tennis shoes, tall socks, long pants tucked into the socks and her green bean picking "gloves". Jo also applied some commercial insect repellent and took along a stick for fending off the snakes. All that garb plus a couple of plastic buckets made for quite a sight. I wanted to take a photo, but feared strangulation by camera strap if I tried, so the berry picking expedition went undocumented.

Jo didn't end up spending much time berry picking. She returned with a couple of dozen blackberries, about a zillion stick-tights of various types clinging to her shoes, socks and pants legs and five tick that were still crawling around looking for a nice, juicy home. It seems the birds and critters had beaten us to the blackberries up on the pasture.

Mowing: I've been doing some mowing and stockpiling the grass clippings so that we can use them to mulch the two corn beds when we remove the wire tunnels. It just isn't worth the effort to remove the wire, mulch and then replace the tunnels. All those grass clipping ought to be in pretty rank condition by the time we get around to using them, though.

Wednesday, 7/4/07

Monday, 7/2/07

Green Bean: I'm really glad that Jo and I were able to get the majority of the green beans before they were discovered by the rabbits. It seems as if a veggie can do okay in the garden for a while, but once the rabbits begin eating it, the damage soon becomes extensive.

Sweet Potatoes: Our sweet potatoes have been covered with welded wire tunnels ever since they were transplanted into the garden. Deer love sweet potato vines and we wanted to make certain they were protect should the deer happen to get into the garden. We also hoped the welded wire would discourage rabbits, even though they can squeeze through its mesh. Evidently, our hopes did not come true. We noticed nibbling here and there on the sweet potato vines. So...... This afternoon we covered the welded wire with chicken wire, just like we had to do for the emerging corn plants. The chicken wire will need to stay in place until we dig the sweet potatoes next fall right before the first frost. Fortunately, the sweet potato bed is heavily mulched. We won't be needing to get into it to do any weeding. Getting that chicken wire off after the vines have woven in and out of it ought to be a really fun experience, though. Oh, well. We know from past experience that the sweet potatoes won't do well at producing potatoes underground unless they've got plenty of health, green vines on top of the ground.

Tomatoes: While I cut sections of chicken wire to length for the sweet potatoes, Jo tied up some of the tomato plants that were growing into the path. The tomatoes are in cages, but many have outgrown their confinement. The aisle between the two rows of tomatoes was become a tomato jungle. We had to do something or else I wouldn't be able to keep it mowed and weeded.

No rain: It didn't actually rain today, but you could have wrung moisture out of the air, I think. When we went on our afternoon walk around four o'clock, the temperature was 81º and the relative humidity was 79%.

Monday, 7/2/07

Sunday, 7/1/07

Tomatoes: The tomatoes seem to appreciate the rain we've been receiving, though I'm beginning to worry about them contracting some kind of fungal disease.

Overcast Day: Very strange weather for the first of July. Our overcast skies made it seem more like fall, and while the temperature was warmer than it would be in the autumn, it still never climbed out of the seventies. A temperature at least in the low nineties would be more typical for July 1st.

Still No Telephone: Our telephone remained out all day. I made a trip to the neighbors to make certain it wasn't just us without phone service. It wasn't. It has been reported. I reckon the phone company will get around to repairing the problem tomorrow. I don't really miss the telephone; I do my best to avoid using the phone, but I do miss not being able to get on the Internet. Oh, well, I got a lot of computer housekeeping and bookkeeping done instead.

No Work Outside: Late this afternoon I decided that since it hadn't rained for several hours, I could probably at least get a little mowing done. Jo was going to take advantage of the cooler temperature by "garbing up" and going up on the pasture to pick blackberries. But...... It rained -- no thunder and lightning or heavy downpour, just enough rainfall to get everything good and wet again. We recorded another half inch of rain in our rain gauge over the past 24 hours.

Sunday, 7/1/07

Garden Update

The cauliflower and broccoli are doing fine. We should be picking within a couple of weeks.



Jo got the sweet potatoes planted and covered with wire.



The new potatoes made it back up through the mulch and are still growing.


The green beans should be blooming soon.



The tomatoes are in the garden and caged. Believe it or not, a few of them are already blooming, even as small as they are.

Garden Update