The Old Guy's Garden Record

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Thursday, October 3, 2024

I've been catching up on stuff the last few days and have sort of ignored updating this site. One interesting development was finding our main raised garden bed filled with tiny weeds that germinated after a recent heavy rain. A few minutes work with our scuffle hoe cleaned up the weed problem.

As I hoed, I was careful not to harm our onions for overwintering and what kale had come up. I also found that a few carrot seeds planted on September 1 had finally germinated. The seed was pelletized, so I'm guessing that even with my frequent waterings, there wasn't enough moisture to melt the pellet covering.

I finally got around to mowing our lawn yesterday. I hadn't mowed through the drought and the mowing left a mess of grass clippings plus lots of spots that didn't mow well. I got the field next to us mowed this afternoon. While mowing, I thought, "What the heck. Let's try mowing down the spent sweet corn stalks." It ended up taking two or three passes over the rows, but chopped up the stalks pretty well. I was careful to keep the mower's wheels in the aisles between the corn rows. A corn stalk root can be sharp and give one a flat tire.

I still have peppers and tomatoes to pick and possibly a few potatoes to dig. Beyond that, my gardening efforts now mostly turn to getting our plots ready for next season. In our East Garden plot, there are zinnias to cut and compost. Once the tomato plants there are done, the cages need to come out and be stored before tilling the 80' x 80' plot and planting some really late hairy winter vetch.

The narrow raised bed where our early peas and cucumbers grew needs to be cleared and tilled, getting ready for a planting of garlic after our first frost.

And somewhat of a surprise, our small bunch of milkweed plants have seeds.

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Friday, October 4, 2024

As often is necessary after a day or two of mowing, I'm having to take it a bit easy today. Despite some sore muscles, I got out this morning and dug our row of potatoes. I didn't get much, as weed pressure and the drought really impacted the potatoes. The soil in the potato row was rock hard. But I got about four medium sized Red Pontiacs and a whole bunch of small ones that may serve up well as new potatoes with peas.

Saturday, October 5, 2024

I had thought about clearing our narrow raised beds today. But the farm crew was bringing in the soybeans next to us. That produces huge clouds of dust and bean trash out of the back end of the combine. So working next to the harvesting effort was out.

There's not a big rush to get the narrow beds cleaned out. One will be renovated and planted to garlic. But you don't usually plant garlic until after your first frost. The other narrow bed won't be planted until early spring with our early peas. And...there's absolutely no rain or frost in our ten day weather forecast.

It's been a long and somewhat frustrating gardening season this year. Taking a few days off suits me just fine.

Saturday, October 12, 2024

No, I didn't die. I just experienced a downturn in gardening enthusiasm, some physical problems, and a two day internet outage. So there's not much here to write about.

I did transplant twelve gloxinia plants that I started August 10 into fourpacks. While the tiny plants start slow, they'll be blooming in four or five months.

Having missed getting some tomatoes to our local food bank for their Monday distribution, I made a large batch of spaghetti sauce on Tuesday with fresh tomatoes. Unfortunately, I got way too much red pepper in it, something Annie and I didn't notice until the fire in our stomachs started later. I rescued the remaining sauce by diluting it with some corn starch dissolved in beef broth and a pint of tomato puree. Then it made a dandy, if ugly, lasagna.

I dropped off two trays of tomatoes Thursday afternoon at the food bank for their Friday morning distribution.

While our extended weather forecast has been bouncing around on possible low temperatures, it now looks as if we'll experience our first frost on Wednesday and/or Thursday morning. I'll need to get out and harvest tomatoes and peppers a day or so before the season ending frosts occur.

And I took down our two remaining hummingbird feeders this week. I hadn't seen a hummingbird at them for around five days.

Monday, October 14, 2024

With a hard frost predicted for later this week, getting stuff picked is a priority. Sadly, we didn't have any tomatoes ready today. I'll still need to pick them even if underripe before the frost. I'll also do a last picking of our bell peppers, probably tomorrow.

Today's job was to begin the process of replenishing our dried parsley. Our old parsley jar was nearly empty of dried parsley. When I made spaghetti/lasagna sauce last week, I cut and used fresh parsley from our garden.

I cut and rinsed all the parsley that grew in a narrow raised bed by some tomato plants. I also cut a little from a large leaf parsley plant in our herb bed, but most of the parsley leaves on that plant had brown spots on them.

After rinsing the parsley, I ran it through our salad spinner before beginning to cut leaves off the stems and laying them on a dehydrator tray. But after an hour of that nonsense, I found on The Purposeful Pantry's How to Dehydrate Parsley page that one can dehydrate the leaves still on the stems and strip the leaves off when dry.

So I'm going to try a little of both and see what happens.

I had far more parsley than would fit on our four tray food dehydrator. The remaining parsley went into a large Debbie Meyer Green Bag and into the fridge. Once the first batch of parsley is done, I'll run a second batch from the bagged parsley.

Per instructions, the parsley will go at 95°F for about a day or so.

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Early this afternoon, Annie and I made a trip to our county courthouse to vote. We only stood in line for a few minutes waiting to vote. But when we came out of the voting office, there was a bit of a line of folks waiting. And they were all senior citizens.

Our first batch of parsley leaves is dried and crushed into our parsley jar. The jar is now about a third filled. With the second batch of parsley I started dehydrating today, we should have enough dried parsley to last us until this time next year.

With a hard frost initially predicted for tomorrow morning, I got out and picked bell peppers and tomatoes this morning. The weather forecast has now changed a bit with 31 degree temperatures predicted for Thursday morning.

The Earliest Red Sweet bell peppers picked were disappointingly small. That's probably a product of our droughty summer. We got some very nice tomatoes, though. And a first picking of zinnia seed heads will ensure being able to plant our usual eighty foot row of zinnias next spring along the edge of our East Garden plot. If we somehow slip past the killing frosts predicted, we may get more peppers and tomatoes.

Thursday, October 17, 2024

The predicted killing frost (31°F) didn't arrive today, although it got down to 33°F. Instead, we had some heavy fog this morning.

Both our Earliest Red Sweet bell pepper plants and our Moira and Quinte tomato plants appear unaffected by the cold morning. With warmer temperatures for the next few days, we may get to pick some more peppers and tomatoes. One never has too many ripe tomatoes!

BTW: The peppers and tomatoes pictured here yesterday went to our local food bank this afternoon for tomorrow morning's food distribution.

Yesterday, after processing a second load of parsley stalks, our parsley jar is now three-fourths full. That should be enough to last more than a year.

I found that dehydrating the stalk and leaves easier than first trimming off the leaves before dehydrating. A drawback to that method is that you get more small parsley stems in the mix. If I'm still around to dry parsley again, I hope I remember to do it that way. I'll also grow a large leaved parsley variety.

Part of my morning fun and games this morning was stripping zinnia seed of the spent zinnia blooms I collected on Wednesday. Not all the blooms were dry enough to easily shed their seed, so those seed heads will get a day or two more to dry.

Our zinnias are mainly tall Benary's Giants Mix and State Fair, although I sometimes buy a packet off the rack of other varieties at planting time.

If you grow zinnias, I suggest harvested the browned and blackened seed heads in the fall. Just a few zinnias will produce a bountiful harvest of seed. Our annual eighty foot row of zinnias overwhelms us with seed. I give a lot of it away.

Our local grocery switched from their own bakery's Vienna bread to something they've outsourced. The new bread isn't as fresh, doesn't keep as long, and is now twice the price of their previous Vienna bread. So I began hunting new recipes for the bread and tried a promising one from the Wheel of Baking site.

Unfortunately, my jar of Fleischmann's Active Dry Yeast had gone bad and I got a rather flat loaf for my efforts.

I prefer the old fashioned yeast over the rapid rise ones as it seems to do better for our bread recipes, Grandma's Yeast Rolls and Cinnamon Rolls.

Saturday, October 19, 2024

At least one of our cats had taken to laying in the tray of zinnia seed I had drying on our dining room table. They made a mess of the seed, but apparently didn't pee on the seed! So I finished removing seed from the seed heads this morning and bagged the seed. It filled a quart freezer bag.

I also bagged and froze a half pound of kidney bean seed for future plantings. According to the Utah State University garden extension,"To plant 100 feet of row, you will need about 3-4 ounces of seed." That leaves me with a bit over nine pounds of kidney beans to can.

That's a lot of canned beans. Some will get used when we make our annual batch of Portuguese Kale Soup. Others will get canned in quarts to later make Refried Beans. And I hope to try my hand this year making chili beans for our recipe of Texas Nachos.

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

I finished getting our two narrow raised beds cleared of cucumber vines and tomato plants. Removing the trellises, T-posts, and tomato cages took some work.

The beds still need to be raked free of organic material before being fall fertilized and tilled. The bed on the left will be planted to fall garlic. The bed on the right will get a heavy layer of grass clipping mulch preparing it for a planting of early peas next March.

Saturday, October 26, 2024

In response to owner Jeff Bezos and/or Washington Post CEO Williams Lewis cowardly caving in to Donald Trump’s threats against the press and not endorsing Kamala Harris, I cancelled my subscription to the Post today. From various news reports, more than two thousand subscribers have done the same. I have tried to keep this site garden centric and apolitical, but Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s failure to endorse the clearly more honorable candidate is unacceptable.

Monday, October 28, 2024

I used our last ripe tomato a few days ago on a couple of sandwiches. So I got out and picked around sixteen ripe and almost ripe tomatoes from our Moira and Quinte tomato plants in our East Garden. If we don’t get a frost in the next few days, I may be picking fresh tomatoes into November. All but two of the tomatoes went to our local food bank for their next food distribution.

Our first seed catalog for 2025 arrived in the mail last week. It sort of caught me off guard, as I'm really into getting our garden plots ready for next season. But I took a few minutes to peek in the Twilley Seeds catalog for some of our favorite items to buy from them. They have great prices for geranium and vinca seed and carry a good line of the sh² supersweet sweet corn varieties we like.

My focus the last week or so has been getting two narrow raised beds ready for planting. One bed will get heavily mulched in preparation for a March planting of early peas. The other bed will be planted to garlic in just a few days.

Getting the beds ready involved getting peat moss, 10-10-10 fertilizer, lime, and Milky Spore distributed over them. The garlic bed got a good sprinkle of Muriate of Potash (0-0-60). After getting things ready, our thirty year old rototiller refused to start yesterday. It was cold and cloudy today, but it's supposed to be sunny and warm tomorrow or Wednesday, so I'll let the tiller sit out in the sun for a few hours before trying to start it again. That trick has actually worked in the past.

Thursday, October 31, 2024 October Wrap-up Halloween

It's finally raining this morning. A local TV station has been reporting that we've had 33 days (at their location) without any precipitation. They've also noted that October is typically the driest month of the year. Our extended forecast suggests a bit more rain early next week without any danger of frost. That's good for our kale and remaining pepper and tomato plants, but delays planting our fall garlic.

On a sunny, windy afternoon yesterday, our thirty year old rototiller decided to start. It had given me one putt the previous day before flooding and refusing to start. While it’s a cranky old machine, it did a nice job of tilling our two, 3’x15’ (interior measure) raised beds. The tilling took less than a half hour, although I had to get out our lopping shears to cut a few thick maple tree roots.

With those raised beds tilled, we're a step closer to completing our End-of-Season Gardening Chores.

Other stuff this month was successfully saving milkweed, zinnia, and kidney bean seed. I also dried parsley, filling our parsley jar.

Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening