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After an unusual five inches of precipitation in July, it appears that things will begin drying out for the next week or so. I'm hoping it won't turn out to be our near annual, mid-summer mini-drought. But for now, we have all the soil moisture our garden needs. Once the soil dries out enough, I'm hoping my neck will be healed enough to allow me to till part of our main raised garden bed for some succession crops. I have basil, parsley, broccoli, and cauliflower transplants started. I also hope to direct seed some fall carrots and kale. I put on my hated neck brace and mowed around our row of tomatoes and paprika peppers in our East Garden plot this afternoon. After just a couple of passes, I was convinced that I still needed to continue paying some friends to mow our yard and the field.
Something that caught my eye while mowing was all the butterflies and bumblebees visiting blooms on our long row of zinnias. I grabbed shots of a Tiger Swallowtail and a Spicebush Swallowtail. Several Viceroys were visiting blooms, but they were all pretty camera shy.
We're coming up on a second picking of our two rows of green beans. I've been waiting for our Bush Blue Lake and Maxibel varieties to mature beans for this picking. While I usually take three pickings from our green beans, I'm planning on just pulling the plants for our second picking, as we still have eight pints of green beans left from last year along with the twelve pints I canned last week. As this month moves on, I'm hoping to can tomatoes and make bread and butter pickles and sweet relish. Our Earlirouge tomato plants are filled with ripening tomatoes,while our row of tomatoes in our East Garden are just putting on tomatoes. Our Japanese Long Pickling cucumber vines don't look very healthy right now, so I'm not confident about the pickles and relish.
Our first apple tree here was a standard Stayman Winesap. It produced lots of tasty apples before succumbing to fire blight. We then just about lost a Granny Smith tree that survived the fire blight with lots of heavy pruning and fire blight spray. But it died from root rot a few years later. A replacement Stayman Winesap from Arbor Day only produced yellow apples. The deal was buy one tree and get another free. I ordered a red maple as our freebie. It turned out to be a silver maple. Obviously, I'll never order another tree from the Arbor Day Society after them going 0-2 on filling an order correctly.
With apple trees taking several years to produce fruit and me at 73 years old, I'm about ready to quit trying to grow apples. In addition to losing apple trees, we lost a bunch of pine trees to root rot and agricultural drift in the last two years.. It's frustrating. On a more positive note, I cut our two celery plants yesterday. I didn't get them wrapped to blanch the stalks, so I fear the celery may be a bit bitter. But I'm happy at least to be able to have grown celery for two years in a row. I have a pot of celery transplants in the basement. But I fear that I may have drowned them yesterday when watering them! So there's our kickoff for August. It's an iffy kickoff, considering my humbled physical condition. But I'm really looking forward to canning tomatoes and saving seed from several of our favorite varieties.
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I cleaned up our gloxinias this morning. I trimmed off dead leaves and unpollinated bloom spikes and lightly fertilized the plants. There are only a few plants still in bloom, as most of the plants are putting their energy into maturing seed. I also moved several plants downstairs under our plant lights. I've already had three early blooming plants go into dormancy.
Our main tomato canning probably won't happen until the tomato plants in our East Garden begin producing later this month. Like with multiple varieties of canned green beans, I think our canned tomatoes taste better with more then one variety canned. We have seven more tomato varieties there. While taking the splashshot for today, I realized that I could see some blue sky between the clouds. Over the last few weeks, we've had lots of cloud cover, or on some days, smoke cover from the wildfires out west. We're also experiencing some cooler temperatures which is nice. I am, however, waiting for a really warm, sunny day on which to defrost our manual defrost freezer in the garage. A Personal Note I have a sister and a sister-in-law whom I dearly love who have resisted getting Covid-19 vaccinations. I pray for their health daily. But I think prayer isn't always an effective measure against the virus. If you're not yet vaccinated, let me urge you to get the vaccination. I had one mild down day after my first Moderna shot. Annie had a couple of tough days after her vaccination. But both her and my response to the vaccination were really no worse than a flu shot. Let me urge my readers to get vaccinated. If not for yourself, do it for those around you whom you might infect.
Wednesday, August 4, 2021 - More Green Beans
I actually wasn't dancing last night until a quarter of three, but the 1961 Gary U.S. Bonds hit was running through my head as I finished up canning our second picking of green beans...at about a quarter till three! I got a bit of a late start picking the beans, not beginning until a little after noon. With a number of breaks built in to rest my protesting neck, I didn't complete the picking until suppertime. And that was doing the picking the easy way. Since we already had eight pints of canned beans left from last summer and eleven more pints from our first picking this year, I pulled the plants and picked the beans off of them. That made for a lot less bending and working on my knees, two things my body doesn't respond well to. Washing and snapping the beans delayed beginning canning until almost eleven o'clock. Having mentioned the length of canning in a previous posting about canning beans, I wrote down the times from when the jars of beans went into the canner and then came out at the end. Each canning cycle for pints took about 80 minutes!
Something I noticed when picking was that several bean plants had runners extending five or six feet out from the roots. That's not supposed to happen with bush beans. Since we don't save seed from our bush beans, the runners did no real harm. Earlirouge Tomatoes I picked more Earlirouge tomatoes today. Together with a previous picking, I had enough to can about seven quarts of whole tomatoes today. Unfortunately, I didn't have the energy to do more than wash and photograph the tomatoes.
I'll probably can the tomatoes tomorrow. And this canning won't be our last or even our best. When our other tomato varieties in the East Garden plot mature later this month, we'll be able to mix multiple varieties of tomatoes in a canning or two. That seems to improve the flavor of the canned tomatoes. Thursday, August 5, 2021 - Canning Tomatoes
As usual, I followed the canning time from our old Ball Blue Book (©1977). Since I didn't actually do a hot pack, I boiled the canning jars the full 45 recommended minutes in our water bath canner. While the tomatoes got pretty hot in the peeling process, I didn't want to take a chance on the shorter time suggested for a true hot pack (15 minutes).
Onions This afternoon, I worked in our garage on trimming and bagging our onion harvest. The onions had been laid out for a little over two weeks on a sheet of plywood over sawhorses that we use as a drying/curing table. As I trimmed, I sorted out any onions I thought might not store well, but were still good to use. I bagged thirty-five pounds of onions. And that was after using a bunch of large Walla Walla onions when canning our green beans. Fifteen pounds of the onions plus three pounds of garlic went to our local food bank. Considering that at one point I thought we'd lost our onions (wind blew trays of transplants all over the place), I'm pretty happy with our harvest. Drought Over the Western United States I haven't run this group of links for several months, so I thought it time to do so again. The various drought reporting sites are published each Thursday.
Folks out west are into another horribly droughty summer (other than Colorado's floods).
Friday, August 6, 2021 - Slow Day
I rinsed the Earlirouge tomato seed that had been fermenting in its gel and juices for four days. The fermentation process releases the seed from the gel and tomato flesh pieces. It took about five or six rinses to get the seed clean, which is about the usual amount. I dry the tomato seed on a coffee filter in a paper plate. If I remember to try and spread the seed a little each day for several days, it doesn't stick together too badly. Since I want to grill some chicken breast fillets for supper, I fired up our mower and cleared some dry grass near our porch. Then I though, "Why not go around our raised garden beds?' So I did, even running the mower over a low spot in the landscape timbers and knocking down some of the grass weeds in our main raised bed. And then, I hit a bump, which reminded me of why I'm still on limited duty. I came inside, took some ibuprofen, rubbed Ben Gay on my neck, and poured myself a drink! I was on the mower because one of the guys who have been mowing our yard was injured while whitewater rafting. For his sake, I'm hoping he gets better quickly. And for our yard, I hope the mowing crew is soon healthy enough to return. Today's adventure reminded me that I have no business riding a mower over a bumpy yard.
My wife, Annie, mowed our lawn yesterday, as our mowing crew has now tested positive for Covid-19. She didn't mow the field, but it can wait until I'm ready to mow again or the mowing crew is again healthy. I did mow some of the steep slopes on our property, but twenty minutes of mowing made for a very uncomfortable evening and night. One of our older gloxinia plants is now into its second blooming cycle this year. The pink double gloxinia is about six or seven years old. Its corm outgrew a six inch pot last year and is now growing in an eight inch hanging basket pot.
I'm guessing there are some overripe cucumbers that should have been picked days ago. But when I miss picking them when ready, the cukes fill out, turn yellow, and are used for seed saving.
Since we're close to the time when hummingbirds begin their migration south, I've slightly enriched our hummingbird nectar. I usually mix granulated sugar with water in a 1:4 ratio. I'm adding just a bit more sugar to our mix to help the birds put on weight for their long flight south. Whether or not we'll have a fall garden or not is still up in the air. I moved some broccoli, cauliflower, basil, and parsley transplants to the porch last week to begin hardening off. I have kale, carrot, and beet seed in our kitchen freezer in hopes of planting them. But as of today, I'm not physically able to do the tasks necessary to do those plantings. I'm getting better by the day, but the doctors I saw after my fall all said it would take months to recover fully from the damage done. On the positive side, we've already had a fabulous gardening season with lots of asparagus, garlic, onions, peas, green beans, beets, celery, tomatoes, and even a little spinach.
Full disclosure: One of our daughters and her husband are co-owners of Morgenstern Books. Tuesday, August 10, 2021 - More Tomatoes for Seed
With lots of tomatoes to choose from, I lopped off both the top and bottom of each tomato, teasing the seed out of the tops and bottoms with a small knife. I squeezed each tomato which got most of the seed out, although I also cut open each seed cavity to harvest any seeds that didn't squeeze out. While our first batch of saved Earlirouge seed only filled the bottom fourth of a quart jar, I used enough tomatoes to nearly fill a quart jar today. I did leave an inch or so of head space, as the mix of seed, tomato flesh and juice, and gel can expand a bit as it ferments. The fermentation usually separates the tomato seed from the tomato flesh and gel. I have a longer version of how to do this job in Saving Tomato Seed.
I didn't defrost the freezer last summer, so I expected a few ancient surprises as I moved stuff out of the freezer and into coolers. While not as bad as some defrostings, I found a bunch of meat that was well over a year old. It all went into a kettle to boil before being shared with our dogs. I use such treats to induce our dogs into eating a dose of Ivermectin to prevent heartworms. And yes, a vet has approved of our use of this drug for our dogs. Do beware that sheepdogs and related breeds don't do well with this treatment. There also were bags of year to two year old vegetables that went onto our compost pile. One veggie from last season that didn't get thrown out was five pints of sweet corn. Since I wasn't able to get in and fertilize and till our sweet corn in our East Garden, that crop failed. When I got done emptying the freezer, I felt lucky that I'd had enough coolers in which to keep our frozen meats and vegetables. There wasn't enough room, though, for our large bag of garden seed. It went into one of those large, insulated bags sold at Sam's Club and the like. With temperatures into the 90s today, it only took about two hours for the frost to melt off the interior sides of the freezer and for me to wipe it dry. Perseid Meteor Shower From about midnight to dawn this evening, the Perseid meteor shower will be visible for areas in the United States without a cloud cover. This is one of the best meteor showers to observe for a couple of reasons. There will be lots of meteors to view, and the weather conditions for viewing might be pleasant. As the Washington Post's Matthew Cappucci notes: "The display ties that of the December Geminids, but August weather is ordinarily more conducive to getting folks outdoors than the prospect of snow, ice and biting cold."
Today started out as a typical warm, muggy, August day. I avoided the heat in the morning by canning tomatoes again. I canned seven quarts, but still had lots of tomatoes left. Why just seven quarts? That's the capacity of our water bath canner. After picking a few more tomatoes, I took three small trays of them to our local food bank for their food distribution tomorrow morning. Our mowing crew were on their last day of their Covid-19 quarantine, but still came to mow our grass and the field. They did a nice job, although I later went out and mowed a bit of our East Garden plot which they don't mow. I crashed early last night and missed the Perseids. I was up this morning while it was still dark out, but didn't get to see any meteors. I thought I might get another shot at seeing some meteors tonight, but heavy thunderstorms rolled in during the early evening. Five of our six Earlirouge tomato plants are filled with ripening tomatoes. A sixth plant that replaced a failed plant (eaten off by a deer!) has small green tomatoes on it. I'll probably save one more big batch of Earlirouge seed. Then I'll possibly turn to making purée, sharing more with the food bank, or dumping the excess in unlocked cars in parking lots.
Saturday, August 14, 2021 - Garlic
As I tell in our how-to feature, Growing Garlic, I usually aim for planting our garlic sometime after our first frost in October. That goal often turns out to be a November planting. Last year, we planted on November 19...and still got a wonderful harvest this year. Cucumbers I really haven't cared for our Japanese Long Pickling cucumber vines lately. The vines look terrible. And while they've produced some overripe cucumbers that I can use for seed saving, I haven't picked very many nice cukes for slicing or other uses.
So this morning, I picked a few overripe cucumbers and three nice ones before heavily spraying the vines with a mix of Serenade biofungicide and Neem Oil. I also soaked the bed with Miracle-Gro Liquid Plant Food (12-4-8). Peppers
The ripest twelve peppers got cut up and spread across the trays of our food dehydrator. Even though I didn't have any named paprika peppers, the ERS peppers make a nice, mild ground paprika. Some of the twelve were a bit irregular. Their seeds were dumped. But from the best looking peppers, I saved seed. As more peppers mature, I'll save some frozen pepper strips. And while I got a lot of seed today, I'll probably save at least one more batch of ERS pepper seed. The leftover peppers today will probably go to work with my wife on Monday along with some Earlirouge tomatoes. Zinnias and East Garden When I went to the garage to grab a shot of our peppers dehydrating, I also ventured out to our East Garden plot. Our eighty foot row of zinnias are putting on their usual, spectacular display of blooms.
Other than our row of zinnias and a row of tomatoes and paprika peppers, our East Garden is a bust this year. I did cut a semi-ripe watermelon in half when mowing down weeds the other day. But our sweet corn, kidney beans, melons, and yellow squash are a total loss. But with gardening, there's always next year (hopefully).
Monday, August 16, 2021 - Making Paprika
Another garden related job today was separating saved tomato seeds that were stuck together in the drying process. That involved rubbing the clumps of seeds in the palm of my hand. I've found the seeds easier to separate before they are totally dry. But I'll also need to work on the seed a bit again tomorrow.
I'd picked several buckets of our Earlirouge tomatoes over three days. A Facebook friend was looking for tomatoes, and I offered ours for free. When the friend didn't get back to me promptly and the tomatoes getting older by the minute, I reluctantly washed, cored, and removed the blossom ends and bad spots. From there, the tomatoes went into a brief near boiling water bath. Transferred to very cold water, the tomatoes peeled easily.
While I usually cold pack whole tomatoes into canning jars, I put the tomatoes into a large kettle to warm a bit. Then I ran them through our very old and somewhat leaky Squeezo Strainer. The resulting tomato juice then got boiled and reduced by half before I water bath canned eight pints of it.
Because I haven't been able to till or even weed effectively due to my neck injury, we're down to just cucumbers, tomatoes, and bell peppers in our raised garden beds. In the East Garden, it's just tomatoes and paprika peppers, although our row of zinnias are thriving. I'm still hoping to direct seed some kale and possibly fall carrots and spinach, but their maturation dates will be awfully close to our first frost date. I also have transplants going for fall brassicas, parsley and basil. It's just a matter of when I can manage our walking tiller again. Looking at the glass half full, I'm alive from a fall that the neurosurgeons said could have killed me. I'm getting better each day, but very, very slowly. So I'm being thankful and happy with the slow improvement and lessened pain and lots of produce presereved and seed saved.
I wanted to pick peppers today, but knew I had a job to do first. The weeds in our main raised bed had grown right up to our previously well mulched cages of Earliest Red Sweet peppers. So I got out our new weedeater and went at it. It cleared the grass fairly well close to the pepper cages, but the main raised bed was still filled with weeds.
As to the peppers, I filled a five gallon bucket with ripe red peppers. When I dumped the peppers into the sink to wash them, the picking filled both sides of our kitchen sink. I may be processing peppers into the wee hours of the morning.
We have enough canned bread and butter pickles and sweet relish from last year to last us a good while.
I recently gave up on some of our two cycle tools and ordered a cordless string trimmer and chainsaw. The Greenworks 40V 14 In String Trimmer surprised me with its power when cleaning up weeds in our main raised bed. I've only made a couple of cuts with our Greenworks 40V 16-inch Chainsaw. But it cut right through a sixteen inch diameter log with no problems. Both items are the 40 volt versions, so their batteries and chargers should be interchangeable. I'm not yet making a recommendation on these products, but their first impressions are favorable.
In the course of getting the trellis netting down, I uprooted several mature snapdragon plants. That reminded me that I really should save seed from the plants, so I did. I was able, however to leave some of the snapdragon plants in place and the geranium plants at the corners of the bed. Under normal circumstances, I'd have tilled the narrow bed this afternoon to get it planting ready. But with my neck injury, this season has been anything but normal. I did get some supplies out of the garage for tilling and planting, but left the rototilling until tomorrow. Fortunately, our extended weather forecast suggests we'll have several dry days the rest of this week that will permit tilling our raised beds and possibly getting our fall crops planted. Now, I'm going to take a nap.
Friday, August 27, 2021 - Tilling
The main bed still has lots of grass clumps the tiller couldn't handle. I raked the piles of grass to the sides of the bed, but still need to move them to the compost pile. I expect I'll need to till the plot once or twice more before it is planting ready. While the days left in our gardening season are growing short, I hope to direct seed kale and carrots into the bed. I also have basil and parsley transplants ready to go into the ground. Tomatoes
The tomato plants in our East Garden plot are doing well and just beginning to ripen tomatoes. While I've already saved lots of Earlirouge tomato seed, I will be saving seed from three more varieties growing in the East Garden: Moira; Quinte; and Crimson Sprinter. While our Earlirouge, Moira, and Quinte varieties were all developed by the late Jack Metcalf, the Crimson Sprinter variety was developed by Dr. T. Graham in Guelph, Ontario at the Ontario Agricultural College. It shares the other varieties deep red interiors while also having high "lycopene content! Lycopene is a powerful antioxidant that (unlike most phytonutrients) isn’t degraded by cooking." Crimson Sprinters got us into trouble several years ago. I first grew them from seed from an SSE member I once respected. The seed turned out to carry anthracnose. That cost us a lot of tomato and even watermelon plants in 2019. Still wanting to grow the variety, I used seed from High Mowing Organic Seeds which was probably clear of the disease. But the bad experience made me redouble my previous efforts at hot water treating any tomato seed I start.
Last year, our Moira and Quinte plants were our heaviest producers.
Things got a little crazy when I had to replant some failed plants. My record keeping is fuzzy because some plant labels had faded. I'm sure that we have and open pollinated Bradley plant, a Dixie Red hybrid, and several Mountain Fresh Plus hybrids. Since I'm not saving seed from any of those plants, knowing what is where isn't all that critical. Once they mature fruit, the Bradley tomatoes will stand out, as it's the only pink tomato variety we grow. Other, But Possibly Interesting
The peppers I started dehydrating Tuesday evening still aren't dry enough to grind for powdered paprika. I put more pepper strips into the dehydrator than I ever have before. Fortunately, the peppers aren't burning, but are still leathery to the touch and don't snap easily. As their drying drags on, I keep cutting the dehydrator's temperature setting to prevent burning. On a better note, our long row of zinnia plants continue to put on quite a show. Some of the plants are now five feet tall! That's something we've not experienced previously. Some of the early blooms are beginning to drop their petals and display brown to black seed heads. I'll collect the seed heads and let them dry on a cookie sheet for several weeks before rubbing the seeds off the stem. The seed we collect this year will give us the volume of seed needed to plant another long row of zinnias next season. If I run into any marked down zinnia seed on seed racks, I'll probably buy some to add a bit of diversity to our zinnias.
Saturday, August 28, 2021 - Fall Brassicas
Each transplanting hole got a bit of 12-12-12 solid fertilizer and a bit of lime to prevent clubroot. I watered the holes with a mix of dilute Quick Start and Maxicrop Soluble Seaweed Powder. Once the plants were in the ground, I watered the area around them where I'd made a trough around each plant. With temperatures in the upper 80s to low 90s each day and some rather frail transplants, I'm not sure if this planting will take. I have three or four replacement plants leftover on the back porch. And the heat is supposed to diminish next week with some welcome rain predicted. With deer and rabbits having decimated our spring brassicas, I spread a good amount of Repels All around the broccoli and cauliflower plants. I also sprayed the plants with Thuricide to deter cabbage loopers and small white cabbage moths. I tell about how we grow our brassicas, when successful, in Growing Great Broccoli and Cauliflower. More Paprika
We now have nine ounces of saved paprika from our garden. Considering that we still have half of an 18 ounce jar of Tone's Spanish Style Paprika that we bought before expiration dates were required on such things, I think we have enough homegrown paprika to last us for the winter. Of course, since this paprika was prepared from Earliest Red Sweet peppers, as our paprika pepper plants aren't yet producing. It's probably a bit less zippy than some paprikas. But I'm sure it will nicely help season and brown chicken breasts and adorn deviled eggs. One More Thing While I have several things I'd like to get planted yet this season, kale tops the list. If we're going to make our annual batch of cold and flu healing Portuguese Kale Soup, I need to get the kale seeded next week. Fortunately, kale is pretty frost resistant. The late James Underwood Crockett wrote in Crockett's Victory Garden that a light frost actually improved the taste of kale. The hard part is getting the kale seed to germinate in hot, dry weather.
Sunday, August 29, 2021 - Well, that was quick.
I got up this morning with plans to water the brassicas I'd transplanted. But when I looked at the bed, it appeared that most of the plants had no leaves. Closer inspection confirmed that rabbits had probably dined on the leaves overnight. While Repels All deters dogs and cats, it obviously doesn't deter hungry rabbits all that well. I may have to consider using a hot wire around some plantings in the future. That, or maybe I'll just go totally Elmer Fudd on "them wabbits." While brassicas can recover from being nipped, that sets the plants back a bit. There simply aren't enough growing days left in the season now for the plants to mature heads. So much for growing brassicas this year. Critters got both our spring and fall plantings.
I planted an approximately 14 foot long double row of carrots with the rows spaced just four inches apart. Since the soil I was planting into was powdery dry, I watered the shallow furrows I made for the seed. That trick only works well if you can keep the rows watered until the seed germinates. We have rain predicted for this evening and the next two days, so we may be okay. I use an old scrap piece of 1x4 lumber to make my furrows for the seed. Of course, a 1x4 actually measures as 3/4 inch thick by 3 1/2 inches wide.
Evenly seeding the wet kale seed was a challenge. The wet seed stuck to my fingers and fell in clumps into the row. I had to go back repeatedly and spread out the seed. I might not have gotten the planting done this afternoon, but my incredible wife, Annie, warned me she'd heard a weather forecast suggesting we might have rain by mid-afternoon. So I ventured out to do the seeding with a heat index of 102° F. My shirt was soaked with sweat when I got done, but I was happy that I'd possibly made some progress in what has been a challenging gardening season.
Tuesday, August 31, 2021 - August Wrap-up
It's been both an interesting and a challenging month. My recovery from a neck injury still prevents me from doing many normal tasks. At the same time, we had some fantastic harvests this month. We saved seed from Earlirouge tomatoes, Earliest Red Sweet peppers, Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers, gloxinias, and snapdragons. Our harvests included green beans, tomatoes, and red peppers. We canned green beans and tomatoes while drying the peppers into paprika. A Personal Comment If I needed any reminding, the severity of the Delta variant of Covid-19 was brought home to me again this week. The school system I retired from was ordered by the county department of health to close for two weeks because of a serious Coronavirus outbreak. Then a neighbor who lives "around the corner" (in country terms) from us died from the virus last week. He was a relatively young man still in the prime of his life. Our family has been impacted by the virus as well. Our youngest son and much of his family had the virus early on before there were any vaccinations available. They all recovered, but his father-in-law was hospitalized with the virus for a week. After said son's family all were vaccinated, he recently had a mild breakthrough infection, although his wife and daughters did not contract the disease. When I go out shopping, I find that I'm among the few old geezers still wearing a mask. That's despite our State Health Commissioner, Dr. Kris Box, "calling this late summer surge the 'darkest time in the pandemic'" this week. I stirred up a hornet's nest a week or so ago on Facebook by sharing a link to Paul Krugman's excellent opinion piece on the New York Times, The Quiet Rage of the Responsible. He wrote:
I'm going to stick with the comment I attached to the posting even if it irritates my friends, family, and readers. Mask up, and get vaccinated if you haven't already.
Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening |
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We got a lot of rain yesterday with more predicted for today. Having found the soil light and powdery in the narrow raised bed where I direct seeded carrots and kale yesterday, the rain is welcome. After our first downpour this morning, I checked the bed to see if any seed had washed up. None had, although I then wondered if I got the seed in too deep.| Affiliated Advertisers |
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