One of the Joys of Maturity |
|
Affiliated Advertisers |
The Old Guy's Garden Record Clicking through one of our banner ads or some of our text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale.
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.
|
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.
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.
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. Friday, August 5, 2022 - Canning
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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. Save $100 on Select Gas-Powered Generator
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.
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. Friday, August 12, 2022 - More Relish and Canned Tomatoes
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. Monday, August 15, 2022 - Saving Dill and Lettuce Seed
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?).
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.
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.
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. MacBook Pro 16" Laptop - Apple M1 Pro chip - 16GB Memory - 1TB SSD (Latest Model - Save $300)
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:
I would have used Spreader Sticker instead the Dawn for an emulsifier, but our local garden center was out of it.
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. 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.
"What a difference a day makes." (Dinah Washington)
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. 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:
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. 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
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
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
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.
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.
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. Tuesday, August 23, 2022 - Planting Day
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. 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:
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.
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.
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.
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. 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. 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.
Again wondering how long does sage last, I read the following on the Gilmour site:
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.
I'll be canning tomatoes again soon. Lettuce
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.
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.
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.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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. Wednesday, August 31, 2022 - August Wrap-up
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. Beyond all that, I'm trying to decide on whether to put up whole tomatoes today or tomato purée.
Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening |
Affiliated Advertisers |
©2022 Senior-Gardening.com