Cucumbers and Bradley Tomatoes

When I went to bed last night, my old bones were aching so badly from yesterday's garden madness that I could not sleep.  Finally, some time after midnight, I swallowed two Alleve, and managed to fall asleep soon thereafter.  Today, I was none worse for the wear.

At lunch, I bought 4 more tomato plants - Bradley tomatoes - and planted them when I got home.  I also planted a whole row of cucumbers, enough to pickle the entire county if they all come up.

I had about given up on the potatoes and squash I planted Easter Sunday, but it looks like there'll be at least some showing.  A couple of squash have poked their heads up, and there's a potato peeking out of that hole! 

Last year, I let a red lettuce plant go to seed.  The sprouts survived the mild winter and are thriving.

I read up on "companion planting" last night.  The article said to let the corn get 6" tall, and then plant beans and squash around the stalks.  I ordered "rattlesnake beans" last night to plant with the corn.  If the squash I planted on Easter comes up and does well, I think I'll plant zucchini around the corn.

With the exception of the rattlesnake beans and zucchini, and assuming that the seeds I planted yesterday actually sprout, I think this year's garden is officially "in."

Corn, Butterbeans, Tomatoes, Peppers, Carrots...

Whoooooweeee, I'm tired.  Tilled up 6 rows (3 passes each) and planted corn, butterbeans, carrots and onions.  Yeah, I know the carrots and onions should have gone in two months ago, but I didn't get to it, okay?  I don't know why I bothered planting the carrots, since not one of the two million carrot seeds I have planted in my garden in the past few years has germinated.  I don't know why I bothered with the corn, either, since the raccoons push it over every year as soon as the cobs begin to grow kernels.  But one continues to hope....

I am not having a zillion tomato plants this year, like I usually do.  Today, I set out 4 Arkansas Travelers, 2 Mr. Stripeys, and one "Mortgage Lifters."  We do have a bunch of volunteer Roma tomatoes that I will probably transplant to finish filling out one tomato row.  But that's it.  No more.  I promise.

Peppers - cayenne, jalapeno, and a long, sweet pepper (can't recall the name).  Need a couple more.

I'm going to try companion planting this year - green beans and squash with the corn.  I suppose the corn will need to sprout, first, and get established, before the beans and squash go in.  The theory is that the beans can use the corn stalks for support, and the squash provides ground cover for weed and moisture control.  I'll let you know how it works.

First Planting 2012

I cut loose from work a little early today.  The sun was shining, and a nice breeze was blowing.  I came home, suited up for gardening, and went to the garden.  The big tiller cranked on the third pull.  I plowed up two long rows and planted radishes, lettuce, and sweet peas.  I left room for cabbages, broccoli, and brussels sprouts, and I'm going to plant some tomorrow, if I can find any.

My "son of another mother" called me over the weekend with the news that he has delivered a 2-row breaking plow down to Nanny's.  Sure enough, there it sat, not far from the shed, when I got to the garden.  If we can get the little Ford tractor to crank, I sense plowing lessons in my future.

And, yeah, I'm missing Pop-Pop.

Good Deeds

It's balmy here today.  My boss sprang me from work a little early.  If the ground weren't so wet, I'd be trying to crank a tiller right now.

On the way home from work, I passed a pick-up truck pulled to the side of the road with its flashers flashing.  I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a woman trying to load what I thought was a sheet of plywood onto the truck.  The wind was blowing so hard that she was struggling.  I turned around at the next driveway and went back, intending to help her. 

When I got there, I saw that it wasn't plywood; it was plastic-backed styrofoam, the stuff they use now-a-days to sheathe houses.  She had a big stack of it, probably a dozen or more pieces securely wrapped in plastic.  There were several more pieces laying in the ditch.  I helped her turn the sheet sideways so that it would not catch the wind.  Naturally, as soon as we slid it atop the stack and bent down to pick up the rest of the sheets, it blew away again.  She ran to grab it, and when she turned into the wind to come back, the wind snapped the sheet right in two.  All that was holding it together was the plastic backing.  We slid it in beside the stack, and, somehow, managed to pick up the rest of the styrofoam sheets without breaking them. 

We leaned them against the side of the truck, and I held them down while she rummaged around in the truck bed for some rope.  She came up empty-handed.  I asked her to hold the sheets while I checked my Jeep.  Sure enough, my knitting bag was in the back seat, and there was a ball of yarn in it.  I grabbed the yarn and went back to the truck. 

We caught a lull in the wind and were able to get all of the styrofoam sheets back onto the stack.  She held them down while I cut a long piece of yarn, doubled it over, and tied it through the holes in one side of the truck bed.  I ran to the other side of the truck and poked the yarn though the hole on that side.  When I gave it a firm pull to tighten the slack and tie a knot, the yarn cut through the top piece of styrofoam like a hot knife through butter.  About that time, another stiff wind hit, and both pieces flew out of the truck bed and sailed across the road like Frisbees.  The rest of the unwrapped sheets followed.  Some of them went over a fence into a pasture.  Others landed in a steep ditch. 

"I'm calling my son!" she said, and she got out her cell phone and told her son to get there, pronto, and bring some rope. 

I started trying to gather up the pieces that were strewn all over the roadside, but she said to leave it, and she would make her son get it.  

Geez, I felt kind of bad about cutting that sheet in two with my yarn.  She might have been better off without my help!

A Tribute to Pop-Pop

Our Pop-Pop passed away on November 19th, after a long, hard struggle with more problems than I care to name.  Even though he was in and out of the hospital since early October, none of us believed that his time was up.  He left a wife, a mother, three children, seven grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren, all of whom loved him dearly.  We miss him, already.

Pop-Pop was a quiet man with a wicked wit that bubbled to the surface at the most unexpected times.  When my husband and I announced that we were expecting our first child (and his first grandchild), his response was to look at my husband and say, "Ain't that just like a woman?  You just want to poke a little fun at them, and they take you seriously."  But when that child was born, before leaving the hospital, he leaned over my bed, kissed my cheek, and said, "Thank you for my grandson."

He was crazy about all of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and delighted in acting as their accomplice in mischief.  When our boys got a go-kart, he put the blade on the tractor and scraped a dirt track all the way around the front field so they'd have a safe place to ride at top speed.  He taught his 3-year-old great-granddaughter how to drive his Rascal scooter, and let her take it up the long driveway to get his newspaper.  He teased them, and argued with them, and good-naturedly endured their jokes about his age and his turtle-paced gait. 

He let the kids tinker in the shop with him, and ride the tractor with him.  He let the girls stick bows on his bald spot at Christmas, and wrote a letter nearly every day to a home-sick granddaughter who went away to Army boot camp. 

His great-grandchildren remember him for the candy he always had stashed in his shirt pocket or in a bowl high on a kitchen shelf.  While the family was gathered at his house after his death, one of them, a six-year-old girl, led me out to the workshop and asked, "Has he got any Tootsie Rolls in here?"  The next day, I caught the 4-year old boy in the shop, climbing onto the workbench and peering into plastic coffee cans, looking for the one that held the stash. 

Pop-Pop and I had a system:  I'd bring the dull hoes to the shop and deposit them in a barrel; he'd sharpen them and put them in another barrel in the gardening shed.  My favorite hoe was almost always ready to be used when I was ready to use it.  He kept my ragged old tillers running, and always took time to fill up a small gas can with a gas/oil mixture that wouldn't make their motors smoke the way they did when I did the mixing. 

After his funeral, the pall-bearers - mostly grandsons - loaded into Pop-Pop's old red-and-white Ford pickup truck and followed the hearse to the cemetery.  They piled out of it, and sang "I'll Fly Away" in the rain at his graveside.  He would've loved it.

Sweet Potato Casserole Recipe

This stuff is lip-smackin' good.

Basic recipe:

3 c. mashed sweet potatoes (takes about 3 big ones) *
1/3 c. milk **
2 eggs
1 c. sugar ***
1 t. vanilla
1 stick of butter
pinch of salt
cinnamon, if you like it, however much you like ****

Mix above ingredients well with mixer or by hand.  Pour into large casserole dish. 

Topping:

1 c. brown sugar
2/3 stick butter
1 c. chopped pecans
1/3 c. flour

Melt butter.  Mix flour, sugar, and nuts.  Pour melted butter over mixture.  Mix well, and spread over potatoes.  Bake 25 minutes at 350 degrees.  Serve hot or cold.

* Do yourself a favor:  boil the sweet potatoes and THEN peel them.  It much easier than doing it the other way around.  ;)

** Half & Half makes it richer.

*** I only had 1/3 c. of sugar in the canister, so I supplemented with light brown sugar and some cane syrup.  Whatever works, eh?

**** The recipe in this church cookbook does not call for cinnamon, but we like it.   Taste the potatoes before you add it, though; they're really good without it.

Chili Kohlrabi Rellenos

Um...yeah.  Chili kohlrabi rellenos.  They're in the oven now. 

You see, I rode my bike down to the garden this evening to see what was happening.  Though I haven't done much writing about the garden for a couple of months, things have been clicking along.  When the summer heat relented, the tomatoes and peppers kicked into high gear.  Every week, I've harvested enough tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants to make sauces for supper and to freeze.  The tomatoes are getting a little "nubby," but the peppers are in their prime.  The limbs of the Big Jim pepper plant were bent and broken with the weight of the peppers.  I wanted to leave them to turn red, but we've had a few very cool nights lately, and I decided to get most of them before the frost does.

And when I turned around, behold, there sat the two kohlrabi plants, planted on the summer solstice, that had managed to escape the varmits and our hoes.  Since I'd paid them any attention, they had each grown themselves a nice green bulb - the size of a tennis ball - atop the ground.  They had big, spiky, collard-type leaves.  I pulled one of them up, root and all, but broke the other off at the ground to see if it will make again.

My original plan was to roast the Big Jim peppers and either pickle them or freeze them.  Before I made it back to the house with them, I decided I'd stuff them, instead. 

But what was I going to do with kohlrabi?  I'd never eaten the stuff.  I'd seen a few recipes on the internet.  None of them exactly turned my crank.  I peeled one and tasted it.  It was turnip-y, but surprisingly sweet, good enough to eat raw.  I chopped it into little cubes and decided that it could just go in the stuffed peppers, along with some tomatoes, onions, and cheese.  A few of the chopped leaves got tossed in, too, for color.  I wrapped two of the peppers in bacon, pinned on with toothpicks.

I'll let you know how they turn out.