Sweet Peas

Though we've had a few chilly nights with frost, we haven't had a serious freeze, and the sweet peas are acting like they were made for this kind of weather. (Maybe they were!) While the first frost completely killed everything else in the garden, these peas are still vigorous - still blooming, for pete's sake!

On Saturday, I decided I'd better pick the peas before the really cold weather sets in. I took a plastic grocery bag to the garden and filled it nearly full of fat pods. The frost had turned the pods a strange, whitish color, but the peas inside were just fine. We shelled them for supper on Sunday night, and got about 2 cups of peas. I should have picked them sooner; some of the peas had grown so big that their skins had split, and they were still a little al dente even after 5 minutes of steaming. But, heck, I'd never grown sweet peas, so what did I know? In any case, they tasted wonderful.

There are many more immature pods still on the vines. We're supposed to get some below-freezing temperatures this week, and I'm curious to see how the peas will cope with it.

While we were at the hardware store on Saturday, I bought a big sack of tulip bulbs. I wish I had planted them this past weekend, since it'll probably be even colder this coming weekend. Spring bulbs are such a joy. By springtime, I've usually forgotten what I planted the previous fall, and so every flower is a welcome surprise. I'm going to plant these tulips in the beds along the front sidewalk, where there is creeping phlox and creeping vinca. Won't it be terrific if they all bloom at the same time next year?

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First Frost

We had our first frost two nights ago. Foreseeing the chill, Nanny picked the remaining green beans (4 gallons of them!) and bell peppers. She covered the tender lettuce with a sheet of plastic. I never got around to buying that extra plastic sheeting, and so she didn't have enough to cover up the other greens. Hopefully, they can take a little chill. Hopefully, I can remember to get more plastic today.

I am also crossing my fingers that the sweet peas can stand the cooler temperatures. Few of the pods have matured. I picked the fattest ones yesterday afternoon, and they yielded a handful of peas, which I tossed into a noodle concoction for last night's supper. There are many more immature pods still on the vines. I left them there, hoping that they will grow a little more.

After leaving the garden yesterday, my husband and I went into town on a furniture-buying mission. We have not had new living room furniture in 20+ years. For a long time, we've been talking about buying new furniture, but never got around to it. When our son and his family moved in with us (temporarily) a few months ago, we gave away our old living room suite, making room for our son's furniture, knowing that when he and his family moved into their new house, we'd be forced into action.

We began shopping for furniture in mid-September, anticipating a late-September closing date on the new house. We each found a few things we liked - my digital camera is full of pictures of sofas and recliners - but, naturally, we did not agree on anything, and, since the closing date kept getting pushed ahead, we kept putting off the decision. Last week, while we were on a camping trip, we learned that the closing is "definitely" to happen this week. I said to the husband, "Since we can't agree on anything, and since we've both seen what the other likes, one of us should just go and buy the furniture, and get it over with." On the way home from the camping trip, the husband said, "Since I'm off work again tomorrow, maybe I'll go buy the furniture."

I gave him the "have-you-lost-your-mind?" look.

He said, "Well, you SAID that 'one of us' should just go do it."

I said, "Yeah, but I meant ME!"

Wisely, he refrained from going to the furniture store until I got home from work. As we should have anticipated, none of the things we had liked on our previous outings were still in the store. We had to start from scratch. But 30 minutes after I walked in, I knew what I wanted. So did the husband. Unfortunately, they were not the same things. The compromising started.

Other customers came and went. A friend came in, and called to us, "Hey, how are you guys doing?"

"We're about to fight," I told him. He waved, and ran for cover.

Before it was over, poor David, the store owner, had rearranged about a third of his inventory, moving "that chair" next to "this couch" so that I could see how they looked together. (I believe if we had debated a little longer, David might have paid us to take some furniture and get out of his store.) We finally agreed on one chair - a cushy burgundy leather recliner for the husband - and were able to build a suite around it. "Put 'sold' signs on these," we told David, "and we'll call you when we're ready for them." I thought David was going to cry.

He may cry for sure when I go back to the store today, to see if I still like everything in the daylight. ;)

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This Year's Last Hurrah

The greens are ready to pick. According to my last blog entry, I planted them about a month ago. We have plenty of mustard, turnip, kale, and lettuce. Sarah took home two sacks full on Monday. This barely made a dent in them. Come Saturday, I'll be picking greens for the freezer. Wish you lived close enough to help! ;)

The spinach is being persnickety and has come up thinly. Same goes for the beets. Right now, there's enough spinach for a couple of small salads from the baby leaves, but not enough to sautee. We intend to make a plastic tent for all of the greens, hoping to extend their growth into winter. I should go to Home Depot for plastic tomorrow, so that Jack Frost won't catch me unprepared.




This afternoon, I picked the first green beans from the "new crop." (We planted those two months ago.) I went to the garden hoping to find enough for supper, and came out with 2 gallons of beans. They'll need picking again by the weekend. After skimming a couple of handfulls off the top for our dinner, I gave the rest to a cousin up the road. Mine are now slowly steaming in garlic butter, to go with the potatoes and the pork loin that are roasting in the oven.

The sweet peas, planted two months ago, have nice, big pods on them, but they're not filled out yet. I can hardly wait for those!

Back in the summer, I found two scraggly brussels sprouts plants at a garden center, and stuck them in the ground. It was way too late to plant brussels sprouts, and they just sat there, doing nothing, during the hot part of the summer. Last month, I noticed that they had begun to grow, and I thought we might get a little crop of sprouts, after all. Today, I noticed that they are now green skeletons, thanks to some cute little green/black striped worms that have helped themselves to the leaves. I'm going to leave them - and the worms - alone to see what happens.

It's too bad that there aren't more resources for fall gardening around here, because gardening at this time of the year can be so pleasant. It's not too hot or too cold. The bugs (except for those pesky brussels sprouts worms) aren't too bad, so there's no need for pesticides. How nice it feels to eat vegetables that are fresh and crisp and, except for maybe a little bug poo, clean enough to eat while standing right there in the garden.

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Gearing Up for the Gearing Down

I walked down to the garden about 9 a.m. today, store-bought canes in hand (see last post), intending to string the wire between the green bean poles, stick the canes in the ground, and call it a day. I hadn't even made it all the way across the back yard when Nanny came out of the house and called, "Did you find the wire?" I hollered back that I knew where it was, and went on to the garden.

While I was pushing the store-bought canes into the ground, Nanny arrived with an arm-load of green canes that she had cut from the edge of the woods. We had just enough to do the green bean rows.

But when we finished that job, Nanny said, "Are these butterbeans the running kind?"

Pssshhht. As if I knew. They had foot-long runners on them, but I didn't see anything curling. And I didn't have any more metal posts and canes to make another fence.

I looked around. At the end of the garden was a small pile of 2x2 poles that had once been tomato stakes. I told Nanny, "Maybe we can go ahead and drive these stakes into the butterbean rows, and run some string between them later if it looks like they're going to be climbers." We gathered up the stakes and hammered them into the ground. Naturally, we didn't have enough stakes. But there were more pooped-out tomato plants in the garden, still attached to their stakes, so we stole those stakes to finish the butterbean rows.

Then Nanny said, "Are you going to plant greens? If you are, pull up the rest of those tomatoes, and I'll run the lawnmower through there to make it easier to plow." So we pulled up almost all the rest of the tomato plants, and Nanny hauled them away in the lawn cart while I pulled up and hauled away the sunflower trees that had long-since fallen over.

By then, it was 11 a.m. I hadn't had any breakfast and my stomach was rumbling. "I'm going back to the house," I told Nanny. "I've had enough for today."

I came home and fixed some breakfast. While I was eating, I decided that I ought to go ahead and plow up the spot for the greens and get them planted today, before the rain from hurricane Ike gets here. After breakfast, I went back to the garden. The big tiller actually cranked, and I steered it to the garden.

On the second round of tilling, something faintly intenstine-ish flew out from beneath the tiller and landed beside me. What in the world...? I stooped to get a better look. Ewwww! It was an animal - I'm not sure what it was, but it was pink (didn't have much hair), and it was gasping. I cringed, and stood up, not knowing what to do. Whatever the thing was, it was clearly in pain and needed to be finished off. But...geez.... Fortunately, while I was deliberating about whether to get the shovel or run over it with the tiller again, it shuddered and went still. I apologized to it and went back to my tilling, kinda grossed out by the thing, which I had to look at every time I passed it. Yuck.

I finished the tilling. By then, the heat had sapped my energy again, so I came back home. The ground still needs raking, and the greens still need planting. The sweet peas need a support system. They and the new green beans and butterbeans need fertilizing. The butterpeas, hot peppers, and okra need to be picked, and I'd like to get all of that done before the rain gets here.

But, right now, I have to run over to Mother's to change some light bulbs.

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Addendum:

Got the light bulbs done, came home to get my gloves, and went back to the garden to rake the tilled soil and plant greens. When I went to the shed to get the rake, Pop-Pop was on his back on a creeper under the big John Deere tractor. "Laying down on the job again, are you?" I said, as I passed by.

"Hey, what'd you do with my girlfriend?" he asked (referring to our stylish scarecrow - the one he calls "the Garden Ho'" - which I'd taken down earlier, when we were pulling up tomatoes).

"She's out there," I said, "laying on that pile of tomato stakes."

"I just can't keep a girlfriend," he muttered sadly.

I got my rake and went out to the garden. Before raking, I sprinkled pelletized lime over the soil to "sweeten" it for next year. Nanny came out to help about the time I finished spreading the lime, and we made short work of raking up some rows and planting the seeds. We planted turnips, spinach, kale, lettuce, and mustard. Oh, and a row of beets. (The beets I planted last time came up sparsely and have since disappeared. I'm trying them in a different spot this time. Never did get a single carrot to come up.)

Nanny and I tidied up - pulled some grass from around the three tomato plants that we'd left standing, and weeded the sweet peas. I hooked up the Miracle Grow sprayer to the water hose and fertilized the new beans. I even gave the old green beans a shot, just in case they still have a little energy left in them.

I picked a few squash, a few tomatoes, and an eggplant.

With my last ounce of energy, I hauled the scarecrow back to the center of the garden and put her hat back on her head. Can't have Pop-Pop missing her, can we?

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Negligence

Sorry, bloggettes, to have neglected you this week. I would like to say that I've been too busy gardening to write about gardening, but that would not be entirely true. The hurricanes have sent some rain our way for the past couple of weeks, keeping the ground too wet to work. I have been spending my time reading and cooking and otherwise piddling around the house. The grass in the garden is celebrating both the rain and my absence.

Since my last post, I've canned 17 quarts of green beans, and Nanny has canned five or six quarts. There's probably another pickin' on the vines right now, but it won't yield much more than a family dinner's worth. Fortunately, the new green beans are coming right along. Runners are about a foot long, and twisting around one another in the air above the plants. They need staking. Last weekend, I managed to hammer some metal fence posts in the ground between the rows while the ground was still wet. As soon as it dries up a bit more, I'll string some wire between the posts, and lace bamboo canes through it for the beans to run on (assuming my husband cuts me some bamboo canes, as he has said he would).

The billiard-ball squash I planted around the 4th of July are cranking out squash like crazy. The package said that the fruit matures fast, and it was not kidding. Today's golf-ball-sized squash is tomorrow's tennis ball. Seriously. Much of it gets too big before I get a chance to pick it. It's good squash, though. I've baked it, sauteed it, fried it, and eaten it raw. Its taste and texture is about like regular yellow squash, perhaps with less of that slightly-bitter aftertaste that some squash has. It may get the lion's share of the squash row next year. When I was patroling the edges of the garden earlier in the week, I saw that the squash and pumpkin bugs were having a street fair on the squash and pumpkin leaves. I dusted them with Sevin and did not feel the least bit criminal for doing it.

The pepper plants are showing off. I picked most of them clean two weeks ago, but left the pods to turn red on one or two plants. I've not had much luck with bell pepper in previous years, but this year's crop has been impressive enough to break a few limbs off the plants. I should dig around in the dirt around those plants to find the plastic nursery stakes that came with them so I can get the same kind next year.



In the yard, the sweet autumn clematis is doing its thing. I planted it to grow on a fence, the one I installed to hide all the yard junk. Once I actually got all the junk moved behind the fence, the clematis broke the fence down, so now we have a spectacular view of all the yard junk, together in one place.








The clematis' original home was on a different fence. When I tore the fence down, I dug up the clematis, but, evidently, I left leaving a little piece of the vine in the old location. That little piece took a shine to a Crape Myrtle bush at the corner of my patio. I think I'll let it stay. ;)

News Flash

It's settled: green beans respond to threats.

Remember that last week I gave my green beans a talking-to because they hadn't produced? By the end of the week, they were looking as though they might have listened, for on Saturday I gathered a couple of handfuls of beans, and saw many more that were too little to pick.

You ought to see them now!

Mother says that the more you pick green beans, the more they make, so I went to the garden this afternoon to gather what beans were there, hoping to spur them on. I was expecting to gather maybe another handful or two of beans. Boy, did I underestimate them! The vines are loaded with beans, and making more. I picked half a sack full of beans from about half a row of vines before it got too dark to see what I was doing. I'll go back in the morning to get the rest. It looks like I might get to can some beans, after all!

We love them small and tender. I'll pack them whole into pint jars and process them in the pressure canner. (I am scared to death of that thing.) They'll be yummy this winter, sauteed in garlic butter with mushrooms and pearl onions.

The new crop of green beans that we planted on the 16th is doing well. The butterbeans that we planted that same day have sprouted, too, but they look funny - kind of...crinkled and nappy, like they just got out of bed. Heh, I guess, in a way, they did!

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The Ultimatum

I had a talk with my green beans today.

They've been sitting there all summer long doing nothing. Nothing. I've watered them, I've fed them, I've weeded them. The vines are beautiful - full and lush, loaded with blooms. But something goes wrong between the bloomin' and the beanin'; we've harvested one small meal from them the whole summer.

So today I told them, "You've got one week. One week to show me what you've got, or you're outta here."

I explained to them that there are two new rows of green beans sprouting, just on the other side of the tomatoes. Pretty soon, they'll need supporting. The old beans have a good fence. It can be moved, once I get the old bean vines off it. So I repeated my warning: "If you guys haven't wowed me by next weekend, you're history."

We'll see if they listened.

While I was in the garden, I cut four big sunflower heads - big as dinner plates - and put them in the shed to finish drying. If I can figure out how, I'm going to roast them. The rest, I left for the birds to eat.

Thumped the biggest watermelon again (not that I can tell if it's ripe by that method, but it is vaguely satisfying to thump them). Daddy says the curlique will dry up when the melon is ready. This one looks pretty far from dry.

The pumpkin vines have little pumpkins on them, soft-ball-sized, and bigger. Maybe we'll have some home-grown jack-o-lanterns, or at least a pie or two.

For the past couple of weeks, we've had some good rain showers, and the blight-stricken tomatoes have found new leases on life. They're showing new green growth and have begun to bloom again. It'll be interesting to see what they do before frost.

The billiard-ball squash is about ready to eat. I'm excited to see what they're like - would cook some for supper tonight, if I hadn't already told the husband he's taking me out to dinner. The seed packet said that the fruit grows rapidly once it starts, and that is surely the truth; only two days ago, the billiard balls were marbles. I hope they're not too big to eat by tomorrow!

Weekend plans: two buckets of pears await. I intend to make pear butter out of them. Let's hope it turns out better than the peach jam.

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