The Old Guy's Garden Record

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Tuesday, October 14, 2025

I fooled around doing other stuff until around 4:30 this afternoon before taking our near daily splashshot. Of course, with the sun lower in the sky, I had solar flare (those transparent white spots) in the shot despite using a lens hood on a multi-coated lens. So much for quality photography.

I hadn't picked tomatoes yesterday. When I picked this afternoon, I ended up with tomato juice on my hand when gripping several tomatoes. I think I need to go back to picking every day. And as it was, I only got three so-so ripe tomatoes.

On a more positive note, our weather outlook still looks frost free for the next week or so. Our first frost date for this area is October 18.

And lastly, we're into the time of year when I have a heater turned on overnight in my office, but have a window open with a fan running while writing this afternoon.

Saturday, October 11, 2025

After having written about picking butternut squash yesterday, I hadn't planned on a posting for today. But as I scanned the New York Times front page, I saw an article entitled Our 14 Favorite Butternut Squash Recipes. Good timing, Times!

While our Butternut Mock Yams recipe and just splitting and cleaning the butternuts before baking them with butter and brown sugar remain favorites, some of the recipes looked interesting.

An email from the Garden Tower Project caught my eye as they announced their new Garden Tower 2. With the space we're blessed with, I doubt I'll be using a Garden Tower...unless I become disabled.

I bought some mini chicken salad sandwiches at the deli of our Sullivan (IN) Baesler's Market this week. We quickly devoured them. Baesler's has always had great chicken salad.

That put me onto making chicken salad this morning. Our recipe is every bit as good as Baesler's, but doesn't cost $7.99/pound.

I began the recipe page with "When we had kids at home, one of the treats we'd spoil them with was chicken salad. Our youngest daughter especially enjoyed it with club crackers. As the price at the deli in our local grocery rose to about $6/pound, our enjoyment and frequency of buying it seriously decreased."

Friday, October 10, 2025

I hadn’t picked tomatoes for a day or two, so I checked the plants this morning. And...there were zero ripe tomatoes. We’re into the time of year that an early frost could end our tomato harvest. But our current extended weather forecast shows no signs of frost for the next ten days.

Frustrated with no tomatoes, I took our lopping shears out to our patch of butternut squash vines, dropping off a heavy bucket of kitchen scraps on the way.

I ended up bringing in eleven butternuts. Only one or two of them were small. I left a dozen or so on the vine, as they were still showing some green. And sadly, there were six or seven butternuts in various stages of decay that should have been harvested weeks ago.

We grow our butternut squash on the site of the previous year’s compost pile. While I give the butternut plants a bit of starter fertilizer at transplanting, they get all the nutrition they need from the rich soil that the compost pile created.

I sterilized a kettle of potting mix this week in anticipation of transplanting thirteen young gloxinia plants from three to four and four and a half inch pots. Two of the plants from an otherwise failed planting already had bloom buds on them, so they went to our dining room table. The rest of the plants were started in June, so they may begin to bloom in a couple months. They stayed under our plant lights in the basement.

I'm about done saving gloxinia seed for this year. The plants pictured above won't get pollinated and have to try to mature seed.

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

As we wind down a rather dismal gardening season, my efforts will turn to cleaning up our various garden plots. All four of our raised beds are currently overgrown with weeds. Both of our asparagus patches will also require some attention.

Our extended weather forecast suggests more clear, warm, mostly dry weather for the next week or so.

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