Senior Gardening

One of the Joys of Maturity


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The Old Guy's Garden Record

August 31, 2022


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Monday, August 1, 2022

Our Senior Garden - August 1, 2022
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Crockett's Victory Garden
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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..." While our reduced garden this year won't be a true cornucopia, we'll be doing a lot of harvesting. We hope to pick and can lots of whole tomatoes and tomato purée, cucumbers for relish and Bread and Butter pickles, and peppers for freezing, use in relish, and seed saving. For that matter, we'll also save seed from our Earlirouge tomatoes and Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers for sharing via the Grassroots Seed Network and the Seed Savers Exchange.

I'm still waiting for the soil in our main raised garden bed to dry out enough for tilling. That got set back a bit by a strong storm that moved through dropping three fourths of an inch of rain this morning.

Once I can rototill the main raised bed, I want to plant fall peas (Encore), carrots, kale, lettuce, and spinach.

I'd planned to can tomatoes today. But looking at the volume of normal size tomatoes on our Earlirouge plants, I decided to save seed from our volume of large Earlirouges that have lots of cracks and splits.

Saving Tomato Seed

Botanical Interests Burpee Gardening Required FTC Disclosure Statement: Botanical Interests, Burpee, Renee's Garden, and True Leaf Market are some of our Senior Gardening affiliate advertisers. Clicking through one of our ads or text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale. Renee's Garden True Leaf Market
 
 

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Weather Underground Extended Forecast August 2-11, 20221-800-Flowers Deal of the WeekOur Weather Underground extended forecast says it all about gardening for today...and possibly several days to come. The wind was howling again this morning with a bit of rain. There's enough chance of rain over the ten day period shown that may make it difficult to get our fall crops seeded anytime soon.

I picked another cucumber this afternoon once the rain had let up and about a dozen nice tomatoes. I hope to do our first canning of whole tomatoes by the end of this week.

I have a note on my to-do list to pick up more paper sacks at the grocery. They use ones with neat handles on them that are great for drying seeds where you pull branches of a plant and hang the sacks to dry. I've done broccoli, spinach, and lettuce for seed that way.

Burpee Herb Seeds & Plants

Thursday, August 4, 2022

Ripe Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers and Ealiest Red Sweet peppersA2 Web HostingOn my way to check our tomatoes this morning, I found we had several Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers ready to pick. I also found three small ripe Earliest Red Sweet peppers. While I'd planned to can tomatoes today, my focus shifted to making some Sweet Pickle Relish.

There were eight of the Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers ready, along with part of one previously picked that I'd been using for salads. That was just enough to make a small batch of relish.

Making relish for me is a two day process. I worked at chopping the cucumbers, peppers, onion, and garlic before starting to brine the mix. I'll let the brining sit overnight in the fridge. Then it's just a matter of squishing the brine water out of the cucumber mix, heating some vinegar, spices, and sugar and combining and canning it all.

Seeding cucumbers Chopping cucumbers Ready to brine

I'll try and write a bit more about making the relish tomorrow. But for now, today's work left me worn out. I tried watching the NFL Hall of Fame game after a supper of Asiago Cheese & Tortellini Soup, but kept falling asleep every two plays or so! And again, I tell the whole story of making relish in our Sweet Pickle Relish recipe, complete with links to pages I used to develop our recipe.

Oh yeah, I also filled a 12 quart bucket today with ripe Earlirouge tomatoes. Our water bath canner should get a workout tomorrow.

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Friday, August 5, 2022 - Canning

Straining relish mix of brine waterToday was devoted to canning. I started out by draining the brine from our pickle relish mix, using a wooden spoon and a fine strainer to push as much moisture out of the mix as possible. As I was doing that, some apple cider vinegar, sugar, and spices were boiling on the stove.

The strained relish mix went into the vinegar solution and boiled for about ten minutes before going into pint jars for canning. I got four pints of relish for my effort. It will need to sit and season for at least a week before we use any of it.

I give complete directions in our recipe for Sweet Pickle Relish, along with links to some other articles on making pickle relish.

Today's haul: five and a half quarts of tomatoes and four pints of pickle relishI moved on to canning whole tomatoes. That took the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon. I washed, cored, removed the blossom end and bad spots before using boiling water followed by cold water to skin the tomatoes.

Ball Complete Book of Home PreservingThe tomatoes went into canning jars with a bit of canning salt. Unfortunately, two of the five quarts jars didn't seal. Since I had the water bath canner and some extra lids out, I put fresh lids on the jars that didn't seal and processed them again. One jar sealed, but the second one didn't. It went into the fridge with some fresh basil, parsley, and oregano cut into it to make pasta sauce tomorrow. The twice failed jar will either end up holding nuts and bolts or go into the trash tomorrow.

Five and a half quarts of canned tomatoes won't last us through the winter, but it's a start. With only six tomato plants out this year instead of our usual twenty, our batches of canned tomatoes will probably continue to be smaller than in previous years.

The best instructions I've seen for canning tomatoes appear in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. Without buying the book, one can reliably use their online instructions, although they lack the step-by-step image illustrations for the task.

Morgenstern Books

Saturday, August 6, 2022

Onions - 2022Water CharityI trimmed, bagged, and brought in and hung our onions today. I wonder if I waited too long to do the job, as I had to cull a lot of red onions with white mold at the base of the bulb and roots. I haven't had that occur in the past. Other onions with soft spots or other problems went with the cull red onions and all the trimmings to our compost pile.

This year's onion harvest yielded just over thirteen pounds of good, storable onions. That's a far cry from the thirty-five pounds of onions we harvested last year. Around half of last year's harvest went to our local food bank. That won't happen this year, but they'll get a lot of garlic from this year's bumper crop.

The jar of whole tomatoes that didn't seal yesterday was joined with a quart from last year and a pint of purée to make some pasta sauce. Fresh onion, garlic, basil, parsley, and oregano went into the sauce with some not-so-fresh black and red pepper. I make enough sauce for spaghetti one night and lasagna the next.

Botannical Interests - Fall Gardens

Monday, August 8, 2022

Majestic Red or Better Devil and Barbados lettuce ready to cut for seedBags for drying seedI picked six or seven JLP cucumbers this morning and a dozen or so Earlirouge tomatoes. While outside, I saw that our Barbados lettuce was ready to be cut for seed, as well as the Majestic Red or Better Devil. The lettuce went into some nifty paper grocery bags with handles which are ideal for hanging and drying light crops.

While harvesting the seed lettuce, I pulled some weeds and discovered that the soil in our main raised garden bed had dried out enough for tilling. After sitting in the sun a bit and a little cajoling with starting fluid, our twenty-eight year old MTD rear tine tiller fired up. While it didn't chew up the tall, well rooted grass weeds like Troy Bilts do in TV commercials, it did a pretty good job for an old girl.

I interrupted my weeding and tilling to move two clusters of mature snapdragons to a better spot. I severely cut them back, hoping they’ll take where I moved them.

Getting back to our potential lettuce seed saving, our Jericho romaine and Crispino and Sun Devil head lettuce aren't quite ready for seed saving. The Jericho and Crispinos are in full bloom, while the Sun Devils are just beginning to have blooms open on their seed spikes.

Jericho lettuce blooming Crispino lettuce blooming Sun Devil lettuce putting up seed spikes

I wound up my outdoor gardening around one in the afternoon. The temperature had reached the nineties and the heat index was over a hundred. I was worn out, so main bed reclamation will have to continue tomorrow.

Main raised bed cleaned up some

I'm not in such a hurry to plant, as I considered the calendar today. My plans for a fall crop of Encore peas will have to be set aside.
Encores are a 64 days-to-maturity variety. And we have just 67 days until our average first frost. With the week or so extra that has to be added to days-to-maturity figures to account for the shorter days of fall sunlight. the numbers just don't work. Fortunately, there's still plenty of growing days left for fall plantings of kale, carrots, spinach, and lettuce.

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Thursday, August 11, 2022

Chopping cucumbersCucumbers briningToday was another relish day. I got started early coring cucumbers and running them, some peppers, onion, and garlic through our rarely used food processor. I went with the food processor instead of our Pampered Chef Food Chopper because I had lots more cucumbers to chop than last time. The food processer doesn't do as fine a chop as the food chopper, but it's quicker and far easier on my arm.

When I list using seventeen (or eighteen as I did today) cucumbers for a batch in our recipe, one needs to realize that our cukes are Japanese Long Pickling, with many of the cucumbers being eighteen inches long. While a bit too long for ideal slicing, that's just about perfect for making relish or pickles. The eighteen cukes chopped with some peppers, onion, and garlic filled an eight quart kettle.

I was done chopping before eleven. I added ice and canning salt and moved the relish mix to the fridge to brine. I'll let the mix sit and brine until tomorrow morning.

Weather Underground Extended Forecast August 11, 2022

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We just may get a break in our rainy weather that has limited our gardening lately. Usually any rain in late July into August is a godsend, but what we've experienced has been frustrating gardening wise. I dumped about three quarters of an inch of rain from our rain gauge on Tuesday, and a local weather reporting station showed an inch and a half of precipitation over a two day period.

While I'll be hoping for rain once I get our main raised garden bed tilled and planted, the predicted dry spell gives me a nice window in which to get our fall garden started.

Terracotta Composting 50-Plant Garden Tower by Garden Tower Project

Friday, August 12, 2022 - More Relish and Canned Tomatoes

Canned sweet relishCanned whole tomatoesOther than picking some tomatoes, I really didn't garden today. Instead, I had sweet relish brined and ready for canning and a lot of ripe tomatoes to process. Eighteen cucumbers canned out to eleven and a half pints…except that one pint jar broke in the boiling water bath. Other casualties of the effort were a slotted spoon, a spatula, and a strainer rather permanently stained yellow. :-) Considering that a similar amount of canned pickle relish we made in 2018 kept and lasted until early this year, we should be good on relish for a few years.

What Do We Use Relish In?

We like sweet relish on hot dogs, of course. But we also use a good bit of it in ham and chicken salad and homemade tartar sauce.

Tomatoes

I canned 7 quarts of whole tomatoes this afternoon. Again, one jar broke in the water bath canner. I need to figure out what is breaking those jars during canning.

A2 Web Hosting

Monday, August 15, 2022 - Saving Dill and Lettuce Seed

Dill, sage, basil, and weedsBrowned dill seed heads ready to be harvestedLooking at our herb garden, it was obvious that our dill needed to be harvested for seed. Otherwise, I'd have hundreds of volunteer dill plants coming up this fall and next spring. The dill plant, a volunteer itself, came up between our two perennial sage plants and a basil I'd put in.

Harvesting dill for seed is pretty easy. I used a pair of good kitchen shears to snip off the seed heads that had browned out. They went into a paper sack where they'll dry for a few weeks. Then it's just a matter of banging the seed heads around in the sack, removing the stems, and winnowing the dill seed. At least, that's how I remember it from the last time I saved dill seed (in 2016 or 2017?).

Fallen over Crispino seed stalksCloseup of Crispino seed headsTwo more of our lettuce plants were ready for seed cutting and saving. A Crispino head lettuce plant's seed stalks had fallen outside the plant's raised bed and could have gotten mowed off when our mowing crew arrives. So even though the plant had some new yellow blooms on it, I harvested the seed stalks, storing them in a paper grocery bag to dry. And as you can see in the photo at left, there are several more Crispino plants blooming.

This plant had already begun to shed seed. I rolled a couple of the browned blooms in my hand, revealing nice, white lettuce seed in them.

While I plant our Crispino lettuce each year from saved seed, this is a variety I don't offer to share (sell) via the Grassroots Seed Network or the Seed Savers Exchange, our two seed sharing outlets. Crispino seed is still commercially available from Johnny's Selected Seeds. I've found the quality of lettuce seed from Johnny's to be excellent.

Jericho romaine lettuce seed headSmall garter snake in Sun Devil lettuce bloomsOur Jericho romaine lettuce plant that surprised me by going to seed pretty quickly when things got hot here had also fallen over. I was able to save it from the mowing crew by using a row marker stake to hold it inside its raised bed spot. But it was ready for seed harvesting today.

This is another good, open pollinated lettuce variety still offered by Johnny's. So, I won't be sharing any seed from it, if we get any good seed.

And no, Johnny's isn't one of our affiliated advertisers. But they are one of our favorite suppliers of quality garden seed.

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Some of our text links go to the sites of our Senior Gardening Advertisers. Clicking through one of our banner ads or text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale.

One variety of lettuce seed I hope to share is the Sun Devil head lettuce variety. It was tied up for several years in a plant patent that apparently expired. I saved seed from a Sun Devil plant for the first time in 2019. We now have four or five Sun Devil plants putting up seed spikes. When I saved Sun Devil seed in 2019, a young garter snake climbed into its bloom spikes!

Other

I had to move our rain gauge yesterday. The vines of our Japanese Long Pickling cucumber plants had grown so much that they were in danger of covering the opening of the rain gauge! If you should choose to grow the JLP cucumber variety, a trellis at least five feet tall is recommended. But the growth this year is a bit unusual.

Cucumber vines outgrowing five foot trellis

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Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Our Senior Garden - August 17, 2022Weedy main raised bedI finally gave up trying to pull or till under the well established grass weeds I'd let get away from me in our main raised garden bed. Doing so left my old shoulders in real pain. Instead, I watered the weeds with a vinegar/epsom salts solution. It's an effective weed killer I've previously used around water sources (deep well vent and shallow well) where standard weed killers wouldn't be such a good idea.

I gave the area a gallon of the homemade weed killer yesterday. While some of the grass had yellowed, I really wasn't satisfied with my coverage. So I came back today with almost two gallons of the mix. Hopefully, the weed killer will only add manganese from the epsom salts to the soil, a necessary soil element. I'm not really sure what the vinegar will do for the soil.

The basic recipe for the weed killer is:

  • 1 gallon white vinegar
  • 2 cups Epsom salts
  • 1/4 cup Dawn dish detergent as an emulsifier

I would have used Spreader Sticker instead the Dawn for an emulsifier, but our local garden center was out of it.

Kidney bean pods set onHuge, overripe JLP cucumberI thought I was being careful not to splash the weed killer on our row of kidney bean plants, but a few apparently got hit. While inspecting the damage, I saw that the plants had put on bean pods.

I also went around our raised beds with the mower today. I'm not supposed to mow, as hitting bumps aggravates my neck injury from last year.

The mower tugged at one vine, revealing a huge Japanese Long Pickling cucumber. It's a good bit larger than I'd use for slicing or even making pickles or relish. But when it yellows and I cut it open, I suspect it will be filled with lots of viable seed.

Chewy.com

Thursday, August 18, 2022

I only found two ripe tomatoes to pick today. Disgusted, I fired up our twenty-eight year old MTD rear tine rototiller and began turning under the grass weeds I've been fighting. I'd previously tried tilling the plot, only to have the well established grass defeat my efforts. After turning under some weeds a week ago with a garden fork and two treatments of homemade weed killer, I was finally able to make some good progress in reclaiming the bed today.

Yesterday
Raised bed - August 17, 2022

"What a difference a day makes." (Dinah Washington)

Today
Raised bed - August 18, 2022

The bed will need to be raked out and tilled at least once more before it is planting ready. And with all the weeds pulled and raked out, I'll need to add some organic material to the bed at some point to maintain its soil level. In what has been a lackluster gardening year, I may yet get some fall crops started.

Fruit Bouquets

Sunday, August 21, 2022 - Down Time

I've had a couple of enforced days off that reflect a meme currently going around on social media:

It's not my age that bothers me.
It's the side effects.

After two days of tilling our main raised garden bed, I awoke with my neck, shoulders, and one hip in total protest. While getting up and moving around a bit each day with healthy doses of aspirin eased the pain, I realized that I needed to take some time off and let our raised garden bed be.

Our main raised garden bed - August 21, 2022

Such are the benefits of being a retired senior citizen. The raised bed is now very close to being planting ready. But I'm also totally aware of our diminishing growing days this gardening season. Fortunately, the crops I want to grow are somewhat frost hardy or do well under floating row covers.

Saving Snapdragon Seed

Crushing snapdragon seed heads to release seed
Saved Rocket Mix snapdragon seed

Snapdragon seed headsI've been working at saving some snapdragon seed. Although both of the varieties we have growing this year are hybrids, I'm hoping we'll get something useable from the seed next season.

I clip off the stems of the snapdragons with browned seed heads on them and let them dry inside for a week or so. Then I put a fine strainer on a paper plate and use pliers to crush the seed heads and release their seed. The seed is so fine that it slips through the strainer while most of the trash and seed head covers stay in the strainer.

I've done a lot better saving Rocket Mix snapdragon seed rather than our favorite geranium variety, Madame Butterfly. The Rockets went in well before the Madames, as the latter seed came in late from a backorder.

I also severely cut back our Madame Butterfly snapdragons before digging and moving them to a new location. They were in the way of where I wanted to rototill our main raised bed. But it appears that the transplanting worked, so we may have some lovely, late Madame Butterfly blooms and possibly seed heads for seed saving.

A Pretty Geranium

Pinto Salmon geraniumAt the corner of one of our raised garden beds, we have a lovely geranium. It's a Pinto Salmon geranium that came in a packet of Pinto mixed seed.

While the link above is to True Leaf Market for a hundred seeds, I often get my geranium seeds in packets of ten seeds from Twilley Seeds. The cost per seed is about the same, and I don't know what I'd do with a hundred geranium seeds!

Rain

We had thunderstorms last night that gave us about a quarter inch of precipitation last night. Some of our row of Earliest Red Sweet peppers may have gotten a good bit more water. I'd forgotten that I'd run a hose from our rain barrel to the pepper row, so they got all the rain the barrel collected last night.

Gloxinias

Gloxinias moved to four inch potsI've been disappointed by the lack of blooms on our gloxinias this year. In years past, I've brought the plants up to our dining room table in front of our bay windows for us to enjoy. But this year, we got less blooms and only one blooming cycle from our older plants that usually bloom for several months.

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I realized yesterday what may have been the issue with the plants. When they break dormancy, I repot them in fresh potting mix. But I was out of our usual Baccto Lite potting mix that I mix half and half with ProMix. Our local garden center was out of the Baccto, so I used some no name organic potting soil from Walmart.

My current shopping list includes getting a couple of bags of the good potting mix before our garden center runs out of it.

Yesterday, I moved sixteen baby gloxinias from their fourpack inserts to four inch pots. The gloxinias were seeded on June 17 and moved to fourpacks on July 17. The plants went into straight sterilized Baccto potting mix and may begin to produce blooms by Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Hoss Tools

Monday, August 22, 2022

Our Senior Garden - August 22, 2022Our main raised garden bed is finally pretty much planting ready. I did cut a few corners, but it should be good to go.

Raised bed planting readyAfter raking a bunch of dead grass to the low side of the bed, I staked the rows I plan to plant tomorrow or in the next few days. I liberally sprinkled Muriate of Potash (0-0-60) down the planned double row of carrots. Since this isn't our usual spring intensive planting, I made sure to leave a good twelve inches between the carrot rows to allow using my scuffle hoe to hold back weeds. With a mowing crew doing our mowing now, I'm not able to generate the grass clipping mulch we usually use to hold back weeds.

The whole tilled portion of the bed got serious applications of 12-12-12 commercial fertilizer and ground limestone. I also added two more bales of peat moss to the bed, concentrating most of it in the carrot rows before another tilling. I plan to add more organic material to the bed when I do our end of season tilling, as the bed's soil level is still below what I'd like.

1-800-Flowers Deal of the WeekHardware WorldBefore I go to bed tonight, I'll start soaking our Abundant Bloomsdale spinach seed saved last year. Soaking the sometimes hard seed for twelve hours or so seems to really improve germination. I'm saving the spinach seed we saved this spring for next year's planting. There's not a lot of it, as our spinach plants this spring turned out to be mostly male!

In a change of plans and heart, I went ahead and left room for a row of Encore peas. With our growing days growing short, I may have to protect the crop with floating row covers. But I had the space and the seed. So, tomorrow morning, I'll soak our saved Encore pea seed. The Encore variety was part of the parentage of the supersweet Eclipse pea. It also shared Eclipse's PVP plant patent protection. Both varieties are now out of Monsanto's evil grip and hopefully will begin to be available to gardeners once again.

I'm thawing our pea, lettuce, kale, carrot, and beet seed for the coming plantings.

The main corner I cut today was only raking out the proposed planting rows. I just left the thirty-six inch aisles between the rows alone.

Burpee Herb Seeds & Plants

Tuesday, August 23, 2022 - Planting Day

Our Senior Garden - August 23, 2022Succession plantings in main raised bedI lucked out with a beautiful day for planting. It was partly sunny with temperatures in the low 80s and a pleasant light breeze at times.

Since I'd fertilized, limed, tilled, raked, and marked my rows yesterday, all I had to do today was string the rows, make furrows and plant. I did water each furrow, as we're into another dry spell that may well last through the weekend. I used our garden hoe to make the furrow for a row of peas. All of the other furrows were for small seeded varieties, so I used a scrap one inch board to make shallow furrows for the carrots, beets, spinach, lettuce, and kale.

I soaked our saved Abundant Bloomsdale spinach seed overnight. The Encore pea seed soaked for about an hour this morning, and the Vates kale seed soaked for just a few minutes before planting. The other seeds went in dry.

With lots of space available, I left aisles of 30-36 inches between crops. While I usually grow our spring carrots in a double row spaced four inches apart, I left twelve inches between our double rows of carrots and beets, enough to run a scuffle hoe between the rows. The 30-36 inch aisles should allow running the rototiller through them for weed control.

Main bed succession plantings completed

I haven't direct seeded lettuce in years, but did so today. I was a bit mad at myself for not starting transplants weeks ago.

We're now 57 days from our average first frost date. When you add a week or so to our crop's days-to-maturity figures to allow for shorter day length in the fall, we'll have to be lucky to bring in some of those crops. Floating row covers may help us extend our growing season. And sometimes, we don't have a killing frost until well into November.

Planted today were:

  • Encore peas, a 67 day variety that we'll be lucky to harvest
  • Mokum and Napoli carrots - Mokums are a 36 day variety for baby carrots and 54 days for full sized. Napoli's are a 58 day variety. But according to Garden Betty, "Carrot tops are cold-hardy down to at least 18°F." So I'm confident hopeful we should get a crop.
  • Detroit Dark Red (55) and Cylindra (56) beets. Hey, smaller beets are great for making Harvard Beets.
  • Abundant Bloomsdale spinach (47)
  • Crispino and Sun Devil head lettuce (57-60), Barbados summer crisp (37), and Jericho and Coastal Star (47-60) romaines
  • Judy's Kale (55), Red Ursa (65), and Vates, also known as Dwarf Blue Curled or Dwarf Blue Scotch (55)

When I began to soak the kale seed, Vates seed from both Burpee and Twilley Seed had a lot of floating seeds. Often, floaters aren't good seeds, and I skimmed most of them off before planting. Vates has long been our go-to variety for making our annual batches of Portuguese Kale Soup.

Botanical Interests Burpee Gardening Required FTC Disclosure Statement: Botanical Interests, Burpee, Renee's Garden, and True Leaf Market are some of our Senior Gardening affiliate advertisers. Clicking through one of our ads or text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale. Renee's Garden True Leaf Market

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

A foggy morning - August 24, 2022I was up early this morning and enjoyed looking at a morning, low-hanging fog. It cleared up fairly quickly into another pleasant, partly sunny day. While I was up really early, my aging body suggested after three straight days of hard gardening, it was time to take it easy.

Nesco Food DehydratorOne easy job this morning was picking basil leaves and filling the four trays of our food dehydrator. I picked both dwarf and large leaf basil and was surprised at the differing basil odors they gave off. Going into our dehydrator around nine in the morning with it set to about 100°F, the leaves are still somewhat limp at around nine this evening. I'm not in a rush, so I'll cut the dehydrator back to its lowest setting (around 95°F) and let it run all night.

I moved on to picking six Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers for seed saving. I'd let these cucumbers yellow somewhat on the vine. They went onto our drying/curing table in the garage. I'll let them mature there until they almost begin to rot before harvesting seed from them.

Cease biofungicide

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While picking the cucumbers, I saw some dead and discolored leaves whose appearance I didn't like. It wasn't classic powdery mildew, but to be safe, I sprayed the cucumber vines with Serenade biofungicide. Serenade is no longer available, but Cease biofungicide is said to have the same formulation. Since I had material left in my biologicals sprayer, I also sprayed our six Earlirouge tomato plants.

Watering Required

Something I should have mentioned in yesterday's posting: When planting wet seed via soaking the seed and/or watering the furrow in dry weather, one needs to continue to regularly water the planted rows. We're into a dry spell that may last the rest of this week. Without watering, the seeds could begin to germinate, run out of soil moisture, and die.

So this evening around sunset, I was hauling our two gallon watering can to our garden watering our new plantings. I'll continue doing so until we get some rain and/or the plants emerge. While asoil soaker hose might be an easier option, our deep well can run dry for short periods at this time of year. Forget the hose is on and you may hear the pump grinding, or worse, have it burn out.

David's Cookies

Thursday, August 25, 2022

Loading dehydrator trays with basil leavesThis morning our basil was crisp and dry from its day in our dehydrator. I crushed and then ground the basil, but it only made about half as much as I wanted. I'd planned to start drying sage today, but instead, I started another load of basil.

I made the job harder by first harvesting some dill seed. The dill plant towers above a large leaf basil plant, so I had to dust dill seed off the leaves as I loaded the dehydrator trays. I made that job easier by doing it sitting on the glider on our back porch enjoying a pleasant breeze.

I was disappointed again picking tomatoes this morning. Our Earlirouge plants have been producing smaller tomatoes than usual, some somewhat shaped like plum tomatoes. I'm not sure whether I've made a wrong turn in breeding and saving seed from the variety, or whether the strange weather we've had this season is responsible. At any rate, I watered our six Earlirouge plants and our seven Earliest Red Sweet pepper plants with Miracle-Gro Liquid All Purpose Plant Food (12-4-8) with some Maxicrop Soluble Seaweed Powder (0-0-17) mixed in. Maxicrop's formulation doesn't show it, but there's something in the seaweed our peppers really like.

I picked a dozen or so mature Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers. The cukes were long and yellowing, which is what I want for seed saving. The cucumbers went on our dry/curing table in the garage with some I'd picked yesterday. This variety of cucumber ripens incredibly quickly. They also go from mature to rotting quickly, so I'll have to keep an eye on them. I want them well overripe and soft, but not rotting for seed saving.

Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers curing for seed saving

I wound up the day by again watering the rows I planted on Tuesday. We have a slight chance for rain overnight, with a better possibility on Sunday and Monday. And until it rains, I'll just keep watering the newly seeded crops.

Alibris: Books, Music, & Movies

Friday, August 26, 2022 - Basil and Sage

Today is another dried herb day. Our second load of basil dried nicely overnight and is now ground and stored in a jar with our first batch. There should be enough to last a year or so, and we still have a jar of dried, uncrushed basil leaves left from last year.

My plan was to process the dried basil this morning and then start a batch of sage drying. But the sun didn't get around to shining on our sage plants until almost noon to dry off an overnight rain and the morning dew. But the the overnight storm with some really impressive lightening and thunder eliminated the need to wash off the sage before picking it.

While not a bunch, the .15 inch of rain should help with getting our newly seeded crops going. Of course, since the rain fell evenly across the bed, I'll need to use our scuffle hoe soon to suppress emerging weeds in the aisles between the plantings.

Our two sage plants are now in their seventh year. I'd read somewhere that sage plants can play out after about three years. Ours that marked the corners of our East Garden plot have definitely followed that guidance. But the two in our raised bed with its improved soil and cut back each fall continue to thrive. The sage and some oregano have about taken over two sides of the raised bed.

Sage plants first year Sage plants today - August 26, 2022

Again wondering how long does sage last, I read the following on the Gilmour site:

As long as properly cared for, harvested and pruned every season, your sage plant can last you many years. Some have found that their plants get more and more woody as the years go by, and that by year 3, the plant is no longer as productive or flavorful. However, others note that by cutting back past the woody stems at the end of each growing season, you can get many more years out of this herb.

Tomatoes

I wrote somewhat disparagingly about our Earlirouge tomatoes yesterday. What the tomatoes lack in size this year is made up for by the volume of tomatoes ripening.

Earlirouge tomato plants Cluster of Earlirouge tomatoes

I'll be canning tomatoes again soon.

Lettuce

Sun Devil lettuce plant in bloomSmall garter snake in Sun Devil lettuce bloomsI'm not sure how to squeeze this photo in, but a shot of one of our Sun Devil lettuce plants in bloom and producing seed got me.

Our original Sun Devil seed came from Johnny's Selected Seeds in 2005. The variety produces wonderful soft heads of lettuce. But it was under some patent protections that appear to have died out, even though commercial seed houses no longer carry the variety.

So, along with the Crispino head lettuce variety, I began to try to save seed from Sun Devils. I got lucky in 2019 with a nice saving of seed, despite a young garter snake deciding to die in the plant's blooms!

I won't be sharing any Crispino head lettuce seed on either the Grassroots Seed Network or the Seed Savers Exchange, as Johnny's still offers the seed. But I hope to share the Sun Devil variety for next season.

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Saturday, August 27, 2022

Harvesting dill seedBall Complete Book of Home PreservingAfter crushing and grinding the sage I started drying yesterday, I moved on to harvesting dill seed. I had in mind making some dill pickle chips for my lovely wife who loves them. I already had a small sack of fresh dill seed, but worked on a large sack of dill heads, rubbing them to release their seeds.

I was looking at two dill pickle chip recipes, one from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, Grandma's Dill Pickles, and another by Diana Rattray on The Spruce Eats, Canned Dill Pickle Slices. The Ball recipe needed eight pounds of sliced cucumbers, but also called for pickling spice. I'd rather add my own amount of pickling ingredients. Rattray's recipe was smaller, using four pounds of cucumber slices, but also called for individual pickling ingredients (dill seeds, mustard seed, bay leaves, black peppercorns, and garlic). I decided to go with the eight pounds of sliced cucumbers, but to double the ingredients in Rattray's recipe.

Twenty plus pounds of washed pickling cucumbers
Slicing cucumbers

Lots of Japanese Long Pickling cucumbersDriving my desire to make pickles, I'd picked over twenty pounds of Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers in the morning along with several overripe cucumbers that will serve for seed saving. I'd also picked a bunch of Earlirouge tomatoes, but not quite enough to make a batch for canning.

The cucumbers got washed and de-spined as best as I could with a stiff vegetable brush. Then it was the relatively easy task of slicing the cucumbers, picking the best of them for the batch.

Trying to follow the recipe, I used my postage scale to weigh what I'd cut, eventually ending up with a bit over eight pounds of sliced cucumbers. I had to twice switch containers for the sliced cucumbers, as they took up a lot of space.

They eventually got covered with ice and canning salt in a twelve quart stainless steel pot to brine in our refrigerator overnight. Sometime tomorrow, I'll drain the cucumbers and immerse them in the spice mixture called for in the recipes before canning them. Sadly, one has to let the pickles cure in their canning jars for several days before enjoying them on a sandwich or whatever.

The leftover cucumbers will go to our local food bank for their Monday distribution.

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Sunday, August 28, 2022

Our Senior Garden - August 28, 2022Cold pack of cucumbers for dill picklesThe eight pounds of sliced cucumbers I started brining yesterday canned out to fourteen pints of dill pickle slices. Unfortunately, one jar broke in the canner. Two others failed to seal. But we now have eleven pints of dill pickles in our basement pantry and the two unsealed jars in the refrigerator. All of the pickles will need to cure a week or so before we taste any of them.

Something I need to add about the two recipes I combined: They have you put cold cucumbers into hot canning jars that go into boiling water in a water bath canner. That sounds like an invitation to thermal shock, which may or may not have been the cause of the one jar breaking in the canner. At any rate, I combined the second batch of cucumbers with the hot vinegar and let them simmer for about twenty minutes before doing a hot pack into canning jars.

When I moved the jars of pickles to our basement pantry, I realized that there were no more bread and butter pickles on the shelf. That should be our next canning of cucumbers.

Canned dill pickles

To help our cucumber vines keep producing, they got about twenty gallons of water with Quick Start (4-12-4) fertilizer mixed in. I didn't want a lot of nitrogen to encourage green growth, but wanted the vines to begin blooming heavily again. I picked four more nicely ripe cucumbers today that will go to the food bank tomorrow, and six more yellowed, overripe ones that went to our drying/curing table to mature a bit more for seed saving.

After the canning, the rest of my morning and early afternoon were taken up with watering. While we may have a good chance of rain tonight and tomorrow, with temperatures in the low 90s today, our soil was drying out fairly quickly. The thorough watering should get us through until the rain comes...if it comes.

Our rows of kale are almost all up, and we even have a few beet seedlings emerging.

Renee's Garden

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

I really thought I was going to be canning tomatoes today. But when I looked at our tomatoes on the vines, I could see that they’d benefit from another nice day to ripen. With my empty picking bucket in hand, I noticed a ripe cucumber. I picked it and went around our row of cucumbers picking other ripe ones. The picking filled the bucket and changed my plans for the day. I was going to be making bread and butter pickles today.

Earlifourge tomatoes almost ready Earlirouge tomatoes - August 30, 2022

Canned bread and butter picklesKale upI followed our usual recipe for Bread and Butter Pickles in our Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book (1989). I misread the recipe, using eight cups of sliced cucumbers when I should have used 16 cups or 4 quarts. But I got four pints of pickles, anyway. I only used half of the cucumbers picked. The rest went to the food bank.

It's been a week since I planted most of our main raised garden bed. A half inch of rain last night should help the stuff there. While there's a little of this and that up with some weed seedlings, our rows of kale have shown the strongest germination.

It appears that I'll need to continue regularly watering the raised bed. Our current extended weather forecast shows little to no chance for rain for the next ten days.

I've been meaning to stop and take a shot of all the egrets (white heron) on the nearby Turtle Creek Reservoir. There were very few egrets or blue heron visible this spring, but the egret population has exploded the last month or so, far more than I've ever seen on the reservoir.

And as usual, I couldn't get a good shot of the always shy blue herons.

Egrets (white heron) on the Turtle Creek Reservoir

Young Stayman Winsap apple treeFour year old Stayman Winesap with its first appleI took some time yesterday afternoon to clean up under and around the Stayman Winesap apple tree I put in last summer. Lots of weeds had come up inside its protective ring. After weeding, I gave it a good watering with some dilute fertilizer mixed in.

Our other Stayman Winesap is now in its fourth season...and it has an apple on it!

Both Stayman Winesaps came from Ison's Nursery & Vineyard. The variety has been difficult to find. The other apple tree in our yard was supposed to be a winesap but is full of yellow apples this year. While I'll never order again from the supplier of that not winesap tree, the tree may turn out to be a good pollinator and producer of apples for applesauce.

Our fourth apple tree is a volunteer just off our property where we used to dump cull apples. When it bears fruit, the smallish apples have a wonderful red delicious/winesap flavor. That tree is overgrown a bit with surrounding trees and bushes. I've tried without success grafting from that tree onto root rot resistant rootstock.

Our rose bushKidney bean pods ripeningElsewhere, our rose bush that came from one of those miniature potted Mother's Day roses continues to thrive and bloom without much care. I cut it back some yesterday.

It appears that our row of red kidney bean plants that I damaged with some vinegar/Epsom salts weedkiller may yet make a crop. With a large harvest, I'd hope to save kidney beans for planting next season and making Portuguese Kale Soup and Refried Kidney Beans, often for use in Texas Nachos. Realistically, I'll be happy with one or two of those three.

Dungarees

Wednesday, August 31, 2022 - August Wrap-up

August, 2022, animated GIF of our Senior GardenJLP cucumbers curing on drying tableOur wonderful Japanese Long Pickling cucumber vines are really fading. I took all of the cucumbers I could for seed saving this morning. This picking pretty well filled the rest of our drying/curing table in the garage. I'm hoping to get one more picking of fresh cucumbers from the vines. If not, we already have sweet relish, dill pickle slices, and bread and butter pickle slices canned.

My other gardening chores this morning were picking lots of small tomatoes and watering the crops I direct seeded in our main raised bed a week ago. Everything seeded, other than the lettuce, is showing signs of germination.

From our current extended weather forecast, I'll be watering each day well into September.

Morning watering done

Beyond all that, I'm trying to decide on whether to put up whole tomatoes today or tomato purée.

Fruit Bouquets

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