Today, for the first time since we had produce we could harvest from the garden this summer, I collected nothing at all this morning.
Normally, I would have at least collected a few sunburst squash. With the cooler temperatures, though, the many little squashes out there are growing a lot more slowly. I like to pick them, and the zucchini, while they are still quite small, but not that small!
Amazingly, even though we dipped to almost freezing last night, one of the bottleneck gourds has started to bloom! This is one of the last ones that got transplanted. Of the tray of seed starts, a few germinated well after the others had already been transplanted, so I planted them, even though it was so late in the season.
I suppose I could have harvested some carrots and beets this morning, but they do better in the ground until we’re ready to use them. The potatoes are ready to be dug up, but it’s going to warm up a bit over the next few days, so I might wait a day or two.
I’m really hoping this little cool down is an aberration, and we’ll have a long, mild fall. If the pattern of that last couple of years continues, though, we should have a blizzard right around Thanksgiving in October! :-D
More and more of the sunflowers are opening up, and today I spotted one that’s different.
Most look like this.
Bright, sunny, mostly yellow with light oranges and greens around the developing seeds.
Then there was this one.
The camera actually lightened it up a bit. Compared to the others, this one looks almost black in the middle! Very dramatic.
This may be the first of the slightly shorter variety of giant sunflowers we first planted, so start opening its seed head. If so, I expect to see more. :-)
Today, I headed out to pick the apples off of one of our crabapple trees.
This is the one that has such bright red, sweet apples. It also ripens earlier than the other trees.
Last year, most of the apples disappeared before I had a chance to harvest them, so I wanted to get them before the … deer? … get them first.
When we were cleaning things out, I was flummoxed by finding a grabber with spoons attached to it. My mother eventually remembered that my dad used it to pick apples.
I’m happy to say that it works absolutely beautifully!
Since there were so many apples to pick this year, I laid out a sheet on the ground for them to fall on. It also made it much easier to move the apples into a bucket.
I was able to fill a 5 gallon bucket just with the apples I could reach with my hands, or the grabber. I did try shaking the trees, too, but the branches are a bit too thick to be able to shake much at that height, so I didn’t get a lot that way.
Using the step ladder, I was able to fill another 5 gallon bucket. I could have gotten more, but by then, it was getting too dangerous to try and get the apples, even with the grabber. The remaining apples will be for the birds. :-)
Ten gallons of apples is so awesome! Last year, I used the apples from this tree to make apple cider vinegar. After trimming and chopping, I filled a quart jar 3/4s full.
That’s it. That’s all we had.
This year, I plan to make more apple cider vinegar, then juice at least a gallon, to make hard apple cider. There should still be plenty to give to my family, when they come out this weekend, if they want some.
For the hard apple cider, we have gallon jugs, bungs and airlocks to use. When we made apple cider vinegar in a quart jar last year, it was a success, but there was a problem with fruit flies being attracted to the coffee filter covered jar in the cupboard. So this year, I plan to use an air lock (they’re so cheap, I’ve been buying extras).
I’ll be using a repurposed gallon sized pickle jar for this, which means I need to find a way to get an airlock into the lid.
Which I’ve already gotten started, and will show how in my next post. :-)
What a difference in how they looked, two years ago, and now! The above photo is from 2 years ago. This year’s grapes are easily double in size – and these are not a large fruit variety!
It’s even more appreciated, since after cleaning out and trellising them last year, we didn’t get any grapes at all last summer. Not a one.
In picking the grapes this morning, I did have a bit of a problem. Most of the grapes were on the other side of the trellis. Which is when I realized the trellis was so close to the wall, I couldn’t get at them.
Thankfully, the trellis is just on a couple of bars pushed into the ground for support. I was able to move them a few inches away from the wall, and that was enough for me to be able to get back there to harvest the grapes. I’ll have to go back to them to pound the supports into the ground more, but I will likely do that when I prune the vines before winter.
At the moment, we’re not really sure what we want to do with the grapes, so they’ll be given a wash, then frozen, like we did with the chokecherries. If we do decide to do something like a jelly or syrup, or add them to the must when making mead, freezing them first will make it easier to extract the juice.
I must say, for a variety that clearly isn’t a table grape (my mother doesn’t remember what they were), they taste quite good, just as they are!
The first seed head to blossom is already losing its little flowers!
I think I should be able to harvest it and set it to dry at this point; at least that’s what I’ve learned from my research. But would the seeds normally be this white?
I think I’ll leave it a bit longer. So far, no birds seem to be going for it.
Pollinators aren’t’ the only ones interested in the budding sunflowers.
The leaves make great shelter for resting dragonflies!
Those leaves have a lot of holes in them. I can’t see what’s causing them, though. They still seem to be doing all right, so I’m not concerned at this point.
That first seed head that opened is getting pretty big! Quite a few more are starting to show yellow petals.
It’s nice to see more reaching this stage.
I have no convenient way to measure, but I’d guess the tallest ones are reaching the 8 foot range.
The heights are all over the place. Of the original seeds planted, they are among the tallest, of course, but some of them are still only in the 5-6 foot range – and then there are the ones that were shortened by deer! Among the variety that got planted later to fill in the gaps, some are just a couple of feet tall, while others are around 3-4 feet. That variety is supposed to reach about 6 ft, if I remember correctly. Hopefully, we’ve got enough of a growing season left for them to produce harvestable seed heads, but even if they don’t, they are good for the other reasons we planted them; as a privacy screen and a bit of a wind break.
Today was our day to head into the city for our monthly shop. We will be making another smaller trip, later in the month, but the big stuff is done. We normally would have done it a few days ago, but doing Costco on a weekend just didn’t appeal to us! :-D
So that took up the bulk of our day. Which made it one of those days were some plenty of stuff got accomplished, but it doesn’t feel like it, since much of the day was spent driving. :-D
While doing my rounds this evening, I was able to play with Butterscotch’s babies again. :-)
The orange babies were quite eager to play, while the calico and the orange and white kitten (which was sitting in the broken barrel planter at the time this picture was taken) looked like they were falling asleep where they sat!
Later, I headed over to check on the sunflowers. There are still only 2 seed heads that are opening, but there’s at least one that looks like it may start opening tomorrow.
Then I noticed something… different… about one of the sunflowers.
Very different.
It is covered with developing seed heads.
I started counting them. I got to 21, and I’m sure I missed some. Along with the several at the very top, every single leaf on the stalk has a seed head developing in the “elbow”. Some of them were absolutely minuscule, but they were there!
I looked at every other sunflower in the rows, and there are no others like this. All the other plants (that aren’t too deer damaged) are developing just one seed head. Which, for these giant varieties, is to be expected. This one plant is among the many that tower above my head now, so it is definitely one of the giants, and not an ornamental type that found its way into a seed packet.
It looks amazing! I really look forward to seeing how it progresses!
Speaking of progress, I made sure to check the pumpkins, too.
The first pumpkin to develop is growing nicely, but it was the the next plant that had me smiling.
The pumpkin plant in the middle mound has finally developed a pumpkin! I made sure to put something under it, so it won’t develop rot from the damp ground.
The third pumpkin mound had a surprise for me, too.
There’s a new baby pumpkin developing!
Our squash beds had one last surprise for me tonight, too.
That, my friends, is the tiniest of birdhouse gourds! :-D
There’s just one that has started developing. I can see no sign of gourds on the others, but they are all so small, I honestly wasn’t expecting any to develop at all.
It should be interesting to see if this one gourd will survive. Especially as we start to get some actually chilly overnight temperatures.
Before it got too dark, the girls helped me with one last thing outside. We moved my daughter’s tent, then moved the picnic table under it.
September is a month filled with birthdays and anniversaries, so we have decided to celebrate them all at once. On the long weekend – weather willing – we will set up by the fire pit and have…
Chinese food.
And birthday/anniversary cake.
And maybe roast some hot dogs over a fire, too. :-D
The tent has one solid wall that we will add to the far side to act as a bit of a wind break, since that is the direction the wind usually comes from. We also have screen walls, in case bugs are a problem.
If the weather isn’t co-operative, we now have the sun room and old kitchen cleaned out and organized, so we can move into there. The old kitchen is downright pleasant to sit in now, plus it’s close to the bathroom. More importantly, there are no stairs, so my mom can get in and out more easily than into the new part of the house. Plus, there is also a door we can keep closed, and keep the cats out! :-D
This is planned for almost 2 weeks from now, so we have plenty of time to make sure everything is clear and accessible for my mother.
Hopefully, it will all work out. A lot can happen in 2 weeks! :-D
We now have two seed heads on the originally planted giant varieties, opening up.
The first one to start opening is getting big enough, the stalk is starting to droop quite a bit – which means short little me can see it better! :-D
Nice to see the pollinators busy at work on the second one to start opening!
Speaking of pollinators, they are just loving our squash bed right now. So many new flowers. Including in the pumpkins.
Look out big this pumpkin is getting!
This pumpkin mound has two plants growing in it, lots of flowers but, so far, there is just this one pumpkin that seems to be growing. There is another on the second plant, but it doesn’t seem to be getting bigger.
This one is on the plant in the mound I’d planted 5 seeds in, and it took so long to come up, I thought none would germinate. Now, not only is the plant just big as the ones that sprouted earlier, but it has a pumpkin that’s almost as big as the other one!
I still don’t thing there is enough of a growing season left for the pumpkins to fully develop and ripen, but I’m still enjoying how they are doing now.
One of the things I’ve been checking every morning of late, is how the crabapples are doing.
In the row of trees by the spruce grove, there are really just two trees that we can use. The others have such small apples, they’ll be left for the birds and the deer.
One of these two trees gets such bright red apples!
There are lots of them, too. I have actually thinned them, and with this tree, the easiest way to do that is just grab a branch and shake. They fall off a lot easier than the other trees!
This tree produces remarkably sweet apples. Last year, oddly, by the time we went to pick the apples, most of them had disappeared. I wasn’t even seeing many on the ground. Very strange, considering how full of apples it was, just the day before! Anyhow, I used them to make crabapple cider vinegar. You can read how that went in parts one, two and three of the process. I want to do this again, but this time, we’ll be using an airlock! Using a coffee filter was messy, and attracted fruit flies. We still don’t have fermentation weights, but we’ll figure something out.
The other tree in this row surprised me, last year. I would taste the apples from different trees to check their ripeness, and this one was… well, pretty awful tasting. We gathered what we could from the other trees, but left this one.
Then my mother insisted I bring her apples from the farm. I told here there weren’t many left, and the ones that were left didn’t taste good, but she said she would just be cooking them down and adding sugar, anyhow, so go ahead and bring them to her.
Much to my surprise, the apples actually tasted really good! They simply needed a lot more time to ripen, compared to the others.
This year, we cleaned out the dead part in the middle, and the remaining parts seem to be appreciating this.
Some of the apples are nearly 3x the size of the red ones on the other tree!
With the fungal disease attacking the row of crabapple trees, I would happily get rid of all the others, if it means saving these two trees.
There is one other crabapple tree, next to the old compost pile, that is ripening some pretty big apples. It should be ready to harvest soon, I think.
We should have lots of apples to make things with this year.
Maybe even enough try making some hard crabapple cider! :-)
I think it’s time to visit the brewery supply place in town. I’m starting to think that the 4 airlocks we have now are not going to be enough. Especially since we’ll be making gallon batches of mead, soon!
