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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. November already! Where has the time gone! Instead of working outside today, I prepared garlic cloves for planting. It was easy with our elephant garlic, as there were lots of large bulbs to choose from. It was just a matter of splitting open the bulbs and selecting individual cloves to plant. Our regular garlic was another matter. There were several bulbs showing rot on a clove or two. I had to set aside lots of undersized cloves and of course, ones showing rot. I selected twenty elephant garlic cloves for planting. That's about one fifteen foot row. I aimed for sixty regular garlic cloves, but ended up with more towards eighty separated and saved. Even though we haven't had our first frost yet, the traditional time to plant garlic, I'm going to go ahead and plant our garlic sometime in the next few days.
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Some of my Facebook friends shared a cute meme today that I don't have rights to reproduce here. It features a red haired girl (presumably Annie) with the text: "Tomorrow, tomorrow, The commercials end tomorrow, It’s only a day away!" I'm fairly sure that resonates with most of us as we're election ad weary. But if you haven't yet, go vote tomorrow. Gardening is on hold here. My lovely wife Annie was sick for a week and sadly shared her bug with me. I'm getting better now, but it's rainy today and probably will be tomorrow. Once things dry out, I want to plant our garlic, mow the lawn and sweep up grass clippings, and mulch the garlic bed.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024 - Kidney Beans (Election Day U.S.) Since Annie and I voted early, we’re spending this rainy Election Day at home. She’s watching TV news while I’m working on canning kidney beans from our garden. I began rinsing and soaking about ten pounds of kidney beans last evening. I dumped the beans into our twelve quart Tramontina 12 quart kettle, but quickly realized it wasn’t going to be big enough. Although the beans filled the pot a little over half full, I realized kidney beans expand to two to three times their original size after soaking. So I put some of the beans in our eight quart Tramontina pot. By morning, both pots were full of beans! The first batch of seven quarts (the canner’s capacity) is cooling. A second batch of nine pints is halfway done in the canner. And there’ll be one more batch to do. Each batch takes a little over two hours to do.
After dumping the soak water, I heated the beans with fresh water and began filling hot wide mouth quart canning jars. Part way through the 90 minutes quarts require to can, I dumped the eight quart pot beans into the ones remaining in the twelve quart pot. That told me it was going to be a long day with three total canning sessions. The Presto site suggests one may be able to double deck wide mouth pint canning jars. I thought I’d try it, but found only five unused wide mouth pint jars in our storage area. So for our second batch of canned kidney beans, I switched to regular mouth pint jars. We’ve had lots of them gifted to us, including four dozen from my late mother and another dozen from Anne’s BFF. Of course, they’re old. There are lots of them with a big magic marker “X” on the bottom of them holding various screws, bolts, cotter pins, and the like. That’s what happens to canning jars that fail to seal. The all day canning exercise produced fourteen quarts of canned beans and nine pints of them. Of the twenty-three total canning jars, all sealed properly! What to do with all those canned beans? Some will go into Portuguese Kale Soup while others will serve in Texas Nachos. And several of the quarts will get reprocessed as refried kidney beans.
I got a Seed Savers Exchange order this morning for some Earliest Red Sweet pepper seed. It turned out to be a losing proposition. My old and troubled Canon 4720 printer refused to connect, so I had to hand write the seed envelopes, letter, and mailing envelope. I do my printing from an older Macintosh computer, so finding a new printer with appropriate software was an issue. Instead, I bought a new-in-box older Canon 4520 printer, as I already had the necessary software installed from a previously failed printer. So, I filled a $4.50 seed order and spent $45 on a new printer and ink. Our weather is finally beginning to feel like fall. I'm still holding off planting our garlic, as I don't want it coming up too soon.
I planted four rows of garlic. The first row was all elephant garlic. The second row was a mix of Purple Glazer and Chesnock Red. The last two rows were a mix of white hardnecks and softnecks.
The garlic bed had been tilled with 10-10-10 and Muriate of Potash (0-0-60) fertilizer, peat moss, and Milky Spore. Since we have a cat that loves digging and pooping in freshly tilled soil, I also spread a good coating of Repels All over the bed. When I mow again, the bed will be mulched with grass clippings to hold in moisture and hold back weeds.
I’d been planning a supper of teriyaki chicken over fried rice for a week or so. A first try failed when some egg rolls and fried rice from a local restaurant made both Annie and I sick. So I decided to try making fried rice on my own. I found a nice recipe on the Real Simple site, 7 Genius Tips for Making Perfect Fried Rice Every Time. It worked out pretty well.
Monday, November 11, 2024 - Veterans Day
And I'm not sure we're done picking tomatoes. There are still some ripening on the vine. Our extended weather forecast has a couple of cold, but not freezing, mornings in it. Our continuing warm, late fall has some good and bad for our garden. It allows our spotty kale rows to fill out, but our Walla Walla onions for overwintering are getting really tall. Since I have no choice in the matter, I'll appreciate any more growth of the kale for our annual batch of Portuguese Kale Soup. I'm guessing that I'll need to buy some kale leaves at the grocery for the batch. Our row of Walla Walla onions for overwintering have gotten really big.
I'll mulch them well, but I'm not sure they'll make it through the winter. I've only successfully overwintered onions one time.
So I boiled down half of the tomatoes today for tomato sauce. I used fresh parsley from our herb bed and saved basil and oregano from our garden. The sauce with some hamburger, onion, and garlic got a small shot of tomato purée with a tablespoon of corn starch mixed in to thicken and slightly sweeten the sauce. Cooking with ingredients from our garden is always satisfying for me.
With no outdoor work possible today, I worked on our annual best pictures of the year file. While doing so, I came across some nice photos of zinnia blooms from our eighty foot row of zinnias. Rather than use them in the best pictures file, I decided to share some of them here. Our zinnias are a mix of the State Fair and Benary's Giants varieties along with a packet here and there off seed racks to add some diversity to the mix. Our plants grow to four or five feet tall each season, putting on quite a display for passersby. If you're like us and live way out in the country with a good bit of ground, a long line of zinnia makes a beautiful and inexpensive display of color. We save seed from our zinnias each season. Here are a few bloom shots from this season:
Tuesday, November 19, 2024 - Kale Soup
The kale showed little bug damage, and I only found one worm when rinsing and stemming the kale leaves. I’d heavily sprayed the kale with Thuricide, a safe biological, to hold off cabbage looper worms. There was a little critter damage. Tracks in the raised bed suggested deer had dined on some of the leaves. This year’s batch contained kale, onions, garlic, carrots, kidney beans, tomatoes, peas, green beans, and potatoes from our garden. The chicken and broth were mostly from bone-in skin-on chicken breasts I’d filleted and frozen, boiling down the skins, bones, and remaining meat for chicken and broth. I did have to add a box of Swanson’s Chicken Broth. The sausage, as usual, was Eckrich Skinless Smoked Sausage. When our ancient pressure canner hit 10 PSI, I settled in to watch the gauge and hold it at the proper pressure for ninety minutes. Canning stuff with meat in it considerably extends canning times! Starting the canner requires ten minutes of venting live steam, going up to pressure, and when done, cooling down for a half hour or so to release the pressure. With several hours of picking, rinsing and stemming leaves, and the canning time, you can see how this turns into an all day activity. When done, I was exhausted and headed for bed. But this morning, I had a delicious bowl of the soup for breakfast. We received seed catalogs in yesterday’s mail from High Mowing Organic Seeds, Vermont Bean Seed Company, and Totally Tomatoes.
With seed catalogs arriving, it's about time for me to bring all our saved seed in from our big freezer and do our annual seed inventory.
While out in our East Garden plot, I took time to pick a few tomatoes. I found only four that were even close to ripening. I'm guessing that it's the end of our fresh tomato season. The four yellow-orange tomatoes are now in a tray on our dining room table trying to ripen a bit. Our copy of the 2025 Seed Savers Exchange catalog arrived today. SSE offers lots of open pollinated seed varieties. This catalog which features seeds SSE sells shouldn't be confused with The Exchange, an online listing of seeds offered by folks like me. Its catalog won't arrive until sometime in January.
Temperatures dropped to near freezing (33°F) with thirty plus mile per hour winds. Just two days ago, we had a high temperature of 71°F. A comment on Facebook by one of my cousins suggested bringing rain barrels in before things freeze. We leave our rain barrel in place over the winter, but drain it. And it turned out that I hadn't yet drained ours! Later Now it's snowing! It's not heavy and probably won't stick. But again, winter all at once.
I mowed our lawn yesterday...probably, hopefully, for the last time this season. I'd hoped to collect some grass clipping mulch for our garlic and pea beds and our overwintering Walla Walla onions. But I ran out of energy for the task and also ended up taking today off from outdoor gardening.
My list is alphabetical, and I got to Herbs this evening. I hope to finish the inventory tomorrow.
I mowed our lawn yesterday...probably, hopefully, for the last time this season. I'd hoped to collect some grass clipping mulch for our garlic and pea beds and our overwintering Walla Walla onions. But I ran out of energy for the task and also ended up taking today off from outdoor gardening.
My list is alphabetical, and I got to Herbs this evening. I hope to finish the inventory tomorrow.
Thursday, November 28, 2024 - Thanksgiving Day (U.S.) Rejoice evermore. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 Happy Thanksgiving
Our bumper crop of kidney beans got canned. One pint of the beans went into a small batch of Portuguese Kale Soup. Unbelievably, we picked tomatoes most of the month. There are still three or four of them trying to ripen on our dining room table. And our Walla Walla sweet onions for overwintering are looking good. I pretty well finished our seed inventory on Wednesday, leaving only our tomato and flower seed uninventoried. I'll get to them at some point. Black Friday Shopping I did venture out to our local Walmart I wasted several hours trying to get a response from Intuit, but their site was totally messed up and unhelpful. I finally called Amazon and got the order cancelled and my money back. After a terribly negative experience with TurboTax, I'll be looking for a new tax software package. First Snowfall of the Season
As predicted, it began to snow this afternoon. By nightfall when I went out to get the mail, almost an inch of snow had fallen. Cooking After making Grandma's Yeast Rolls and Butternut Squash Mock Yams for Thanksgiving, I moved on today to making a batch of Asiago Cheese & Tortellini Soup and Vienna Bread today. The soup recipe is online. It's one we've used for years, although it is a bit expensive to make. For the bread, I sort of used two online recipes as a guide. My last try for this type of bread failed miserably, probably due to old yeast. This time around, I used some fresh Fleischmann's Rapid Rise Yeast, as I wanted the bread done when the soup was ready. I sort of combined recipes from Food.com and Cook With Kushi for the bread. The biggest difference from my usual bread or roll recipes is that these two call for activating the yeast in warm milk rather than water. The first recipe calls for making baggets while the second has amounts that would double a normal recipe. So some adjustments were made. The bread recipe has become a priority. A local grocery changed brands of Vienna bread and doubled the price of it for an inferior bread. Since my wife loves Vienna bread, making some has become important for me. And yes, I do most of the cooking for dinners at home. For years, our work schedules dictated that I cook since I got home a couple of hours before my wife did. While Annie cooks quite well on occasion, we never got away from that cooking schedule. My biggest problem with the cooking is cutting down the amounts cooked. At one time, we had four hungry daughters with us. (My two sons from a previous marriage never lived with us.) With just Annie and I home, I have to work at cooking just enough for us and some leftovers.
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I brought in our big bag of seed, both saved and commercial, from our big freezer this morning. I'm now working my way through our annual seed inventory which must be done before placing any seed orders for the next season. Hitting lots of seed over four years old, I dumped a bunch of it. Both green beans, all dated 2020, and carrots will fill my seed orders this month. My ill fated try with pelletized carrot seed failed miserably, so I'll be buying lots of loose carrot seed for next season.
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