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October is a changeover month for us in our Senior Garden plots. We'll be harvesting the last of our fall garden crops, but our focus will gradually shift to getting our ground ready for the next gardening season, a job that will extend well into November. We hope to still bring in spinach, lettuce, carrots, lima beans, crowder peas, kale, red bell peppers, cabbage, broccoli, butternut squash, and possibly some cauliflower and a few late tomatoes. Fresh, undamaged tomatoes have become rather rare and precious of late as our plants wind down and insects take their toll. We have one very late planted Earlirouge tomato plant, put in after blight wiped out our main Earlirouge planting, that may keep us in fresh tomatoes right up until the first frost. We'll make one more batch of Portuguese Kale Soup this month. We're waiting on our kale to fully re-grow after picking it two weeks ago for our first batch of the soup. While kale can produce far into the fall, well past initial light frosts, we'll pull our kale plants after the next picking. They occupy the area of our main raised bed planned for garlic for next season. In this climate zone, one plants garlic in the fall, preferably in late October. Getting the garlic planted just after ones first frost allows the cloves planted to begin developing roots before winter truly sets in. We'll continue to refine our garden plan for next season as we prepare our garden plots for winter and next season. We have an initial plan roughed out already, but changes will almost certainly need to be made as we decide what to grow, how much, and where for next year. I'll be writing more later this month about garden planning and our fall gardening chores.
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Sunday, October 2, 2016 - Butternut Squash
I filled our four cubic foot garden cart with squash and left three bunches of butternuts on the ground to cure in place a bit. As squash bugs had finished off our vines, there were a lot of immature and damaged squash that went onto our compost pile. I'd earlier moved a dozen or so overripe or rotting cantaloupe and watermelon to the pile.
I did find an interesting recipe online for Easy Butternut Squash Soup. Our hill of butternuts was the old standard, Waltham Butternut Squash I got worn out moving the heavy butternuts, so I still need to collect and compost the vines. Afterward, I'll mow the area, as we had some pretty good grass breakthroughs despite using lots of grass clipping mulch to suppress weeds. I'd hoped to clear the melon patch of melons, but there still a few on the vines that may yet mature. I set out three watermelon to cut, although I'm not confident that they'll have really good flavor, as they matured in cool weather. Eventually, I'll have to clear the area, as I want to rototill the entire East Garden this fall.
Monday, October 3, 2016 - Broccoli
The five main heads I picked today ranged from four to seven inches in diameter. That's a bit smaller than we often get, but a whole lot better than the one to two inch buttoned heads we got this spring. The planting of our fall broccoli ended up being somewhat staggered, as we lost almost half of the first plants we transplanted for fall. Their replacements may yet yield a few more main heads. In addition, we should be able to pick broccoli sideshoots for several weeks. After tasting a bite or two of the broccoli, I was really tempted to get out some dip and devour a good bit of the picking. Instead, I soaked, cut, blanched, and froze it for future use. Articles One of the nice things about fall and winter for me is that it allows time to work on some new feature stories and how-to articles for this site. Working as an educator for almost forty years and moonlighting as a writer during the later years of teaching, it's nice now in full retirement to be able to write at my leisure. When I was writing for commercial web sites (1, 2), the weekly deadlines didn't allow for much in-depth development of columns or long-term investigative reporting. I currently have feature stories and how-to articles in progress on growing asparagus, sweet corn, peas, herbs, end-of-season gardening chores, and a raised bed update that includes our new herb bed around our shallow well. Often, such articles get started, but languish on my hard drive for a year or more before publication. Still missing from our how-to series are articles about growing tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, lettuce, beans, spinach, and lots of other crops. I think I've left the easy ones till last. But then, almost everyone knows how to grow good tomatoes and green beans.
Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - Gloxinia Seed Ripens
I'd noted a seed head just beginning to split open this morning on one of our gloxinias in the basement, but then spaced on checking the plants on our dining room table. The particular seed head that burst open today was from a purple blooming, open pollinated gloxinia, probably of mostly the Empress variety parentage. I'd marked the stem of the bloom with a loosely attached twist tie, something I often forget to do after hand pollinating blooms. After carefully cutting the seed head stem with scissors, I turned it over a paper bowl I'm collecting gloxinia seed in. It appeared that 50-100 seeds dumped out of the bloom. I set the bloom spike in the bowl to dry. As it dries over the next day or so, it will yield even more seed. After the seed has had a week or two to air dry, it gets dumped into plastic or glass vials and goes into the freezer for long term storage. I still have some saved gloxinia seed from 1991 in the freezer that germinated well the last time I seeded it (when re-starting our gloxinia collection in 2014).
Recommended Seed Suppliers After mentioning on Monday some garden articles I'm currently working on, I got busy this morning and updated our page of Recommended Seed Suppliers. While the page gets updated throughout the year, I share some of it here sometime in October or November each year. Our list of recommended seed suppliers is based on our totally subjective experiences with the vendors listed. Seed varieties available, quality, price, shipping & handling charges, and customer service all figure into our evaluation, winnowed a bit using The Garden Watchdog ratings from Dave's Garden. Some of the relationships run back well over forty years, while others are more recent additions.
There really weren't any major changes in the listing since I last updated it this summer. But doing the update reminds me to check my spelling and grammar again and to run the link checker. The full Suppliers page also lists some other seed houses folks might like to try, along with some seed starting products we like and use.
Thursday, October 6, 2016 - Way to Go, Burpee! (and the Burpee Foundation)
Thanks to Angela N. for use of the photo at right via Creative Commons Attribution.
It was also time to bring in the last of our hummingbird feeders. I last saw (or heard) a hummingbird around the back porch on Tuesday, and that was just one lonely hummingbird. I almost missed seeing it, but heard the distinctive hum of its wings and caught a brief glimpse of it at a feeder. While the hummingbirds that are with us all summer become used to us on the porch and even look in the windows when their feeders are dry, transient hummingbirds are pretty shy. Another Garden Delicacy: Homegrown Peas I worked late last night and again today on a how-to story, Another Garden Delicacy: Homegrown Peas. I pretty well finished the text of the article about 3 A.M. this morning, having worked on it for several evenings this week. When I finally got up this morning and well into the afternoon, I worked editing and adding images and proofreading. I posted the story a little after 3 in the afternoon. I actually enjoy the planning, organization, and writing. It's what I do. The technical aspects of web design and the proofreading become a bit tedious. But such activities also challenge the mind, not a bad thing for a retired senior citizen. Aided by a bit of Johnny Walker Red, the words seemed to flow last night. And probably because of Mr Johnny Walker, I had a lot of proofing and correcting to do today. Each evening as I wrote, I found myself craving peas. So today in the grocery, I bought a package of steamer snap peas, something I'd usually pass by. But we didn't grow Sugar Snaps this season, so I had little will power to resist the peas on sale. They turned out to be delicious, almost as good as homegrown. Now I need to rework our East Garden plan for next season to include Sugar Snaps. (Done!)
Monday, October 10, 2016 - No Frost in Sight Yet
Our first frost has occurred here over the years anywhere between October 5 and early November. From the Dave's Garden First Frost/Freeze page, our typical first frost date is October 17. Combining our past experience with the climatic data provided by Dave's Garden, it appears that our rather late planted fall garden crops may have time to mature. We've already begun to harvest lettuce, cabbage, and broccoli and continue to bring in lots of lovely red peppers. Our row of kale is recovering nicely from a thorough picking last month, and our double row of carrots are now maturing good roots. The only fall crops that are in question in beating the frost are our rows of crowder peas and lima beans.
As my wife, Annie, and I chatted this morning, I noticed the desktop photos on my laptop which was in the office backing up and my big screen for my Mac Mini. They sort of depict our extremes of seasons when looking out our kitchen window. We're now in between the two images in season, but winter will soon be upon us. I need to get started getting our garden ready for fall, winter, and the next growing season. Later
Feeling that I'd been a bit lazy today, I got out and cleaned up some stuff in our main raised garden bed and picked a bunch of deep red Earliest Red Sweet peppers. On my way back to the house, spying the curing butternuts, I decided that we should sample the squash with our supper this evening. Baking Butternuts I selected one of the smaller butternuts curing on the porch for our dinner. After washing it and breaking off its stem, I sliced the squash lengthwise, top to bottom. I cleaned the seeds from the squash and also cut a small slit towards the top. The egg area and slit got filled first with butter, then with brown sugar. Before popping the squash into the oven for about an hour at 400° F, I sprinkled a little salt and pepper over them. Some recipes call for a bit of nutmeg, while others omit the brown sugar in favor of maple syrup.
Our dinner consisted of some round steak, pounded thin and tenderized, the butternuts, and some freshly picked broccoli.
Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - Cleaning up the East Garden
In past years, our melon patch got cleared in either August or September. I'd just pull up the melon plants from their hill and drag them to our compost pile. Since I waited so long, many of the vines were dry and brittle. So I had to pick up the vines by hand. But since the soil was very dry, I was able to drive our truck across the patch without fear of creating a lot of soil compaction. I loaded the remaining melons and vines in the truck and dumped them on our working compost pile. I left the grass clipping mulch that hadn't broken down yet and will turn it under when I rototill the East Garden. I'd really prefer that a frost occur before I till, as I'd hate to have to mow down our eighty foot rows of zinnias and nasturtiums before their blooming season is over. Maybe I'll just till around them. Two bonuses came from clearing the patch. I filled a quart bag with zinnia seed. I also, wonder of wonders, found a good cantaloupe at full slip. The zinnia seed will get spread out on a cookie sheet to dry for a week or two. I think I'm going to let the cantaloupe set a day or two before I cut it.
Giant Pumpkins In case you missed them, I stumbled across a couple of pumpkin stories today on The Washington Post. One tells of a Pumpkin weighing 1,910 pounds winning a contest. The other relates that a Rhode Island man’s giant pumpkin set a North American record for massive gourds. That one weighed in at 2,261.5 pounds. Sadly, our pumpkins didn't make it this year. I didn't get them sprayed in time to save them from an invasion of squash bugs. Maybe next year, but we definitely won't be growing any one ton pumpkins.
Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - Growing Asparagus
Being rained out from outdoor gardening, I watered our porch and inside plants and moved on to finishing a how-to article on Growing Asparagus. I haven't started an asparagus patch since 2006. Writing the article had me reaching back in my memory and consulting my ancient garden logs and plans as to how I did the task. Images of starting the asparagus patch or the plants getting started from seed under our plant lights were nonexistent on my hard drive. Google searches of my web sites (1, 2) didn't help much either, although it revealed that I'd published a lot of asparagus photos over the years. So much of the how-to is text, although I spiced it up with many photos of our asparagus patches from over the years. Our raised bed of asparagus is now ten years old. The second patch we care for, Bonnie's Asparagus Patch, is well over twenty years old. Both are still going strong. I'm already looking forward to another spring asparagus feast beginning next April.
I disposed of the last of our excess butternut squash on Thursday. The manager at the food bank took mercy on me and let me use one of their large shopping carts to hold and move the heavy butternuts. The fifty to sixty butternuts almost filled the shopping cart. I was a bit unsure about delivering so many butternuts, but the manager had some knowledge about winter squash. "They'll store," he quipped. Most of Friday was taken up with a six month checkup with my heart surgeon. Neither he nor his staff could find any concerns with my heart, so I'm anticipating it being good for another hundred thousand miles. I published another how-to article yesterday, One Last Raised Garden Bed. It tells of our construction of a raised bed around three sides of our shallow well. The raised bed project presented some different requirements than our other raised beds as described in Building a Raised Garden Bed. Because of the new bed's proximity to a water source we use for watering the garden and water for our dogs, I didn't want to use treated lumber for the construction. I also couldn't afford our preferred 6x6 timbers in untreated cedar, as it runs two to three times the cost of treated landscape timbers. But dropping back to 4x4 cedar timbers seems to have worked out well for the raised bed that will hopefully serve for many summers to come as our herb garden.
I also spread soil acidifier over the area planned for potatoes next season. After the soil amendments have a winter to work, I'll do a pH test of the soil next spring to see if I need to adjust pH levels a bit more. Instead of just tilling the part of the East Garden we used this year, I went ahead and turned over the entire 80' x 80' garden plot. Half of the plot had been in turf for two years, so that section was fairly hard, bumpy tilling. The section where we grew sweet corn, potatoes, and melons this season tilled fairly easily. Today's tilling was an east-west affair (left-right in the photo below). If the weather holds and I get to till the plot again this fall, I'll go north and south. Part of the choice for east-west tilling was so as to not too greatly disturb our gorgeous, eighty foot row of zinnias. I'd mowed down the row of nasturtiums yesterday that ran down the center of the plot.
The twenty-some butternut squash I'd selected to save for winter use got bagged and moved to the basement today. We store our butternuts (and potatoes when we have lots of them) in large, burlap bags. We got our last bunch of them in 2014 from S&S Worldwide, although smaller quantities of the big bags are available from Amazon. Since we buy the gunny sacks by the dozen, I guess we're prepared in case the family wants to have bag or 3-legged races here sometime.
Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - Kale Soup Day
Even though I got started thawing saved chicken broth before 8 A.M., I'll end up putting away the canning equipment around midnight. But the effort is definitely worth the result. As I began picking kale early this morning, I realized that we might have a larger than normal batch of the soup this time around. Our kale, last picked a month ago, had regrown splendidly. I'd given it a little balanced fertilizer after the first picking, and ended up picking just twelve of the fifteen foot kale row. That produced two packed, five gallon buckets of lovely kale greens.
When I dug, I was pleased to find that our carrots were a bit beyond the baby carrot stage. The freshly dug carrots pulled easily from our currently dry soil and didn't require peeling, just a good scrubbing with a vegetable brush before going into the soup. They'll definitely make a nice crop, as there appears to be little chance of a frost for the next week or so. Of course, I also noticed that the tops of the carrots had been bobbed and that there were deer tracks in the garden. That one is a first for us. A normal batch of kale soup for us fills a twelve quart kettle. This time around, I had to split the soup between the twelve quart and an eight quart kettle. The homegrown ingredients in the soup this time included fresh kale, carrots, potatoes, onions, and garlic, frozen peas, dried kidney beans, and canned green beans, tomatoes, and tomato purée - all from our garden. Since I haven't had a home flock since my farming days, the chicken and broth came from the grocery, as did the smoked sausage.
As I've worked on this posting, I've been consuming some kale soup and a delicious bread my wife, Annie, brought home from the grocery tonight. I'm also keeping a close eye on the pressure gauge of the pressure canner. Canning quarts that include meat takes 90 minutes at ten pounds per square inch of pressure. Of course, it takes the canner fifteen minutes to heat up and vent steam, and another twenty minutes to cool down enough to open. When the quarts of soup are done, I'll do a load of pints (another 75 minutes plus of canning). What's left over after canning seven quarts and nine pints will either go into the fridge or be frozen. Two canning loads in a night is about my limit these days. Taking a chance here on being politically incorrect, we use kale soup like protestant chicken broth. Whenever one of us has the sniffles or signs of the flu, we break out the kale soup for a super shot of natural vitamins. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. But the soup is always good.
As to the Crockett books, long since out of print, Crockett's Victory Garden Ah, the timer just went off for the batch of quarts. After it cools down, I'll start the pints. Fortunately, I only do this task about twice a year. If you noticed from our daily splash shot or the top left photo of this posting, the soybeans around our house were getting harvested today. Todd Jackson's farm crew started harvesting the ninety acre field of beans around three o'clock yesterday and finished about suppertime today. Todd generously lets us use a small field east of our house that he rents for our large East Garden plot.
Without emptying my bucket, I headed back to the isolation plot by the barn where I'd noticed some nice hybrid peppers maturing the last time I mowed. I was pleasantly surprised to find several ripe red and yellow peppers along with four ripe tomatoes. I also cut green peppers from the plants there, as we have all the ripe red peppers we can use. As I picked, I thought that I should have brought a five gallon bucket for the picking, but I find the 12 quart bucket Annie got me for my birthday to be pretty handy. Still catching up on gardening chores I'd ignored yesterday, I grabbed a sharp knife and headed out to our narrow raised bed of broccoli and cauliflower. Our fall brassicas got off to a rough start this year. I transplanted the first of them on August 5, but had to put in more plants on August 15, as dry weather took about half of the original transplanting. At that point, I'd hoped to possibly get a little broccoli from the planting before frost.
As usual, the longer season cauliflower isn't yet ready to pick, especially since most of it was transplanted late.
With some thundershowers headed our way, I hope to rather quickly give our East Garden plot another pass with the rototiller this afternoon. Once it starts raining each fall, there often aren't many windows in time where the soil dries out enough to till.
By the time I put the lawn tractor and attached tiller in the garage and cleaned the tine housing, it began to rain really hard. Thunderstorms persisted for the next twenty-four hours, leaving us by mid-afternoon today with 3 1/2 inches of rain! Along with the rain, we've had a dramatic drop in temperature. Today's high temperature was just 59° F. One weather site is predicting an overnight low Friday night/Saturday morning of just 35° F. That's pretty close to frost temperatures. Rained out from outdoor gardening today, I worked with our collection of gloxinia plants. Many of the plants we'd been enjoying on our dining room table had finished blooming. I trimmed spent flowers from the plants before moving many of them under our plant lights in the basement. I also brought some plants ready to bloom up from the basement and others down from the sunroom.
Some of our gloxinia blooms are a bit droopy. I think the lessening amount of light each day may be responsible, although that's just a guess. Tux, one of our cats, wasn't terribly impressed with the plants or my taking his picture.
The beautiful flowers edging our main raised bed were unaffected by the cool temperatures and continued their incredible production of fall blooms. Our broccoli, cauliflower, kale, bell peppers, cowpeas, lima beans, and carrots still actively growing in our raised beds also looked good. Our row of spinach along the south edge of our main raised bed looked terrible, but that was mostly from insect damage and yellowed leaves. Unwilling to pay $3-4 for a bag of spinach at the grocery, I took my good scissors and 12 quart bucket to the row and sheared it down. Then I sorted through the cut leaves and was pleasantly surprised to half fill the bucket with good spinach leaves. Many of the leaves were larger than what one gets at the grocery, but ours were also heavily savoyed...and definitely not sprayed with any insecticide while they were growing.
With the heavy rain we had last week, I'm going to just have to relax and enjoy the late fall weather and harvests. Our garden soil will be too wet to work for some time to come. I'm glad I got our East Garden plot tilled last week, as it currently looks like a good spot to lose a shoe in the mud if you stepped into it. Note that I left our eighty foot row of zinnias along the north edge of our East Garden plot. They're in full bloom and too pretty to cut down. I did till along either side of them, though.
The best fall color I've seen this season was at the edge of the nearby Turtle Creek Reservoir. My brother, Chet, visited last weekend, and we both noticed the display as we drove across the causeway of the reservoir (in our search for a breakfast spot). Getting back to gardening, I snapped a shot on Saturday of one more Mecate yellow pepper growing in an isolation plot. I need to pick it before it rots. I also grabbed a shot of some volunteer dill and a fully blooming marigold, and some asparagus seed. I try to save a little asparagus seed from our patches each year, just in case we experience a disaster.
I got started on something far less sexy than gardening yesterday, but quite necessary. I began washing out trays and seed flats used this year. I try to keep up with this task through the growing season, but always end up with lots of dirty trays, inserts, and flower pots that need to be cleaned and sterilized. Doing this task same me lots of bucks over buying all new seed starting supplies for the coming year. The "sterilizing" part of the cleaning is somewhat questionable. After cleaning the trays, pots, etc., I put them through a bleach bath to try to kill any disease organisms that might be present.
Having a set of replacement leathers on hand, I started with the easier to replace bottom leather. It turned out that replacement put the pump back in working order, and I didn't have to replace the cup leather, a far more involved job. When the voting went quickly, I headed for our local Walmart, as I needed to get my pneumonia booster shot. I also got a flue shot while there. The pharmacist who gave the shots was a man I'd coached in fifth grade basketball and whose mother I taught with for years. It's a good feeling to see kids you've worked with grow up to be happy and successful individuals. My one gardening endeavour yesterday was to package some Earliest Red Sweet pepper seed and pop them into the freezer. The seed had been drying on a paper plate for days as I did a germination test on it. The seed tested at a very good 90%. I planned on going slow yesterday (and possibly today as well), as I'd worked our compost piles on Monday and then put together some heavy steel shelving One other job completed this week was entering an order at the Greenhouse Megastore for trays, pots, and inserts to be used next spring. It's a little early for such an order, but I might just beat some price increases by ordering now. Because of their selection, fair prices, good response to requests to carry items, and excellent service, the Megastore has become our go-to source for trays, pots, hanging baskets, and the like. Between shoveling compost, pounding together steel shelving, cleaning the plant room, pulling a heavy pump head, and getting shots in both arms, I'm a bit sore. One of the glories of retirement is that I can take a day or two off to recharge before getting back to jobs that I enjoy doing.
Saturday, October 29, 2016 - Apples and Carrots
My first job for the day was to pick apples from our Granny Smith tree. It quickly became obvious that I probably should have picked a couple of weeks ago. About two-thirds of what I picked were culls that went to the compost pile. But we got around twenty good apples to use for applesauce or pies. That's twenty more than we got last year! We have sooty mold on the apples again this year. It doesn't really hurt them, but you have to soak and brush the apples to remove the mold. I'll also need to spray our apple trees with a strong fungicide yet this season, as sooty mold can persist on tree bark. It was a precursor to the fire blight that killed our standard Stayman Winesap tree years ago and set back our semi-dwarf Granny Smith tree for several years.
I was able to reach all the apples on the tree without using a stepladder (or standing in the bed of our pickup truck). While the head of my fruit picker basket came off the pole a few times, the telescoping fifteen foot pole was enough to reach the very highest hanging apples.
East Garden I found a couple of little jobs to do in our large East Garden plot Thursday afternoon. My original plan was to seed the plot to buckwheat after tilling to provide some winter cover to help prevent soil erosion. The heavy rain that interrupted my second tilling of the plot prevented stepping into the area for days. When the ground finally dried a bit, I found that mice had gotten into the buckwheat seed stored in our garage. I usually keep such seed in plastic buckets with tight fitting lids, but had run short of buckets. I cleaned up the remaining seed and broadcast it over the plot.
While sowing the buckwheat seed, I remembered that we'd lost a sage plant that marks one of the corners of the East Garden. I've been experimenting with using perennial purple sage as corner and halfway markers for the plot. While good sized sage plants can run five or six dollars each at a garden center, we grew our own, gradually moving a few leftovers into larger and larger pots. The plant I put in on Thursday was the last of our sage transplants and had been growing in an old nursery pot. I've used garden stakes in the past to mark the corners of our East Garden, but found that they heaved, got knocked out of the ground, or rotted. Using sage hasn't been a perfect solution, as I've had to replace several of the plants. But the sage certainly looks a lot nicer than a wooden stake. Standing Rib Roast and Gloxinias
I've been trying to use up all the stuff in our big freezer that is getting a bit old. I remembered that I had some kind of a large beef roast in the freezer. I thought I might pull the roast and cut it in half while still frozen, or even after cooking it, and save half of it. The large roast turned out to be a six pound standing rib roast I'd bought and froze almost a year ago for a family gathering that never happened. I suppose I could have cut the roast into ribeye steaks, but I cooked the whole thing instead, using a Paula Dean recipe. It made a great supper for Annie and I last night, only...
If there's enough roast left, we may try some Pulled Roast Beef Tacos next week. Since we're working folks, we're used to making roasts, turkeys, and such last for many meals. While my French Dip warmed and on a break from writing this posting, I brought a tray of blooming gloxinias down from our sunroom. I've noticed that most of the gloxinias that have bloomed from our June seeding are purple.
Talk about your first world problems...too much roast beef and too many beautiful, purple gloxinias. We're pretty blessed.
We did get our large East Garden plot tilled and seeded with buckwheat. While we'll have seedling weeds to turn under next spring, fall tilling helps break up sod, especially in the area rotated out this season that we'll be using next season. If the buckwheat germinates, it should help prevent soil erosion.
Our remaining spring carrots got rinsed, trimmed, and dried and went to a local food bank along with several pounds of new carrots. I feel a little guilty not giving our best to the food bank, but the spring carrots simply wouldn't store until next spring. Going to the food bank, they should get used up in a hurry. I'd hoped to pick and boil some kale today, but got caught up in doing other stuff. When I went out to look at the kale, I decided to pick and shell some of our maturing cowpeas, or Granny's Little Brown Crowder Peas. I shelled the cowpeas while the bones from our standing rib roast boiled, some carrots and potatoes boiled, and the last of the good prime rib cut into one inch square chunks baked a bit in the oven (to cook off the fat). I'm trying the Irish Prime Rib Pie recipe today that I found last week, and also am gearing up to make Pulled Roast Beef Tacos tomorrow. Since my wife, Annie, still works a full-time job, I get to be the cook here...and I enjoy trying new recipes.
There has been a continuing stream of online articles lately, pro and con, about genetically modified crops. Possibly pushed by the powerhouse agribusiness lobby, many of the articles and studies seem to debunk consumers' fears about the long term effects of consuming GMO crops or the livestock produced from them. As a home gardener, I obviously don't grow any genetically modified crops. I do spray Roundup herbicide along the edges of our yard that abut roundup ready corn and beans to hold back weeds. The farmer cuts back his herbicide spray close to our yard to protect our yard and garden! Even so, I'm one of those folks that think not enough research has been done on the effects of consumption of GMO crops for them to be considered totally safe. I got started thinking about GMOs after recently reading an intriguing article by Danny Hakim in the New York Times: Doubts About the Promised Bounty of Genetically Modified Crops. Hakim compares the yield results of GMO crops in the United States and Canada to those of countries where GMOs are prohibited. He asserts that the promised yield increases of GMO crops over traditional crops is minimal, if any. He also notes the increased herbicide use by US farmers:
That's just my two cents worth on the subject.
Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening |
, as leaving an inch or two of stem on them allows better curing and storage.
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are still available used at very reasonable prices through 
After reviewing the ballot for our area earlier this week, I went ahead and voted early yesterday. At my age, who knows if I'll still be around to vote on election day!
Like many rural areas, our early voting center is the clerk's office in the county courthouse. I always enjoy seeing 
I found the time to vote when a job I was doing for once took far less time that expected. Our new shallow well pump had begun to act up several weeks ago. I opened it up and reseated its bottom leather which fixed things for a while. Then the pump stopped working entirely.
Our gardening in October didn't work out quite the way we'd planned. That's not a bad thing, though, as unseasonably warm weather kept our fall crops growing throughout the month. It also kept us from getting our raised beds ready for next season. If the current extended weather forecast is accurate, we should have plenty of nice days in early November to prepare our garden beds.
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