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The late James Underwood Crockett wrote in his August introduction in Crockett's Victory Garden, "August is the cornucopia month of the year..." He also added the good advice that "There's no reason to grow a vegetable garden unless the vegetables are harvested when they're young and tender, long before they reach the age at which they're usually sold in supermarkets." While our reduced garden this year won't be a true cornucopia, we'll be doing a lot of harvesting. We'll continue to pick tomatoes and peppers all month. In fact, those plants should produce right up until our first frost. Although covered with weeds, we'll have green beans to pick and spring carrots to dig. And from all the blooms on our July transplanted cucumber plants, we should be getting some nice, long, sweet Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers soon. We have butternut squash and pumpkins growing in our limited East Garden plot, but we won't harvest any of them until September. The tomatoes and pepper plants in the East Garden may give us a bonus to our plantings in our main garden. A lot of our effort this month will be in getting our fall garden crops going. Our fall carrots were seeded last month and are now up. We have parsley, basil, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, lettuce, and spinach to transplant into our main garden beds. As of today, we may have about 78 days of growing season left before our first frost date of October 17. Of course, that first frost could come earlier or later, and some crops can survive a light frost.
If you're figuring how many days to harvest the old fashioned way, looking at seed packets and catalogs for days-to-maturity, be sure to add 10-14 days to those numbers. The shorter days of late summer add a week or so to plants' maturity dates.
A few nearly unreadable lines from the image at right are helpful: "Almost certainly, however, you will receive frost from November 7 through April 1. "You are almost guaranteed that you will not get frost from April 28 through September 24." The first frost in the fall is hard to predict. We had one year when we picked fresh lettuce (with the help of a floating row cover) for our Thanksgiving Day feast! Other years, we've had a light frost around October 5. With all the strange weather climate change has brought, I wonder if our frost dates may change as radically as have rainfall (irregular) and wind speeds (much higher now). On my morning check of our main garden, I found a stink bug on one of our tomatoes. Both stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs feeding on tomatoes are supposed to be what causes dead, white flesh under the tomatoes' skins. So I sprayed the tomatoes again with neem oil
Following Jim Crockett's sage advice about harvesting young vegetables, I dug our spring carrots today. There weren't a lot of carrots to dig, as I only planted a ten foot long double row of them. Getting overgrown by weeds limited both the size and number of carrots produced. But I did get enough (2# 14 oz) to hold us over until our recently planted fall carrots mature.
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I also noted lots of cracked tomatoes. Rain after an extended dry spell causes rapid growth of the tomatoes and cracks the skins that can't stretch fast enough to contain the rapid new interior growth. This is the same problem we've had in the past with sweet potatoes. I discarded seriously cracked tomatoes and those where rot had begun, but was able to pick a good many more with minor cracks. If we continue to get timely rainfall, the cracking problem should go away on its own. I spent most of the rest of the day yesterday finishing mowing our lawn and the unplanted areas of our East Garden.
Thursday, August 9, 2018 - Gloxinias in Bloom
Gloxinias can bloom at any time during the year. Our plants are all two or more years old. They seem to sense the seasons and bloom during the summer. To get winter blooms, we have to start new plants from seed in June. And with way too many gloxinias already, I haven't started any new ones in a few years. I have been hand pollinating some of the blooms and collecting seed when it's ready. One problem with our gloxinias on the dining room table this year is that our cats, mostly one year olds, like to lay in and between the plant trays. They also bite and tear the plant leaves. Since gloxinias are pretty hardy plants, they survive and bloom. If you're interesting in growing gloxinias, here are several pages I maintain on the subject:
Rain We finally got a good, overnight rain this week. We received 1.25" of precipitation Tuesday night. Things have greened up considerably. The rain necessitated weeding our newly planted rows of carrots of a lot of seedling weeds. When the carrot plants get a little more size on them, I'll mulch right up to the plants to hold in soil moisture and prevent weed growth. Before the rain, I heavily watered our bed of cucumbers. I knew rain was predicted, but I wanted to mulch the bed. I don't like to mulch dry ground, as the mulch can soak up a lot of rainfall and leave the soil underneath fairly dry. So I dumped about fifteen gallons of water in the 3' x 15' (interior dimensions) bed before spreading grass clipping mulch over it. There are now lots of small cucumbers low on the vines. Since these cukes are touching the ground, most of them are curled. As the vines set fruit higher on the trellis, we'll begin getting the long, thin Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers that are ideal for making pickles. The curled cucumbers will go to friends and family, as well as on a salad or two here at home. Friday, August 10, 2018 - Freezing Green Beans
My wife, Annie, and I made a small picking a week ago. Today, I pulled the bean plants and stripped off the good beans. I ended up filling a twelve quart bucket with raw beans, although some of them were pretty rough. Looking over the small harvest, I realized that getting out the pressure canner to put up the beans would be a bit of overkill. So I decided to freeze the beans as cut beans. I actually like canned green beans better than frozen ones, but there just weren't enough beans to make more than a few pints of canned green beans. And, we still have several jars of canned green beans in the pantry from last season. Cleaning the beans was a bit of a nightmare. They had lots and lots of blooms, grass clippings, and other material clinging to them. I rinsed the beans several times, but eventually ended up rinsing them one bean at a time!
There's a lot written online about freezing beans without blanching (or scalding) them first. I actually don't blanch our pepper strips before freezing them. But the blanching step is said to help kill enzymes that cause the beans to lose flavor and color. The step probably kills off some bacteria as well. So with due respect to the folks not blanching their beans, I chose to blanch/scald ours today for the Ball Blue Book's recommended three minutes before plunging them into ice water to cool them.
When the beans have dried a bit, they go onto a cooking sheet and into our kitchen freezer. After a few hours, or in tonight's case, overnight, they'll go into a ziplock bag for future use. Frozen green beans are one of the many ingredients in a dish my lovely wife named "seduction fish." It has a cousin named "seduction chicken," but the fish actually worked a whole lot better! One of these days, I may get the recipe added to our list of online recipes. With our bean plants out of the way, I can now begin to recover the center section of our main raised garden bed from the weeds that overwhelmed it. I anticipate some serious weedeating, followed by rototilling. We have parsley, broccoli, cauliflower, and kale transplants waiting to go into the ground. Saturday, August 11, 2018 - Cucumbers!
Since these are early cukes borne low on the vines, there is some insect damage on them, as most of them were laying on the ground. But they'll probably be a hit at our local food bank. I know the one small cucumber I sliced into my salad for lunch was delicious. Besides the cucumbers, I picked a few tomatoes and a lot of peppers today. The tomatoes were almost all cracked on top, a result of our return to rains after a dry spell. The peppers are beautiful, although I threw away nearly as many as I picked. Many of the pitched peppers had blossom end rot. Our next picking of cucumbers will probably go to making sweet pickle relish. We still have bread and butter pickles left in the pantry that we put up last summer, although I might yet do another batch of them or of dill chips. Eventually, I'll let some of the cucumbers fatten and yellow almost to the point of rotting for seed saving. Main Garden Bed
I snapped a couple of shots of the tilled soil. The one on the left is from the same vantage point as the shot I used yesterday. The photo on the right was taken from the other side of the bed to avoid shooting into the evening sun. The bed will need to sit for a day or two before I rototill it again to get it planting ready. When I do that, I'll work in some peat moss, lime, and fertilizer. And then, it should be ready for planting and transplanting. Monday, August 13, 2018 - Sweet Relish We like pickle relish on hot dogs, in tartar sauce, and in making potato, chicken, and ham salad. Some folks like it in their deviled eggs. For the amounts we use of it, it's not terribly expensive, although we seem to run out of it often. With lots of cucumbers and red peppers on hand, I decided to try making a good relish. My previous attempt last summer following a Dummies recipe yielded a rather runny relish. So I did a better web search for recipes and came up with three that I liked, each with its own slight variation on ingredients and methods. Sweet Relish Recipes
Since I needed to save some seed from our Earliest Red Sweet bell peppers, I began making the relish by chopping up two red peppers. When saving pepper seed, one can harvest the seed and still use the pepper flesh for cooking or freezing. I took seed from five peppers, with the flesh of three going into the freezer as pepper strips. Moving on to the cucumbers, I found deseeding the cukes to be rather time consuming. After removing the ends and peeling off areas of flesh with brown spots from six Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers, I split them lengthwise and scraped the seeds out with a tablespoon. This was not a new task, as I do it each year when saving cucumber seed. It was a whole lot less smelly and messy this time around, as when harvesting seed for saving, one uses very ripe to overripe yellowed cucumbers.
With the food chopper out, I chopped onion for the relish. I also pretty well pulverized some garlic. It's not listed in the recipes below, but is listed in the Better Homes and Gardens' Bread and Butter Pickle recipe that is similar to the relish recipes above. At times when we've run out of relish, I have chopped up some bread and butter pickles as a substitute. I once again employed the old Chef Tell trick of smashing canning salt into the finely chopped garlic to absorb garlic juice. Doing so prevents anyone from getting a big chunk of garlic in whatever you're preparing. The salt is part of the recipe anyway as part of the brining.
Then it was just a matter of heating up the cider vinegar, sugar, and spices, adding the cucumber mix, and boiling it for ten minutes or so. Water bath canning time for pints was ten minutes in boiling water. It turned out to be a lot of work for just one pint and three half pint jars of our own canned pickle relish. And, one really should wait a week or two before sampling the stuff, as that gives the ingredients time to flavor the mix. But I'll know next time around to use more cucumbers when making relish. I only used six, when I had sixteen on hand! The extras along with a whole bunch of lovely red peppers and some cracked, but not rotting tomatoes went to my wife's co-workers. For readers looking for a more traditional recipe listing:
Note that six JLP cucumbers are probably equivalent to about eight of the shorter, fatter cucumbers one finds in groceries. Since I haven't tasted the resulting relish as yet, I'll not be adding sweet relish to our recipes as yet. If this batch turns out to be as disappointing as last year's did, it will never get posted and we'll just go back to buying Vlasic Sweet Relish. Spraying It seems as if I'm having to do more spraying this season than in the past. Since we lost our butternuts and pumpkins to squash bugs last year, I've been spraying them every 5-7 days. I sprayed them last evening with Captain Jack's Deadbug Brew and Copper Fungicide, but will need to hit them again soon with Serenade, as I saw a bit of powdery mildew getting started on the leaves. I also sprayed our tomato plants and cucumber vines with Neem Oil
Thursday, August 16, 2018 - Fall Garden
It rained overnight, so I thought I might be working in some serious mud today. But our ground has been so dry for so long, that while the soil was moist, it really wasn't muddy. The parsley transplants were all large leaved varieties, as they produce more volume dried than the curled or moss green variety that often serves as a garnish. I sorta lost track of what was what, but the plants were a mix of Dark Green Italian After a bit of a rest, I direct seeded Dwarf Blue Scotch, Lacinato, and Red Ursa kale. I have young transplants of all three varieties hardening off on our back steps, but hope I won't have to use them to fill in bare spots in the rows. The Dwarf Blue Scotch, also known as Vates, was the main one seeded. After another break, I transplanted Amazing and Fremont cauliflower and Premium Crop and Goliath broccoli. I replaced my row marker stakes with vinca transplants, as I thought we had a good many of them left. I did run one shy, though. As I pulled the last plant from a fourpack, I realized that it was a basil of some variety or another instead of a vinca. I put it in as a row marker anyway. I finished off the planting by shaking Repels-All around the transplants to keep rabbits away. I also sprayed the brassicas with Thuricide, as I still see cabbage moths fluttering around the yard. One last step remains to be done. I couldn't mulch the plantings, as I've run out of grass clippings. As soon as things dry enough to allow me to mow, I'll mulch the plantings. But at this point, I'm thrilled to have our main raised bed cleaned up and planted once again. Friday, August 17, 2018 - Refried (Kidney) Beans
We ended up getting seven pounds of dry kidney beans in 2017. I saved about two pounds of them for future plantings and canned the rest. And then the canned beans just sat in our downstairs pantry, other than for our occasional Texas Nachos feast and our annual batches of Portuguese Kale Soup. Coming from depression era waste not, want not parents, I felt compelled to find a good use for the beans. And since my wife once lived in the southwest and really loves Mexican and Tex-Mex cooking, I decided to try my hand at making refried beans with some of the kidney beans. Since pinto beans are the preferred bean for making refried beans, I had my doubts, but found several refried kidney bean recipes online (see below for links) to get me started.
I begin making the refried beans by browning chopped onion and garlic in olive oil or bacon drippings for about five minutes. I use an old Chef Tell trick with the garlic, finely chopping it and then pressing in salt with my meat cleaver so that there aren't any big chunks of garlic left. While that stuff is browning, I rinse and drain my canned kidney beans. Then they go into the pan with the taco seasoning, some chicken broth, and a bit of lemon juice. As the mixture heats, I use a large wooden spoon to begin smashing the beans. One could also use a food processor to reduce the beans to a paste, but our food processor is nasty to clean, so I just went with the spoon and a lot of smashing. I let our refried beans simmer a good bit longer than most recipes recommend. That gives the spices more time to work. I add chicken broth to prevent drying and burning. Off and on through the heating, I smash the bean mix a bit more as I see a bean or two I've missed. The Tough Part: Ingredients and Amounts I cook by taste, so that when I write one of these recipes, I have to go back and do it again taking note of what and how much of what I use. But here is the basic list: 2 pints canned kidney beans Some recipes replace the taco seasoning with cumin, chili powder, coriander, and/or diced green chillies. That's part of the fun of making your own refried beans. You can add or subtract ingredients to suit your personal tastes. Since I wrote this page in August, I was able to use garlic and onion that were in the ground just a month previously. I absolutely love to cook with fresh garlic! Some online recipes for refried kidney beans:
While sharing links, I found a couple of good pages on rendering bacon drippings. Both emphasize slow-cooking the bacon to get as much grease from it as possible and to prevent a burnt taste and then straining the black chunks out of the drippings. When I was growing up, there was always a coffee can of saved bacon drippings on the stove for cooking.
Our pumpkin and butternut squash vines had about outgrown their mulch. So after mowing yesterday and today, I swept up grass clippings to extend the mulch several feet all around the plantings I noticed several things while spreading the grass clipping mulch. We have a lot more pumpkins set on the vines than I thought. I also spotted and squished a baby squash bug on a squash. That discovery required a thorough spraying of the vines with Neem Oil Before spraying the pumpkin and squash vines, I thought I'd do a light spray on our cucumber vines and our tomato plants. It turned out that I emptied the gallon sprayer with a light spray on the tomatoes and all the rest on our cucumber vines. As happens every year, we now have cucumber beetles attacking our vines. I'd been checking the cucumbers every other day, but somehow let the infestation get going pretty good. A pleasant side effect from closely observing the vines was the discovery of a lot of mature cucumbers. I picked twenty good cucumbers today. Since I made sweet relish last week, have lots of bread and butter pickles left from last year, and Annie shared cucumbers at her work last week, these cucumbers will probably go to our local food bank.
I dropped off the twenty long cucumbers I picked yesterday at our local food bank today. While I was at it, I also picked a bunch of red and green peppers for the food bank. I'm probably going to let the next round of cucumbers fully mature for seed saving. That means letting them ripen to a yellow color, almost to the rotting stage. Sadly, doing so can make the vines stop putting out blooms as they ripen cucumbers and seed. But I'd like to get some cucumber seed saved soon. Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - Scuffle Hoe
The sun conveniently peeked out for one of its few cameo appearances this morning for our near daily splashshot that tops this page. I'd been outside in the cloudy conditions earlier testing how wet the soil was in our main raised garden bed. Since the bed had been overgrown with weeds going to seed when I was down with a bum knee, I knew we'd have lots of seedling weeds popping up in and between our rows of direct seeded and transplanted fall crops.
I first scuffled along our two rows of emerging kale plants, getting as close as possible to the kale without damaging the plants. Then I moved on to the rows of transplanted parsley, broccoli, and cauliflower. I would have liked to have spread grass clipping mulch over the scuffled areas, but my back is still sore from spreading mulch over the weekend! I'll get the ground mulched soon before the weeds begin to take hold again, although I may have to scuffle again before mulching. Precipitation In contrast to our dry July, we've received over four inches of rainfall so far this month. I did brief outdoor jobs today in between light showers. Relish Update
The relish was delicious! It had a bit more kick than store bought sweet relish and wasn't quite as sweet. Having made a good batch of relish, I can now begin to tweak the recipe a bit here and there to suit our taste preferences. Looking Around As I came in from my scuffling, I grabbed several other photos. One of a cauliflower plant shows (at least in the larger version) the bits of seedling weeds disturbed by my work with the hoe. I had pretty carefully hand weeded our double row of carrots before mulching up to the rows a week ago. There obviously are some bare spots in the rows, but what has come up should provide more than enough carrots to last us through the winter. And...once again, our cucumber vines are looking glorious. I saw another mature cuke on them today, but forgot to go back and pick it.
In between frequent rains, I've been able to get our fall garden in our main raised bed in pretty good shape. Several rounds with the scuffle hoe suppressed seedling weeds, other than in the new rows of kale. Most of the bed is now mulched with grass clippings which should negate having to weed those areas. The kale will get weeded and mulched when the plants get a little bigger. Quite simply, I ran out of grass clippings before completing the mulching. Our lawn is definitely ready to be mowed (and raked for clippings) again, but daily rains have made that impossible. Still seeing white cabbage moths fluttering around our yard and garden, I continue to spray our brassicas, including the newly emerged kale plants, with the biological, Thuricide (BT). White cabbage moths and cabbage loopers are what lay eggs on brassicas that eventually become the cabbage worms that can severely damage cole crops.
Having a good supply of pickles from last season in the pantry, I decided to use the cucumbers for a big batch of sweet relish. My previous effort a week or so ago produced good relish, but a disappointing quantity of it. I ended up spending most of Thursday afternoon and evening deseeding and chopping up cucumbers, along with the required peppers, onion, and garlic. I nearly filled a twelve quart pot with the ingredients!
After letting the mix brine in the refrigerator overnight, I canned eight pints and six half pints of the sweet relish. Having seriously expanded the recipe I used a week ago, I won't know how the relish will taste until it's cured a week or so in the jars and I can sample it. I should add here that making relish is an awful lot of work for not much product. For me, it's a labor of love. I enjoy both gardening and canning...and using the delicious results of our gardening and canning. Sunday, August 26, 2018 - Overwhelmed with Cucumbers
Letting the vines ripen seed is, of course, the beginning of the end for the vines. As they ripen fruit, the vines tend to stop producing new blooms. But that's okay, as we have lots of dill and bread and butter pickles left from last season and have canned all the sweet relish we'll need for the next year. Change in Saved Seed Distribution I unlisted most of our previous offerings from the Seed Savers Member Exchange last night. I left one listing just to see what happens to it when my membership in SSE runs out. Having decided to leave SSE, I'd been up in the air over how to continue sharing seed of our endangered varieties for some time. I'll still be sharing seed with my favorite seed library and giving away a lot of seed to individuals who inquire. But I really wanted a larger outlet for our saved seed. A timely email this week from Irena Hollowell, president of the Grassroots Seed Network, indicated that the organization is still alive and kicking. I'd pretty well left my membership and listings there alone after some really nasty infighting erupted shortly after the organization's launch. With that stuff seemingly over, I updated all of my seed saving listings on the network. For those folks who might be interested, here are links to our current listings of seed on the Grassroots Seed Network:
I didn't list our saved Abundant Bloomsdale spinach seed on GSN, as I'd prefer folks support seed houses selling the rather new, open source variety (1, 2). I will, however, share Abundant Bloomsdale seed with folks in our growing region. One reason to save seed year after year is that it somewhat adapts to ones specific growing conditions. Note that all of the seed offered above is from seed saved last year (2017). We're a little late in our seed saving this season and also didn't get some of the tomato varieties planted due to my knee problems. I did a quick search of our seed inventory to see what other kinds of saved seed we have in frozen storage from years past. The list surprised me in length: asparagus, basil, daises, dianthus, dill, kidney beans, lettuce, oregano, peas, pole beans, watermelon, and zinnia. Wednesday, August 29, 2018 - Tree Trimming
We're having off and on showers today. Before the rain started, I got out and scuffle hoed our rows of kale. Then I mulched right up to the rows with grass clippings. Our main raised bed is now completely mulched. I will still have some serious weeding to do, however. The kale rows have lots of grass seedlings in them that will have to be pulled. Friday, August 31, 2018 - August Wrap-up
We began the month by digging our spring carrots. Through the month, we've enjoyed lots of tomatoes and peppers, a few green beans, and been overwhelmed with cucumbers. We've also joyfully watched our butternut and pumpkin vines put on more and more squash and pumpkins. In the kitchen, I experimented with making sweet relish and refried kidney beans. The relish was to use up our overabundance of cucumbers. The refried beans came from kidney beans we canned last fall. August was also the month we reclaimed our main raised garden bed. Much of it had become overgrown with weeds as I sat out a month of gardening due to knee problems. The knees are still a mess, but I've learned how to live with them (until I can get them repaired), and we got the area cleaned up and replanted to a nice fall garden.
I hustled downstairs and learned that someone had stopped to say they saw our lab/great dane cross lying dead in the road. He loved to run beside cars at speeds sometimes over 25 MPH, but apparently got too close this time. Like most of our dogs, we didn't pick out Jackson. He picked us. He was actually a neighbor's dog. They live a half mile away down the road and around the corner. We shared him for about five years. When Jackson showed up, he looked a little rough with his ribs showing and his coat a bit dull. Over time, the ribs didn't show so much and his coat glistened. He was a loveable gentle giant. On days when I buy a gallon of milk, but know I still have a little left in the fridge, I call out, "Jackson, milk day!" He quickly emerges from the bushes where he likes to spend his days for his weekly milk treat. Today, he was already outside the bushes when I got home from the store. When he saw the milk jug, he leaped into the air in joy. Part of the joy of living in the country is having wonderful dogs, and a sad part of it is missing them when they go. Hungrier Insects A New York Times article by Kendra Pierre-Louis caught my eye this morning. In The Bugs Are Coming, and They’ll Want More of Our Food, Pierre-Louis tells of a recent study that suggests:
Yikes!
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