Closed for the Season

I'm guessing my garden has about 36 more hours before it's "curtains" for the season.  Tomorrow night's temperatures are predicted to be in the 20s.

Yesterday, The Husband picked the remaining chili peppers and bell peppers.  There are a few green tomatoes left on the vines.  An industrious person would probably be combining the peppers and tomatoes into a delicious green tomato relish.  I never claimed to be industrious. 

Last week, the farmer cut the soybeans in the field next to my garden.  With that food-source buffer gone, the next day, the deer ate the peas and beans in the garden that were almost ready to pick.  I'd hope it gave them stomach aches, except for that word "almost"; tomorrow night's freeze would have taken them out, anyway, so it's just as well that the critters got some benefit from them.

Deer must not like turnip and mustard greens, for they are still standing.  An industrious person would pick a "mess" today (before the freeze), cook them, and put them in the freezer for Thanksgiving dinner.  See above.

Crossing My Fingers

According to my old posts, I planted the second crop of beans/peas in August.  The purple hull peas now have slim 4"-long pods on them.  Butterbeans and crowder peas are blooming their heads off.  I'm crossing my fingers for about 3 more weeks of frostless night, but I have clear plastic sheeting on hand, just in case.

The carrots in the trough are growing nicely.  The beets at the other end of the trough are having their leaves disappear as fast as they can make them.  I suspect there's a deer in the neighborhood with beet green breath, and it burns me up that it doesn't even have to bend its head over to eat.

The tomatoes and okra are reluctantly still producing, but not much.

Turnip and mustard greens are growing well; the kale and the collards barely made a showing.  We had our first meal from them a couple of weeks ago, but I was unimpressed.  I planted these greens in mid-August instead of mid-September because a 90+-year-old gardener said that's when he plants his greens.  Figuring that he ought to know when to plant greens, I got busy and planted mine.  The greens seem tougher and less flavorful.  Plus, they're more bug-eaten.  Next year, I'll be reverting back to mid-September plantings.

It's been down in the 50s here for a few nights in a row, maybe even in the 40s for the past couple of days.  Yesterday, it was cool and damp all day.  Time to crank up the indoor hobbies.

I've been working on a quilted Christmas wall hanging for the past few weeks.  The pattern is in the November/December 2013 issue of McCall's Quilting magazine - the candy cane & Christmas ornament quilt on the cover.  This is an appliqued quilt.  I'm not so good with hand-done applique, so I digitized the pattern so that I could do the appliques with my embroidery machine.  Because I'm still learning how to digitize, it took me forEVER to get the designs right.  It took me another forever to actually sew the blocks and assemble them.  This past week, I finally finished the quilt top, then spent another couple of days decided how to quilt it.

I wish I could have made my embroidery machine do the quilting.  The problem is that the blocks are 8" x 8", and the largest hoop I have for my embroidery machine is 7" x 5".  If I were better at this, I could probably figure out how to split the design into 4 parts and actually have the parts line up in the hoop, but given my current level of expertise, I know better than to try it.

I did have one rather cool idea for transferring my quilting designs onto the quilt.  I'm doing a repeating clamshell quilting design in some of the blocks.  The individual elements of a repeating design like this need to be a consistent size/shape.  I did the design with my embroidery program, telling it that I have an 8 x 8 hoop (even though I don't).  Then, instead of sewing the design, I just printed it onto lightweight tear-away stabilizer.  After printing, I sprayed the backside of the stabilizer with quilt basting spray and stuck the stabilizer onto the quilt blocks.  It will be a little bit of a pain to tear out all those little pieces of stabilizer, but I think the effect will be worth it.

Meanwhile, there was another problem:  I already had a queen-sized quilt in the quilt frame.  I tried doing the quilting on my regular sewing machine, but it was a huge pain.  Finally, I un-did the pins on half of the quilt in the frame and pinned the wall hanging beside it.  It will be a little bit of a pain to get the big quilt pinned back in, but not as much trouble as it would be to pin the whole thing back in!

Too Old For This

Earlier this week, when I went to the garden to get a couple of tomatoes for a dish I was making for supper (recipe to follow), I noticed that the new bean and pea rows were full of grass and morning glories.  So, yesterday evening, I dragged the tiller out of the shed and went to work.  The temperature was probably still in the low 90s, and I was already sweating by the time I got the tiller cranked. 

I swear that tiller gets heaver and more ornery every time I use it.  With the tines running in reverse, it squats down and digs like a mole, and it tries its best to aim for the rows instead of the middles.  With the tines in the forward gear, it sprints down the row like a racehorse.  Even with the speed switch set more toward the turtle than the rabbit, it will try to run off, dragging the operator behind it.  When it does this, the smart course of action is to turn loose of it and raise both hands in surrender, at which time it lurches to a sudden stop and sits there, idling, snarling, "Go ahead, smart*ss...squeeze that trigger again." 

After about an hour of wrestling the beast, I gave up and steered the tiller back to the shed.  The outer edge of the first butterbean row didn't get plowed, and the outer edge of the last purple hull pea row didn't get plowed, but screw it...I'll mow them with the lawn mower this weekend. 

By the time I came back to the house, exhausted and dripping with sweat, I realized that I had strained a muscle in my left forearm.  It hurt just to pick up a drinking glass and hold it long enough to wash down an Alleve. 

I am too old for this.

Thank goodness for the left-overs in the refrigerator.  Speaking of the left-overs, I'm calling this dish "Tuscany Beans and Sausage."  It's quick, easy, and delicious (even better the next day).  Here's the recipe:

4 - 5 links of sausage (Italian, bratwurst, etc.)
1 small onion
1 - 2 cloves of garlic (optional)
3 medium tomatoes (or a 15 oz. can of tomatoes, if you don't have fresh ones)
2 cans of cannellini beans (white kidney beans), drained and rinsed (navy beans work just as well)
3 - 4 bay leaves

Brown the sausage links in a skillet.  Remove from pan.
Soften the onions in the same skillet.  Add the rest of the ingredients, stirring them around to get all that good flavor off the bottom of the skillet.  Slice the sausage and add it back to the pan. Put a lid on it and simmer it for 15 minutes.

This is wonderful served over a thick slice of toasted bread.

Bon appetite!

Late Garden Experiments

I've been planning for two days to get down to the garden, to see how the beans and greens are doing, and to throw a little water on the beets and carrots in the horse trough.  Finally, this morning I suited up - hat, gloves, and crocs - and went down there.

The veggie trough is several water hoses away from the hydrant.  Nanny has one of those new stretchy green water hoses that's supposed to shrink when the water is off, and I have a hose cart with about 150 feet of duct-tape-patched hose on it.  I turned on the water, pulled the green hose over to the hose cart, and flipped a switch on the green hose to temporarily shut off the water while I screwed the green hose to the hose cart.  Before I even finished tightening the connection, I heard a poof! and a whooshhhhhh!, and looked back to see water spewing from the middle of the green hose.  Blow-out!  I felt bad about wrecking Nanny's hose.  Last week, when I was trying to perform the same feat, the shut-off valve blew out of the green hose.  I replaced it with the one from my own stretchy green hose.  Now it looks like I'll be giving her my whole hose. 

I will not be buying another stretchy green hose.

In any case, the garden is lookin' good.  I hooked up the Miracle Grow sprayer and laid into the beans with it.  Folks say that beans don't need much fertilizing, and they probably don't, but we're working against the seasonal clock with this second crop of beans and peas, and I thought a little insurance wouldn't hurt.  I did only one row of the purple hull peas, an experiment to see if that row makes more peas, or makes them sooner.  I also dosed some of the tired old tomatoes, to see if they'll get a second wind.

The okra needed cutting, and there was a lot of it, so The Husband cut a plastic shopping bag full, and I brought the okra back to the house to pickle it.  Some of the okra was too long to fit in a pint jar.  By the time I culled out the tall boys, I had five pints of okra.  As I was lowering the jars into the canner, the bottom fell out of one jar - don't know what happened there, unless there was already a tiny crack in the jar, and the heat from the pickling brine finished it off.  Had to fish out the okra and the glass in the pan, throw out the briny water (and the okra and the glass), and start over with one less jar than I started with. 

This is the second batch of canning that has gone wrong this year.  I think I'm losing my touch!

Labor Day Weekend

Once again, I'm sitting here at my kitchen table, blogging while the canner is boiling - 4 quarts of tomatoes, and a batch of pepper jelly fixings waiting their turn.

I actually started this process about 7 hours ago.  By noon, I'd picked, peeled, and chopped the tomatoes and had them heating on the stove.  Just about the time they started to boil, we had a storm that knocked the power out for nearly 5 hours.

That little storm brought us a good rain, just in time.  The peas, butterbeans, and beets that I planted a week ago have sprouted and are growing like crazy.  When I was in the garden this morning, I made plans to go back and turn on the sprinkler this evening.  Thank you, Mother Nature, for saving me the trouble! 

Funny, when I planted peas and beans late this spring using this season's seeds, they came up "skippy," and I had to do some replanting in almost all the rows.  This latest batch of seeds are seeds I bought on sale last year at the end of the season and had put in the freezer, and it looks like every seed sprouted and is thriving.  My fingers are crossed that we'll have a late frost so that they'll have time to make beans.  It sure would be a lot nicer to pick beans in the cool autumn than in the boiling hot summer.

Re-Canning

Something weird happened with my tomato juice last night.

When I took the jars out of the canner, tomato pulp erupted from under the lids of 4 of the 6 jars. 

I am not sure why this happened.  I left enough head space.  I wiped the residue from the rims of the jars.  The rings were on tightly.  All of the lids seemed to be sealed - their central "buttons" were down.  But I figure if tomato pulp can get out, botulism can get in, so I refrigerated the jars, and this afternoon when I came home from work, I emptied the juice from all the jars into a pot and started over. 

My best guess is that my jars and juice weren't hot enough when I put the juice in the jars.  Normally, I boil both the jars and the sauce at the same time (in separate pots, of course).  I slide the jars off the burner, and when the water quits boiling I drop the lids in the water to heat them up.  I turn off the juice burner and immediately start transferring it to the jars.  Last night, however, my routine was a little different.  Both the juice and the jars had cooled considerably by the time I decided on the juicing method and actually got the juice in the jars.  I figured that it would be ok, since everything was still moderately warm and would get hot in the canner.

On the other hand, the problem could have something to do with the juicing method.  Mr. LaLane did a great job producing nice, pulpy juice, but it seemed a tad "airy" as I was pouring it into the jars.  I stirred the contents of each jar with a knife to get out the air bubbles, but maybe I didn't get it all out.  Hopefully, boiling it again did the trick.  It didn't seem so airy this time.  Note to self:  cook the juice after the juicing, not before.

In any case, the jars are in the canner again.  If they spew this time, I'm giving up and making one heck of a big Bloody Mary.

Tomato Juice

The Husband earned his keep tonight with one simple suggestion.

I'd picked enough tomatoes this evening to fool with canning them.  My original intention was to dice them and can them for soup, but I got to thinking about how much my mother loves tomato juice, and I decided to juice them and take her some.

My juicing equipment is, for the most part, a pile of crap.  I have a grinder pan - you know, one of those cheap things with a crescent-shaped blade in the bottom that you crank around to squeeze pulp through the holes in the pan.  It is rusty.  I have a manual juicer, a cone-shaped thing on a tripod stand with a wooden pestle that you use to mash the pulp through the cone. The problem with it is that the only pestle I have is too small for the cone, and I end up grating my knuckles on the cone when I try to use it.  I have a Juice Master, which is a giant auger thing that clamps to the kitchen table.  It spews juice on everything in the kitchen, and it has a zillion parts that have to be cleaned after use.  My other options were a food processor and a blender, but I didn't really want to shatter all those tomato seeds in the juice.

So, there I was, pulling out one thing, putting it up, pulling out something else....

The Husband comes into the kitchen and says, "What about your fancy juicer?"  I thought he was talking about the Juice Master in the attic.  He said, "No, that one over there," and pointed to the counter.

And there, next to the coffee pot, sat the shiny black Jack LaLaine Power Juicer. 

It came home with me in January, when I decided we ought to be on a juice kick.  We used it about three times.  I'd forgotten all about it, though it's been sitting in plain sight all these months.

It was perfect for the job.  I ran the tomatoes through it once, then ran the pulp back through it twice more.  About all that was left at the end was a clump of wet seeds.  The juice is thick and wonderful.

Good job, Husband!

Beet Trough

The beet trough is planted, half with beets, half with carrots.  It took 7 cu. ft. of garden soil to fill it.  Let the growing begin.

Second Garden

The telephone rang at 7:30 this morning.  I sprang out of bed and answered it.

"Pearl?"

"No," I grumbled.

"Well, what's Pearl's number?"

"Who is this?"

"I must have the wrong number."  Click.

No point in going back to bed with my heart racing a mile a minute.  I got up, cooked breakfast, and put on my gardening shoes.  Ordinarily I would not have gone to the garden to run the tiller and take a chance at waking Nanny up at 9 o'clock on a Saturday morning, but I knew that whoever had gotten me out of bed at 7:30 had probably gotten Nanny up, too.  So to the garden I went.

I'd just about finished a second pass over the ground I'd tilled up earlier in the week when I looked up to find Nanny in the garden, hatted and gloved, with her sweat rag around her neck, raking grass clumps out of the first rows I'd tilled.  The early phone call had been bad news; a sick friend had taken a turn for the worse.  I guess Nanny needed to work off some grief.  Bless both of their hearts.

We planted two rows of butterbeans, two rows of purple hull peas, three short rows of crowder peas, and turnips, collards, mustard, and kale.  The peas and beans might not have enough time to mature if we get an early frost, but the greens ought to be just fine.

While I was tilling the old pea rows, I noticed that the pea vines I mowed down last Saturday were putting on new leaves.  One or two of the plants even had blooms on the new growth.  Who knew?  Next year, I might mow them down sooner, rather than planting a whole new crop, just to see what kind of second crop they'll make.



 

Starting Over

Well, folk(s), I'm tired.

On the drive home from work today, I made a plan for the evening.  The Husband has gone to Nashville on business for a couple of days, and I was of a mind to come home, put on my comfy couch clothes, read a while, eat a bowl of cereal, and go to bed.  I've done all of that, except for the going to bed part.  But in between the coming home and the putting on of the couch clothes, I ran the big tiller for two hours. 

You see, last Saturday, after I saved that last post, I went to the garden and mowed it (well, much of it) down to the ground.  Umhmm.  Tired of picking green beans.  Cucumbers?  Tired of y'all, too.  Zooom.  Squash?  Had enough.  Vrooom.  When the mowin' was done, all that was standing were the tomatoes, the okra, the pumpkin plants (now in bloom) that The Grandsons planted, and a bunch of stubble.  I tried to run the tiller immediately after the mowing, but the ground was too wet. 

Since then, I've been planning.  Found a grocery sack full of seed packages in the freezer last week - all kinds of stuff.  Among them were butter beans and crowder peas.  According to the Internet, the butter beans need 60 days.  The crowders need 70.  Sixty days from now, it'll be the middle of October.  I decided to take a chance on a late frost, and plant them.

So, today I tilled.  Didn't finish.  It was still about 90 degrees outside, and I pooped out after the first passes up the rows where the cucumbers and peas had been.  Thought about putting down some lime and fertilizer, but couldn't summon the energy to cut open the lime bags.  Still have a long way to go before I put those seeds in the ground.

But, as Scarlett said, "Tomorrow's another day."

Gazpacho and Green Beans

Sitting here, waiting on the pressure canner to come up to 11 pounds so I can start timing the green beans.

I wasn't planning on canning today.

Things have been a bit nutty around here, not all in a bad way.  Last weekend, we had a mini-vacation.  We came home Monday, and spent Tuesday mostly laying around, resting up from our restful vacation.  I straightened up my sewing room a little bit, and mowed the yard.  Wednesday, we painted the living room and the bedroom.  Thursday, we painted one of the bathrooms, and the doors and trim in the bedroom and bathroom.  Of course, this required re-arranging of furniture, scrubbing of floors, We spent yesterday cleaning up the painting mess, changing burnt-out light bulbs while we had the step-stool out, doing laundry, changing sheets....

We're plumb worn out.

Today would've been a good day to lay around doing nothing again, but we had no groceries in the house, so I went to the grocery store.  When I got home, The Husband said Nanny had picked beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes.  I figured I'd best go help her with them.  She'd already snapped most of the beans.  We washed them and packed them into jars - 7 quarts and 8 pints, with a few left over.  Nanny fired up her pressure canner with the quart jars, and I brought the pints up here - we'll run two canners at once and be done with it.  Meanwhile, we scalded, peeled, and chopped the tomatoes.  We'll probably just have 4 quarts of those.

While this canner is doing its thing, I've been making gazpacho with a few of the fresh tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden.  Stole this recipe from Ina Garten:

GAZPACHO

1 hothouse cucumber, halved and seeded, but not peeled
2 red bell peppers, cored and seeded
4 plum tomatoes
1 red onion
3 garlic cloves, minced
23 oz. tomato juice (3 cups) [this is half of one big can]
1/4 cup white wine vinegar
1/4 cup good olive oil
1/2 tablespoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Directions: 
Roughly chop the vegetables and put each vegetable separately into a food processor.  Pulse until coarsely chopped.  Do not over-process - you want little bits, not a pulp.

Combine the chopped vegetables with the remaining ingredients.  Mix well.  Chill before serving.

Naturally, I did not follow the recipe exactly, mostly because I didn't have exactly these ingredients.  I used a white onion instead of a red one, red wine vinegar and a shot or two of balsamic vinegar instead of the white wine vinegar, and I used the whole big can of tomato juice, since we don't have any vodka to make Bloody Marys with the left-over juice.  When I take these green beans to Nanny's house later, I'll get another cucumber, another tomato, and another bell pepper from the garden to add to the mix.

Oh, and I put a tablespoon of sugar in the jug.  Didn't hurt it a bit.

Update on the Pea Hull Jelly:  I made the stuff.  It tasted pretty good - surprisingly like grape jelly - but it's W-A-Y too "tight."  It's like tar in a jar.  I expect that the problem was that I used liquid pectin instead of the powdered stuff.  Typically, liquid pectin is added to jellies at a different stage than the powdered pectin that the recipe called for, but I didn't have any powdered pectin, so I winged it.  If I ever make it again, I'll use the powdered pectin, or cook it half as long as the recipe said.

Except for the tomatoes and the okra, the garden is pretty much shot for this year.  We could probably salvage another picking or two off the green beans, but I've canned about enough, and Nanny probably has, too.  The okra is just now starting to make.  We planted it very late.  The tomatoes are just now in full swing, so we should have a little more work to do there.

As for the rest of the garden, I'm getting ready to plow it under and see what else I can grow before cold weather hits.  We ought to have enough time for more squash, and I still have enough purple hull pea seeds to plant a couple of rows - might be pushing our luck on those, if we have an early fall.

I still don't have the beet trough ready.  The stand needs assembling, and I need to go buy dirt. 

Timer's beeping.  Canner's done.  See ya.

Pea Hull Jelly

The Boss said she would like to have some cucumbers for pickles, and so when The Husband and I got home from work yesterday, we went to the garden to pick some. By the time we left the garden, we'd picked cucumbers, peppers, squash, zucchini, a few tomatoes, purple hull peas, and green beans. We foisted the squash off on an aunt, gave the peas to Nanny, and brought the rest of the stuff to the house. By the time we finished snapping the green beans, it was too late to start canning, so we put everything in the refrigerator with the intention of processing it all after work today. The plan was to pressure can the green beans, make bread with the zucchini, and to make jelly with the hulls from the peas. Yeah, pea hull jelly. I won't post the recipe for the pea hull jelly, because recipes for it are all over the internet. They are all pretty much the same as far as ingredients and proportions. Another thing they have in common is that they don't tell you how much jelly the recipe yields. It takes 4 cups of pea tea (for want of a better phrase), a package of fruit pectin, and 5 cups of sugar, so I washed and sterilized ten half-pint jars. The jelly mixture is boiled for 15 minutes. By the time it cooked down, I wound up with slightly under 4 cups of jelly, which seems like a ridiculously small amount yield, considering that 9 cups of stuff went into the pot. In any case, the jelly is done, and it is pretty tasty. It looks and tastes like grape jelly. Go figure. When the oven buzzer goes off in a few minutes, our evening of canning/freezing/baking will have resulted in 4 loaves of zucchini bread, 7 quarts of canned green beans (and several pint bags that we froze), 4 pints of cream-style corn, and 3.9 half-pint jars of jelly. Not a bad haul. My feet are aching. Boy, am I glad we gave away those cucumbers.

"You want a WHAT?"

Last week when The Grandsons brought me the pumpkin seeds, their mother also handed me several seed packets and asked, "Can we grow some beets?"

I've tried growing beets.  Most of the time, the seeds never even sprout.  Last fall, I planted beet seeds, and they came up and made leaves, but they never made beets under ground.

"We can plant some," I answered.  "Whether they will grow is another matter."

So for the past week, I've been pondering what I could do to the garden soil to encourage a beet.

People have told me to add sand to my soil to improve the drainage.  Others have said that adding sand to the kind of soil we have would turn it into concrete.  The best thing to do would probably be to haul in a whole dump-truck-load of "garden mix" from the local nursery, but I can't do that now, with this season's crops still growing. 

An immediate solution would be to build a raised bed for the beets. 

As I've mentioned, my garden is not actually on my property; it's across the road, behind Nanny's house, where there's full sun for most of the day.  If the property were mine, I'd not think twice about plunking down a semi-permanent structure at the edge of the garden, but, somehow, it just seems wrong to plunk one down in Nanny's yard.

Yesterday, on my way to work, I spied a possible solution.  In someone's front yard was a long, narrow, black plastic trough on a low metal stand, and it had a "For Sale" sign on it.  I think it's supposed to be used for cows, maybe, or pigs.  Filled with good, store-bought soil, it would probably be perfect for growing beets and carrots, and maybe even potatoes.  And it wouldn't kill Nanny's grass, and I could move it out of the way when the crop is harvested.

So I said to The Husband last night at dinner, "Today, I found something I want."

He tried to look interested (like this statement is a shocker for him, eh?).  "What's that?"

"A pig trough.  There's one for sale on the Holly Grove Road.  I want to grow beets in it."

He thought about this for a minute, then asked, "Why don't you just use the horse trough?"

"WHAT horse trough?"

"The one behind the shed."

It seems that there's been a trough behind the garden shed ever since Nanny and Pop-Pop boarded a couple of horses for a guy a few years ago.  The Husband knew it was back there because he makes a pass behind the shed when he mows Nanny's yard.  Having never actually been on the back side of the shed, myself, I had no clue it was back there.  I assumed it left the premises with the horses.

This trough is horse high, and twice as deep as the pig trough.  I won't even have to bend over to tend the vegetables I intend to grow in it.  Wooo-hooooo!

Now, if I can just get some dirt....

Rain!

Woohoooo!  We're getting a gully-washer right this minute!

My tomatoes say thanks.  My green beans say thanks.  My squash say thanks.

My roses, especially, say thanks, because they are in a hot, dry spot, needing water, but the garden hose is piled up very near to the spot where the snake probably lives.  The roses were in trouble.

This rain might bring up the pumpkin seeds that The Grandsons planted Tuesday evening.  It might be a miracle if they sprout. 

They and their mother came up, bearing seed packets, just as I was about to go to the garden.  They asked if it was too late to plant pumpkins.  I reckoned it is never too late to plant, so I tilled up "hills" in the skips in the cucumber and bean rows.

"Pretend you're monsters," (which might not be a big stretch for them) [yes, yes, just kidding], I told them, "and make a claw with your hand."  They did so.  I said, "Now, press your fingertips into the dirt, and plant a seed in each finger-hole."  They did so.  We covered the seeds with soft, loose dirt.

Grandson 1 dusted off his hands and went about his business.

Grandson 2, who had done his planting in the cucumber row, found some cucumbers I'd missed in the earlier picking.  This distracted his mother and me, and we moved on down the cucumber row, double-checking the plants.  By the time we got back to the end of the row where we'd planted the pumpkin seeds, someone - someone with Grandson 2-sized feet - had left footprints in all three pumpkin hills. 

He was at the opposite end of the garden by then.

"COME HERE," I commanded, and when he did, I pointed to the ground and said, "Why did you do this?"

He shrugged.  "I don't know."

I figured that was about as honest an answer as I was going to get.  This child cannot resist soft dirt.

"Well, if the pumpkin seeds can't punch their way out of that hard-packed dirt, we're all going to blame you."

As if he'd give a rip.

Watch those seeds pop right out of the footprints, now that they've had some rain.

Mid-July Report

This afternoon when I came home from work, I was greeted on the front porch by a snake.  Big around as a broom handle, and probably three feet long, solid black/gray.  My best guess, based on the pictures on the web, is that it was a Southern Black Racer.  He might be fast, but not as fast as I was when I high-tailed it into the house via the back door.  He was gone by the time I put my stuff down and went to the front door for another peek.  You know what that means, don't you?  He's still out there...somewhere....  I used the back door again when I went to the garden.

The garden is coming along right well. 

Tonight I picked a plastic grocery bag full of cucumbers, and another bag full of squash and zucchini.  I saw a few squash bugs.  Nanny said she would dust the plants in the morning.  She kept the cucumbers to use for relish.  I'll play the Squash Fairy tomorrow at work.

The purple-hull peas are filling out and starting to turn purple.  I planted only three rows - not enough for this family of pea lovers.  As soon as everybody on the hill gets all the cucumbers they want, I'm going to pull up the vines and plant a late crop of peas in their place.

Did my first serious picking of green beans on Saturday.  Had enough for supper (and some left-overs), and a few to give away. 

The Grandson's tiger eye beans are drying on their vines, just as we want them to do.  They are LOADED with beans.

The chili peppers are making faster than I can pick them.

The tomatoes.  Well....

On the up side, we have several tomatoes that would do to eat today, but will be better in two more days.  (I'm craving that first ripe tomato/mayonnaise sandwich of the season.)  They're still blooming, and there are little tomatoes coming along, but not in the quantities I would like.  I planted about 45 tomato plants.  I should be covered up with tomatoes, but I'm not.  Not yet.

On the down side, I'm battling blight non stop.  The blight is probably what's robbing my tomato plants of their vigor, but I'll be switched if I know what to do about it.  I tried the baking soda/cooking oil blight treatment that I saw on YouTube.  It seemed to slow the blight down a little - about as much as the fungicide does - but it's still there.  I believe it's just in the air.  You might remember that about three years ago, I moved the tomato patch plumb out of the garden, way up the driveway, close to the road, where ne'er a tomato plant had ever grown.  Those plants had the worst case of blight EVER, so I know it's not just in the garden soil from prior years.  I even have blight on my two patio plants, which have never been NEAR the garden.

Tomatoes.    I feed.  I water (with drip hoses).  I treat for diseases and pests.  I rotate, mulch, stake, prune off leaves that touch the ground....  What ELSE is a person supposed to do to get a good tomato crop?

Organic Tomato Blight Control

Look what I found!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxeBz1e2OwU

I'm trying this today.

Happy 4th of July

We went to a cookout at Gus' and Ann's today.  Gus and my late father-in-law are first cousins.  Gus invites all his cousins, and all their young'uns, to a family dinner twice a year:  4th of July, and Thanksgiving.  On the 4th, he serves us barbequed pork shoulder, cooked low and slow, the way any self-respecting Southerner would do it. At Thanksgiving, he gives us Turkey.  The cousins and their young'uns bring the side dishes.  Five generations showed up today.  It's good to visit with the extended family.

Uncle Jack was there, and he said that he'd just picked a 5-gallon bucket of ripe tomatoes this morning.  He's picking green beans and cucumbers.  Made me green with envy.  He invited me over to help him cut cabbage for sauerkraut.  I might take him up on that, if he'll do it when I'm not at work.

I came home and went down to inspect my own pitiful garden.  One of the tomato plants has been stung pretty hard with blight; some of the rest are threatened with it.  This weekend, I will need to rig up the sprayer with fungicide to see if I can thwart it a little.

Night before last, I found a bug on one of the squash plants and had to powder them with Sevin dust.  Together, Nanny and I have picked about 4 gallons of squash this week, two of which are sitting on my kitchen table, needing to be processed.  I intend to make some of that good squash relish that I made last year, but first I'll need to make a run to the grocery store for vinegar and stuff.

The green beans are beginning to make.  The Grandson's tiger eye beans are loaded, but I'm going to let them dry on the vine so he can see how the dried bean thing is done.  Come winter, we'll soak his beans, and cook them, and talk about how we planed them w-a-y back in the spring....

My yard is phloxing. 

Night before last, as The Husband was walking down Nanny's driveway to join me in the garden, he spotted a fawn under the pine trees.  He whistled, and when I looked up from my squash-picking, he motioned for me and showed me the baby.  It was tiny!  We didn't see its mama anywhere.  "Keep a watch out for mama," I said before trotting back to our house for the camera.  The fawn was still there when I got back, and lay there and looked pretty while we took its picture.  After I finished picking the squash, we came back to our house and watched the field beside the driveway.  Sure enough, before long, the doe emerged from the tree line and eased across the field.  She was still 100 feet away from the baby when all of a sudden it bolted from beneath the pine trees and joined her in the field.  She led it back to the woods.  Sweet.  :)

As we walked up the sidewalk to our house, a rabbit ran out of the flower bed.  I took its picture, too. 

Rain

It was raining this morning when I woke up.  YAY!  We need it.

As my usual luck would have it, I spent several evenings this week watering the garden.  But I hadn't yet gotten around to the purple hull pea rows, so it's all good.

The Grandson paid me a visit while I was watering the tomatoes.  This child loves mud with a passion.  I'd used the soaker hose, and I'd built little dirt dams alongside the rows to keep the water hemmed up where I needed it, so the middles, for the most part, were dry.  But the regular water hose had sprung a leak near the soaker hose connection, and I'd aimed the spurt toward the garden, so there was one area between the tomatoes and the green beans where the ground was 6" deep in soft mud.  He dived into it with both feet before I could stop him.

Naturally, it wasn't long before he turned the water hose leak on me.  We were both pretty wet and muddy before the job was done.

He asked me, "Grandmama, did you plant EVERY vegetable?"  I answered that I had not planted EVERY vegetable, explaining that I had not planted any corn because the raccoons always get it before I do.  As we moved around the garden, I pointed to the rows and named the vegetables that I had planted.  When we got to the row where the squash and zucchini were growing, he wanted to know why the squash plants looked just like the zucchini plants.  "They're cousins," I told him, "and they look alike because they are from the same family."  He thought about this for a minute and said, "I think apples and tomatoes are cousins, too." 

We continued our watering, moving the soaker hose from row to row.  At one point he said, "When I grow up, I'm going to plant a garden with corn in it."

"Oh, yeah?  What are you going to do about the raccoons?" I asked.

"I'll stand out there and guard the corn."

"What will you do at night?  Raccoons love to come for the corn at night."

"I'll guard it all night."

"You can't guard it all night," I said.  "You've got to sleep sometime.  Maybe you could get a dog to guard it for you at night."

"That's what I'll do!" he said.  "I'll get a coon dog.  AND a thquirrel dog!"

Sounds like a good plan.  ;)

First Squash

We picked our first mess of squash on Sunday.  We gave some of it to our son and his family, and sauteed the rest (with onions and hot peppers) for supper that night.  I picked another 2-gallon bucket full this afternoon.  This weekend I'm going to drag the canning equipment out of the attic and make some squash pickle when the next batch of squash gets ready.

The garden is looking good, so far.  Beans and cucumbers are blooming.  Tomato plants have tangerine-sized tomatoes on them.  The okra is beginning to grow.  The rows are clean (mostly).

I watered the tomatoes and the squash today.  The hydrant closest to my garden is not in working order, and I had to use the one on the back of Nanny's house.  This required stringing several hoses together, dragging them for miles, and then dragging them all back and un-stringing them once the watering was done.  No more of that.  One day this week I'm going to buy the biggest hose cart/reel I can find.

Mid-June Maintenance

It's been hard to work in the garden for the past few weeks.  We've had sporadic rains, making the soil too wet to work.  Yesterday afternoon, I was finally able to do some maintenance: tilled the grassy middles, sprayed for bugs and blight, used the hoe where the big tiller would not go.

We ate our first ripe tomato yesterday.  It came from a potted patio plant, which already had a little green tomato on it when I bought it.  The plants in the garden are pretty far from having ripe tomatoes, but they are coming along nicely.

The Grandson's tiger eye beans are beginning to bloom. 

We'll be eating squash and zucchini by the weekend.

The pepper plants are going nuts making peppers.  This seems odd to me, as the pepper plants don't generally kick into gear in our garden until later in the season.  I hope they don't poop out before the tomatoes get ripe so that I can use them in salsa.

Blight Control

Today, I fired the first round - or so I thought - in the battle with blight.  Doused the tomatoes with fungicide, put down some landscape fabric around them, and snipped off any leaves that were touching the ground or even thinking about touching the ground.  I only thought that I was firing the first round because I had not closely examined the plants; I thought I was making a pre-emptive strike; in truth, the blight was one step ahead of me.  Some of those lower leaves that I cut off were already looking yellow and sickly.  It's a good thing I struck when I did. 

Watch it rain tonight or tomorrow and wash off the fungicide.  :-\

Re-Bean

Very few of the beans I planted on 5/16 actually came up.  Maybe I planted them too deep.  Maybe the moon wasn't right.  Who knows?  In any case, I re-planted today.  The purple hull peas need re-planting, too, but I'm out of seeds at the moment.

The squash and zucchini seeds sprouted nicely, as did the cucumbers.

Tomatoes and peppers growing nicely.  Some of the peppers even have peppers big enough to eat.  Go, peppers!

Memorial Day Check-In

According to the Facebook tag, it was on April 7 that the Grandson and I planted some tomato seeds in those cool little expand-o peat pellets.  Of the 25 (or so) seeds we planted, only about 10 sprouted.  Today, I planted them in the garden.  I should've waited to let him help me plant them.  Maybe I'll put him in charge of their care. 

The rest of the garden is coming along so-so.  The first planting happened 10 days ago.  The seeds are starting to come up, but not as thickly as I would like.  It has rained several times since the seeds went in the ground, which compacted the dirt on top of the seeds.  Now, the soil has a crust, with a rupture down the center of each row where the seeds are trying to poke through.  I hope the rest of them make it; otherwise, I'll have to re-plant.

The SkeeterVac is humming along nicely.  We turned it on a week ago today, and I was worried that since we replaced the standard regulator with one made for gas grills we'd burn too much gas.  The tanks usually last for 14 days.  If this one runs out much sooner than that, I'll order the "official" one.  It seems to be catching bugs about like normal.  I wish it had caught the one that bit me above the eyebrow a couple of days ago.  It raised a monstrous knot on my head, and turned my eyelid an alarming shade of fuschia.

SkeeterVac Review - Year 3

I was bitten by mosquitoes in the yard last week, and decided it was time to fire up the SkeeterVac.  We put on a new propane bottle and did the lighting routine.  We could hear the igniter clicking, but the machine wouldn't start.  I went online to the SkeeterVac "troubleshooting" page, performed all of the suggested remedies, still nothing.  The Husband took the fuel filter out of the gas line, and it looked rusted, so we ordered a new one.  It came in the mail at the end of the week.  We installed it and did the lighting routine again.  Still nothing.

I called the SkeeterVac hotline and spoke to a nice lady who gave me some other suggestions.  One suggestion was that we turn the gas knob only 1/2 a turn (as opposed to 2 full turns per the instruction manual).  Tried that.  Nothing.  The lady said maybe our "regulator" was bad, or maybe the gas tank, itself, was bad.  The Husband tried the gas tank with a different gas appliance, and it worked fine, but we could not test the regulator, as it would not fit the other appliance. 

We found a "How to Fix your SkeeterVac" video on YouTube that showed how to disassemble the unit and clean the various valves.  We tried all those tricks.  Still nothing.  Okay, so maybe the regulator is bad. 

We went to the hardware store and bought a regulator meant for gas grills.  The opening in this new gas line was bigger than the opening in the old one, and when I dropped the fuel filter into the opening, it went right down the tube!  We shook it out, connected the hose without the filter, and the machine fired right up.

Probably I will order an "official" regulator this week, as I suspect the machine is using too much gas. 

At Last....

(You know the tune.)

Aaaat laaaaast, my love has come along
With a tractor and some disk blades.
Now I can sing my garden song.

Eggplaaaaaant, squash, zucchini, too.
Tomatoes and bell peppers.
Bush beans from lakes of blue.

(Ok, ok...yes, enough.)

Seriously, The Husband disked the garden yesterday, and I went at it with the tiller this afternoon.  Tilled up 7 rows.  Nearly killed me.  But there's a threat of rain tonight, and I wanted to get the plants in the ground while it's dry enough.

All that stuff you saw above, plus some carrots, went in the ground today.  And I still have lots more room.  If it doesn't rain, tomorrow I'll plant some tiger eye beans that my grandson picked out of the seed catalog (no idea what they'll be like) and some cucumbers. 

(Note to self:  yes, you put down fertilizer in the rows you planted.)

Good Intentions

This post is related to gardening only because it started with a warm, sunny day....

On warm, sunny days, I like to drive with the top down on my Jeep.  When I do, I like to wear a hat to keep my big nose from sunburning.  When I wear a hat, I like to tie a scarf around it to keep it from blowing off my head.  I have (had) several scarves, but on this particular warm, sunny day - the first top-down day - I could not find a single one, and I drove without a hat.

A good hat scarf is hard to find.  The scarves in the stores are usually either too wide, too long, or too short to tie around a hat.  And so as I drove to work that day, I thought about making scarves, maybe even hand-painted scarves.  That evening, I went online and ordered a couple of yards each of chiffon, georgette, and organza ($60).  The next day, I bought fabric paint and brushes ($25).  Two days after that, I bought permanent markers ($18).  By the time the fabric arrived, I'd done some sketching and formulated a plan, and I was itching to get to work.  I cut a 6"-wide strip of white chiffon and sat down to practice.

Sadly, my brain can conceive of things that my hand can't produce.  The design I'd sketched looked amateurish.  The paint ran into the "channels" of the weave, making everything look slightly out of focus.  I switched to the markers.  The ink didn't run, but the colors were wrong.  I formulated a new plan that coincided with the marker colors at hand - peacock feathers instead of wispy fern leaves. 

Imagine my excitement when I saw that the new plan was actually going to work!  I cut a new piece of chiffon and started on the "real" scarf.  It turned out okayyy, but the inked peacock feathers lacked the irridescence of real peacock feathers.  I pondered ways to up the "wow factor."  Among my art supplies, I found a metallic gold marker and thought, "That's IT!"  A few wispy swipes of gold on the feathers would set them off perfectly.  But the hand (and the marker) failed the brain again, and I ended up with big blobs of gold that muddied up the feathers and robbed them of their wispy aspect.  *sigh*

Ok.  New plan.  Embroidery, not paint or markers. 

I spent two hours yesterday afternoon digitizing a morning glory design.  Spent another hour trying to get that wispy strip of chiffon to stick smoothly to a strip of self-stick fabric stabilizer (imagine trying to stick a length of toilet paper to shelf paper and you'll have the idea).  Finally got the fabric hooped for the embroidery machine, turned on the machine, and...nothing.  The machine gave me a message: "Raise the Presser Foot," but it was already raised.  It would sew without the embroidery unit, but would not embroider.  I could hear something rattling inside the machine.  I took off the cover to have a look.  Sure enough, a little metal gizmo had come loose.  In the process of re-installing the little gizmo, I knocked a wire loose from another gizmo.  Now, I'm going to have to take the machine to the shop.  This will cost me at least $150.

Thinking back to that warm, sunny day in the Jeep, if anybody had suggested that I should spend almost $250 on a scarf to tie around my hat, I would have accused them of having gone off the deep end. 

That is all.

Spring 2013

I foresee some ground-breaking on this hill in the near future, if Mother Nature will cooperate.

Last week, I dragged the big tiller out of the shed to see if he was willing to work.  One pull, and he fired up.  Check!

The Husband had the local Farmer's Co-Op come out and fix the flat tire on the big tractor, so it's ready to go.  Check!

Seeds bought.  Check!

All we need now is some dry ground and some time to work.

Quilting Weather

Awwww, you've gotta love Tennessee weather.  Last weekend's temperatures were in the 70 degree range.  Early in the week, we had a monstrous rainstorm, after which the mercury plummeted into the 20s at night.  Yesterday at noon, I went outdoors dressed in a hat and a light coat and was almost too warm.  Last night it snowed, blizzard-like, for about 10 minutes, then it quit.

Screw it.  I'm just going to stay inside and quilt.

One of the first quilts I ever made was what we refer to as "the clan quilt."  The Husband's family has ancestral roots in Scotland; their clan had a tartan pattern and a motto.  I made a simple 9-patch quilt in the colors of the tartan and sewed a big, gaudy, silver lame' badge and motto applique in the middle of it.  Both of my sons said, "I want that quilt when you die."  Since they both can't have it, I decided to make one for each of them.  

I wanted to make theirs better than mine, which should not be hard to do, considering how bad my skills were back then.  Carpal tunnel syndrome discourages hand quilting these days.  To compensate, I've added a short-arm quilting machine to the mix, engineering a whole new set of troubles for myself.  There's a ways to go before I master that beast. 

Mastery or no, I finished the first "clan quilt" earlier this month.  The end result did not exactly match my original "vision."  The official clan tartan colors are reportedly black, blue, green, and white.  For this quilt, I used navy and dark sage for the blue and the green.  As you can see, there's not enough shade variance between the navy and the black, and the chunks of white are too big.  (The pattern, by the way, is called "Clay's Choice," which I chose because my son's name is Clay.)  I tried to lighten the blue sections by stipple-quilting them with a blue variegated thread, but it didn't work very well.  I also tried to differentiate the black from the blue by quilting with white thread on the black blocks, but that didn't work very well, either.  Lightening *both* the blue and the black kind of cancelled each other out, but the idea seemed good at the time.  Sorry I had to smudge out the badge (on account of cyber creeps, you know) - it's kind of the best part.  It's machine embroidered in black, with our last name beneath it.  I wanted to add some subtle Scottish symbols, such as thistles, but I could not figure out how to do it.

The second one, a "Walls of Jericho" pattern - I couldn't find a pattern with "Joshua" in the name - is in the frame now.  (I've added some borders since this picture was taken.)  I'm happier with the color choices, though the green is a bit strange.  While I was working on Clay's quilt, I figured out how to do the symbols, but by then I was too far along to incorporate them.  The blue squares will have Celtic knots quilted in them.  The black strips will have diamonds.  I think I'll pebble the white parts.  I'll figure out what to do with the green when I get there.  I'm quilting a stylized thistle vine ("stylized," I say, because thistles don't grow on vines) on the outmost border.  In my mind, it was stunning; in reality, it's...just o-kay..., way too much buck for the bang, but at least it's not awful.  The big mistake happened on the next border.  While working on the thistles, I discovered that another Scottish symbol is the unicorn.  If this quilt were for a little girl, I might consider putting unicorns frolicking around the border.  But this quilt is for a man who would shoot and make stew out of a unicorn if he encountered one in the woods, so I thought to use just the horn, the distinctive spiral horn, two of them, butted together end-to-end.

It was an unfortunate thought. 

This thing looks like a cross between a UFO and the Michelin Man.  I put some lotus flower-looking things in there, to break up the "poke-y" factor, but it's still bad.  Bad.  But it's staying.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to you (both).  :)

I hosted a New Year's Day lunch for my siblings yesterday.  The main dish was cabbage rolls, with sides of black-eyed peas, candied sweet potatoes, fried okra, slaw, and garlic cheese biscuits.  The cabbage rolls were my own adaptation/combination of the many recipes I found, and I have been encouraged to write the recipe down before I forget what I did.  So, here goes:

Cabbage Rolls - makes 15 - 20 rolls

1 large head of cabbage
2 pounds of ground pork sausage (the breakfast kind)
1 box of Uncle Ben's 5-minute Wild & Brown Rice
1 tbs. olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
6 cloves of garlic, finely minced
1 stalk of celery, sliced
2 large cans of diced tomatoes
1 bay leaf


Oven 350
Boil a couple of quarts of water.  Remove the core from the head of cabbage.  Place the cabbage upside-down in a bowl.  Pour the boiling water over the cabbage and let it soak for 10 minutes, then drain it, right-side up so that the water runs out.

Meanwhile, sautee the chopped onion, garlic and celery in the olive oil.  Set aside to cool.

In a large bowl, combine the raw sausage, the UNCOOKED rice mix, and HALF of the sauteed vegetables.  I added part of the seasoning from the rice package, as well.

Peel off a cabbage leaf, pat it dry with a paper towel, and cut out the large, tough vein.  (If the leaf is large, you can cut it in half length-wise and make two rolls out of one leaf.)  Overlap the cut edges (if you're using a whole leaf from which you have cut the vein).  Take a little handful - about a scant 1/4 cup - of the sausage/rice mixture, shape it into a loose cylinder, and position it at the bottom of the cabbage leaf.  Roll the cabbage around the meat once, then fold the sides over the ends of the meat and keep rolling.  (Don't sweat it if the sides aren't wide enough to fold over the ends, just roll it up and move on.)  Lay the roll in a pan, seam side down so that it doesn't unroll.  Continue with remaining leaves/meat mixture.

Now make a tomato "gravy" to pour over it as follows:  Add the diced tomatoes, liquid and all, and the bay leaf to the remaining sauteed vegetables.  Simmer for 5 minutes or so, then pour it over the cabbage rolls.  Add enough water (or broth or stock or tomato juice) to almost cover the rolls.  Cover the pan with a lid or foil.  Bake for about an hour.

(Some recipes said that you can cook these entirely on top of the stove.)

When I took my rolls out of the oven, I uncovered them and dipped off most of the fat. 

I made these a day early - since it was an experiment, I wanted to give myself time to invoke "Plan B" if they turned out horribly - and re-heated them at 300 degrees for another 45 minutes before serving.  They were fine re-heated.