More harvesting and preserving

We're starting to get a few more tomatoes but so far have only had enough to enjoy fresh. Unfortunately, we'll be racing against the blight that seems to already be started. I'm low on home-canned tomatoes so I'm really hoping for a good harvest before the blight takes over.

The first of our cukes are finally ready to pick. As with the tomatoes, Clarence grows them on fencing so they can climb, rather than spread all over. It's fairly effective, although the tomatoes, in particular, still seem to spread out quite a bit.

This is the strawberry tower, planted with beans this year. Clarence and Allison picked the beans last night and enjoyed picking them while standing.

Last night's harvest wasn't huge, but I was able to can 5 quarts of beans. It's a start.

Yesterday I also made a batch of bread and butter pickles. I'd never made them before but the girls' adopted grandparents shared some with us a few months ago and we all loved them.

Wednesday night they gave us a couple bags of cucumbers so I tried using her refrigerator pickle recipe, but followed the instructions in my Ball Blue Book to process them as I don't have a lot of refrigerator space to store them in. Hopefully, they will still be good. I'm afraid they won't be very crisp after being processed. Anybody know?

Visit Teaching Good Things for more From Seeds to Harvest updates.

Peppers and Zucchini

I haven't updated on the garden in forever but am still trying to participate in the From Seeds to Harvest challenge.



Remember Clarence's pepper plants in the two-liter bottles? He planted them in the ground in the hoop house when they had little peppers already forming. He is now thinking it was a mistake to wait so long to transplant them because the peppers haven't been getting very big. He's been picking them as they ripen, hoping the plants will make more (and larger) peppers before the end of the season.

The zucchini is starting to yield like...well...zucchini. We have been enjoying it as Honey Roasted Zucchini, using honey from the neighbors, whose hives are on the far side of our mud-hole pond. The honey isn't my favorite on its own, but it works great for this.

The other peppers are starting to produce and the first tomatoes have ripened, which is a bit earlier than we sometimes have tomatoes.

Our green beans are behind the normal schedule. We had some almost ready to pick and the deer visited Allison's garden and had a snack. Thankfully, they just grazed the tops, rather than devouring the whole plants. Clarence put some fence up the next day and we're hopeful we'll have more soon.

We also have beans planted in the strawberry tower that have yet to produce. We're thankful some friends have been supplying us pretty regularly with fresh beans-we've been enjoying them.

The snow peas are still producing pretty well. Usually ours are done by now but it has been cooler and wetter than most summers and the peas apparently have been liking it.

The weeds seem to be doing the best of all. With the amount of time we've been spending at camp, it seems to be a losing battle.

More garden updates can be found by visiting Teaching Good Things.

Garden update

The zucchini are off to a good start. No blossoms yet, but Clarence is keeping an eye on them. We're all getting anxious for some Honey Roasted Zucchini.

The recycled potatoes are starting to bloom. They are way ahead of the seed potatoes we planted.

This is our first picking of strawberries this year. They are from our established rows in the garden, not the strawberry tower. We are thrilled the chipmunks are allowing us to share some of them. Unfortunately, the chipmunks seem to like to take a taste out of several berries, instead of just eating one completely. I'd probably be a little more tolerant of them if they had better manners.

Allison's green beans are up. She's using her favorite hoe, a small stirrup hoe. I think it's her favorite because it reminds her of riding horses, which she loves. On the terrace behind her are the zucchini and some red bell peppers.

We've had a lot of rain the last couple of days. The plants are loving it, as are the weeds.

For more garden updates, visit Teaching Good Things for their From Seeds to Harvest challenge.

Garden update

For the From Seeds to Harvest challenge this week, I thought I'd update on a couple things other than the potatoes.



Clarence started romaine, spinach, and some Asian greens quite early and we've been enjoying them for a few weeks now.

We've had a couple nice surprises in the garden this spring. The radishes and the light green lettuce in the bowl are self-seeded bonuses Clarence found when weeding the parsnip patch. (Yes, Mom, I do still hate parsnips. Clarence grows them for his dad. Last year I think the total harvest was four parsnips. You'd think I'd been out there weeding them, wouldn't you?)

Clarence transplanted his "bottled" orange pepper plants into the ground in the hoop house about a week ago. The cold weather we've been having convinced him to plant them inside, since they already had peppers forming.

We've been worried that they'd go through major transplant shock since they were so far along but, so far, so good. I'm really hoping they continue to thrive.

Clarence topped off the strawberry tower with compost and planted green beans in it this week. The winter seems to have killed all the strawberries that were in it (although they cover the ground around it) so we're going to find out how beans work in it. If they grow well, it will be much nicer picking!

The girls each have their own garden areas, too, but I don't have any pictures of them yet. Hopefully, I'll get some pictures soon and be able to update on those, too.

For other gardens participating in the challenge, visit Teaching Good Things.

Strawberry tower-one year later

Remember this?

We have a steep front yard and Clarence used a three-week layoff last spring to terrace it so we could increase our garden space. He built this strawberry tower as part of that project. The plans came from the book Classic Garden Structures : 18 Elegant Projects to Enhance Your Garden by Jan and Michael Gertley.

We filled it with two varieties of strawberries and watched them take off. I dutifully picked off the blooms so the plants could get well established.

One of the varieties we planted was an everbearing type so we got just a few berries in August.

We debated what to do to winterize it and ultimately never came up with a workable plan.

So, there it sat all winter. I went outside several weeks ago and snapped this shot of it in all its brown, shrivelly glory. Clarence and I talked about perhaps having to plant the strawberries as annuals in this, or using it to grow something else.

Since today is beautiful (65º! Yippee!), I took my camera with me and went to take a look.

Mostly, it still looks just like the picture above. With new, volunteer strawberries growing on the ground all around it. Sigh.

Closer inspection paid off, though.

Can you see it? That new bit of green starting to grow at the base of the plant?

This is in one of the lowest levels of the tower so I'm not convinced that many of the plants survived the winter. I'll keep checking over the next few weeks, though, and see what happens.

Strawberry tower-harvest

Are you sick of hearing about the strawberry tower yet?

The everbearing plants we put in half of the tower are starting to get ripe berries. It seems strange to pick strawberries in August, doesn't it?

The harvest yesterday was not huge, to say the least, but Clarence and I were pretty happy anyhow.

Yep, five strawberries. Quite exciting, isn't it? LOL

These didn't seem as sweet as the June berries usually are. But, hey, fresh picked strawberries in August-pretty cool!

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We also are watching to see how many chicks hatch in this round of incubating eggs. Allison was downstairs checking on them as soon as she was done with her morning routine today. So far, there are five brown leghorns but no Americanas (green egg chickens...and what the first two chicks we hatched earlier this spring are).

Clarence didn't expect them to start hatching until today but the first one hatched yesterday morning. Allison is delighted and back in full mother hen mode. She is planning to teach them to eat and drink today.

I'll try to get some pictures later of the new babies and their adoptive "mama".

How our garden grows

Here are a couple pictures of the strawberry tower as it has filled in with strawberry plants. When Clarence was building it, he installed an automatic watering system which we hooked to a timer. The tower gets 30 minutes of water a day and the tubing (which you may or may not be able to see in the second picture) has emitters built into it so the water is fairly evenly distributed to the plants right at the soil.

Half of the plants we bought were the ever-bearing type so we are seeing an occasional strawberry even now. Generally, the chipmunks get to them before we do.

Julianne's basil is growing really well, too. I pinched a few flowers off it when I was taking pictures this morning. Time to make some pesto! Yum! The bell peppers are doing well, too. Can you see that one in the background?

These are some flowers Julianne started from seed this spring. They are impatiens but don't look like any impatiens I've ever seen. The variety name is "Tom Thumb" and although I think they have pretty flowers up close, I don't really like how much green you see when you stand back from them. I picture a lot more color when I think "impatiens".

We have VBS every night this week and I've been drafted to be the kitchen lady so it will be a busy week for us. I also need to get the girls signed up for swim classes this fall, get some things for a funeral dinner, order some more curriculum, and the list goes on. Hopefully, I'll find some time to get some pesto in the freezer around all the other errands that need to be done.

Front yard garden update

The weeds have taken over all our gardens. July was just too busy to keep up with weeding so today we started working on catching up. Clarence worked in the back yard garden-weeding, staking up tomatoes, rototilling some stuff that didn't grow, planting another row of green beans, and probably a million other things.

I pulled some giant weeds in the regular garden, in order to see how the bush cherry plants were doing. Seriously, the weeds were so thick and tall I couldn't see the cherries. Yikes. Then I went out and started the clean-up out front. The wheelbarrow in the background is full of weeds we pulled. I had Allison weed "her" terrace, with the green peppers and nicotiana. Then she mowed the lawn and helped Clarence mulch her terrace with the grass clippings. Her green peppers are really doing well.

Belle doesn't do too much to help. But he's good company when he doesn't trip you.

Here's an updated picture of the strawberry tower. The plants are sending out runners so we've got to do something with them. We're also trying to figure out how we will winterize this thing. I can't imagine that the strawberries will do well if they freeze and thaw multiple times all winter.

There's still lots more weeding to do but I've had enough for today.

Strawberry tower

Here is the cedar strawberry tower Clarence built this spring, shown as he prepared to fill it with dirt.