From Newsgroup: rec.gardens.edible

it sure has been one of those years... :)

i'll go in reverse from last night where we went through
several buckets of beefsteak tomatoes to get them peeled
and cored and chunked up so they would fit in the canning
jars. 20 quarts plus a pint in the jars. which is not bad
for a first picking off 9 plants.

the other harvests i have coming in now are the peppers
and the green peppers are pretty much done for now but if
we get another month without a hard frost we can get another
harvest of some kind off them. the hot peppers i grow are
called Beaver Dam and they have done well for me every year
i have grown them. they have a similar heat level to the
jalapeno peppers (which have not been reliable for me in
the several times i've grown them). i have a lot of plants
out there and about a half dozen peppers per plant or more
so i've already put some in the freezer and used some for
making chili but also given away a few dozen and still have
a few buckets of peppers out there.

the dry bean harvest is also starting to come in and that
will be on-going up until we get hard frosts and the later
beans are finishing up. in the meantime i can pick dry pods
off plants that have already finished. my bean season has
not been normal either as it has had root rot troubles in
every garden and not limited to only certain varieties (i
plant 50-70 varieties each season). i also know that it is
not due to planting during cold weather because i planted
later than normal and it was pretty warm and also i didn't
change my planting method either as it has usually been
good. so i really don't know exactly what happened there
so it could just be down to our most normal garden soil that
has a lot of clay and is somewhat compacted but i do loosen
it up when planting and my germination rates are close to
100%.

the onion harvest was good, we didn't grow any of the
normal sweet and mild onions that Mom likes the best as the
greenhouse said they didn't get their order that they
requested but we did grow a nice crop of large yellow onions
and those will get used up or given away in the next few
months. the garlic harvest also looks pretty good
considering.

i have gardens to weed and the lawn to mow so there is
never a shortage of things do it.

in the middle of this all we had a long dry spell where we
had about 3 inches of rain most of the past three months
and then we finally had about six inches of rains recently
when i'd really have liked things to be drier.

we also had the smokey season that was pretty brutal but
gladly there we could be ok by staying inside.

my back also had some trouble for a few months and i am
happy that it is resolving ok without any major followup
needed other than my normal routine. all because of a sneeze
and an ancient injury. training my body to sneeze different
is not easy and when some sneezes come on i have almost no
warning at all.

i didn't grow any strawberries this season as last year i
turned under the strawberry patch as it was full of weeds
and the critters were eating what few berries i could get
growing in there. i had to spend a week during planting
season to get the whole garden cleared of thistles that
were going to flower and in our subsoil clay those roots
were getting down several feet. yeah, i needed that like
i needed a hole in the head but it did get done. i need
to weed it again a little today to get some grasses out
before they drop seeds. the goal was to get the garden
covered for this season so i didn't have to keep weeding it
but that hasn't happened yet. always too many other things
coming up and the back injury really sidelined me a lot
this season.

one other project i did for the fun of it and to do
something different to help keep weeds down in a small
garden was to plant my mix of cosmo seeds (mostly yellow,
orange and some reddish tints on the ends of some of
the flowers). last summer when harvesting i was trying
to get the seeds from only the yellow flowers and those
were what i planted but there are still a good amount of
orange flowers that would come up from the seeds that
were dropped in that garden. as soon as i saw any orange
i would remove that plant so most of what i have harvested
for seeds now should be yellows. Mom doesn't really like
orange so this was just a fun thing to do and i'll plant
these seeds next year and continue the selecting of the
yellows and leave a few tinted edge flowers in the mix too
since they are interesting. the other day i picked about
a quart of seeds and those plants can get pretty big so
i easily have enough seeds to do an acre or more if i
wanted to (i don't). i'll give away the seeds to anyone
who wants them as they are great later summer flowering
plant for the bees and i enjoy harvesting seeds and
weeding out the orange plants that show up even if the
patch is full of bees on the flowers, they won't bother
me as long as the bees don't get trapped in my clothes
or i don't grab a bee by accident.

another project i did finally get going was to
transplant some more creeping low growing thyme along an
edge of one garden to get it established. it is much
easier to weed the thyme (and more enjoyable too) than to
have to weed the same space repeatedly (which i've done
probably fifty times over the years). the thyme does
suppress a lot of other weeds from growing and it looks
nice and keeps the soil covered - i wouldn't really mind
if it took over the entire area and i can just poke in
whatever plants i want to grow in there. i wouldn't even
mind if it took over all of the remaining areas of grass
and whatever that i mow. i hate mowing and would rather
weed thyme. it looks great when it flowers and it smells
wonderful when i'm sitting there on my ground pillow
weeding - it certainly smells better than the lawn mower
and is more peaceful too...

life goes on... :)


songbird
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