A while back, severe winds had broken some large branches on a couple of Mosaic Mix tomato plants. They were laden with green tomatoes, so I ended up just sticking them into the soil and leaving them.
It worked.
Not only are the green tomatoes continuing to ripen in the sun, but the branches themselves have started to grow new leaves among the ones that have wilted and died!
What remarkably resilient plants.
The Re-Farmer
I’ve had a bit of a dilemma lately.
What do you get a 90 year old for her birthday?
I mean, by the time someone reaches 90, they pretty much have everything they want and need by then.
Ah, but there is an added twist.
The 90 year old in question is my mother.
My mother is… difficult. And often obliviously cruel.
Still, the family is planning a birthday party for her, and I will be driving her to it.
Yesterday, I finally settled on getting her a necklace. I already know she will complain about it but she might actually wear it anyway.
I also decided to make it a double gift, and stayed up late last night to make this little bag, rather than wrapping the necklace in a jewelry box.
It’s about 3 inches square, and the necklace is already in it in the photos. I figure she can use the bag to hold her rosary or something, afterwards.
This was done using a tulip stitch, which I’ve never done before. Here is the video tutorial that I used. It’s really quite simple.
The main difference is that I worked the bag in the round, rather than a flat panel, so I just needed to have a total number of stitches divisible by three, without the +1 needed in the starting chain when having to turn rows. The single crochet rounds in the bag are 48 stitches.
The yarn is from a package of cotton mini skeins in 8 colours, similar to Lion Brand’s Bonbons. It was gifted to me, and I’ve hung on to it for years before finding a project I wanted to use it for! :-) The bag used four colours, and I used a 2.25mm hook. After the bag was completed, I did a round of single crochet to finish the edges and create a button loop, then crocheted bobble stitch flower petals around the button loop. The button itself was from a bag of mixed, vintage buttons.
I’m happy with how it turned out. My mother will probably hate it. At least out loud and in public. Privately, she might actually like it. It’s really hard to know, with her! :-D
The Re-Farmer
Today, one of my daughters and I headed out to do more of our monthly stock up that I wasn’t able to do when I did our Costco run. It was a good opportunity to also order and pick up my husband’s birthday pizza. :-) It’s not his birthday today, but we tend to spread out our celebrations over several days.
Before we got to indulge, though, we had some green gold to gather.
Today we hit 23C/73F with the humidex at 25C/77F, and full sun. That gave the grass clippings from yesterday’s mowing in the outer yard a chance to dry. My other daughter helped me rake it up and haul it over.
We now have a nice little haystack next to the compost pile, ready to be used in the low raised beds. This is from the two areas of the outer yard pictures, plus one more wheelbarrow full from the overgrown lane between them.
It would have been nice to have clippings like this throughout the summer; they would have been a huge help in keeping the garden beds mulched when it was needed most! Ah, well. Now that we have it, it will help us prepare our garden beds for next year! :-)
I never thought I would get all excited about having and collecting grass clippings. :-D
The Re-Farmer
While doing my rounds this morning and checking the gardens, I was pleased of fine a really big Madga squash ready to pick. After being seasoned with cayenne pepper, the groundhogs are leaving the summer squash alone and they are finally getting a chance to grow! There were even a few zucchini to gather.
The few sunflowers that are opening up are, of course, looking gorgeous!
So far, it’s still just the Mongolian Giant sunflowers with seed heads that are opening. Too bad it’s so late in the season, but we’re still enjoying them.
I had my first little surprise while checking out the squash tunnel.
A little, ripe Halona melon, just sitting on the ground! :-D So of course I had to check the others that were turning colour, and found the biggest one was ripe, too. The only reason it hadn’t fallen of its vine was because it was already sitting on the ground. :-D
Then there was my second little surprise.
The Tennessee Dancing Gourd vines are starting to die back, revealing two “huge” gourds we had completely missed seeing before!
This is about what their full size would be, I believe. Gosh, they are adorable!!
Our morning harvest!
What a difference in size between the two ripe melons.
I am so happy with how these are doing. :-)
The Re-Farmer
We had a brave little visitor while I was putting kibble out this morning.
Junk Pile’s kittens still run off when we come out, but a couple of them are getting a bit more brave about not going far, or coming back sooner. This handsome little tuxedo seems to be the more daring of them. Since they are still really nervous about going into the kibble house while we are outside, I have set up a more permanent food tray, sheltered under the shrine. When I come out with kibble in the mornings, Rosencrantz and, sometimes, Nosencrantz will be waiting at the sun room door for me, then they run over to the shrine and wait for me to bring their share. Being a regular place for food, I am now seeing Junk Pile’s kittens get over to it, rather than the kibble house or simply running away.
What a handsome fella this one is! :-)
The Re-Farmer
We’re having some pretty hot and humid days of late. Not heat like we’ve been having all summer, thankfully, but more “average for August” hot. Though it didn’t rain last night, when I came out to do my morning rounds, the dew was so heavy, I would have though we’d had some, had everything else not been completely dry.
The squash and gourds are certainly enjoying the moist heat!
The Ozark Nest Egg gourd plants are busily climbing the fence and blooming – and completely dwarfing the Thai Bottle gourd plants (on the left).
One of the flowers even made its way through the chicken wire critter barrier! :-D
So far, they all appear to be male flowers. No gourds forming, though it’s possible there are some hidden under the leaves. I won’t mess with the chicken wire to look.
Thanks to all the wonderful rain we’ve had, the grass is actually green and growing again, and in need of a mow. It took hours for the grass to dry enough for that to be an option, which meant mowing during the hottest part of the day.
Or it would have been, had the battery on the riding mower not been dead! It’s only been used once this year, and I had to charge it then, too.
With the time it took to charge the battery, it was actually starting to cool down, so I guess that was a good thing! I took advantage of it and was able to do both the inner and outer yards, including areas I did not more the one other time this year we mowed. I kept doing as long as the light held, and managed to get it done just before it was full dark, though the yard light had turned on well before I finished. I was even able to mow in front of the storage shed. Which means that, weather willing, in the next day or two, we’ll have lots of grass clippings to rake up and set aside for the garden.
By the time I finally came inside, it was 9pm, but it was worth it! :-)
The Re-Farmer
As always during my morning rounds, I checked on the various beds to see how things are growing.
This most mature of our Red Kuri squash has ceased growing in size, and is just beautifully deepening in colour as it ripens.
While it’s neighbour is getting bigger. We won’t have a lot of mature winter squash at the end of the season, but we might have at least the two of them before first frost hits. Which, I hope, will be very late this year!
The one Mongolian Giant with so many seed heads, now has more of them opening and blooming!
These ones just amaze me. These are the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers that were started indoors, but did not actually germinate until after the other ones were direct sown outside. They were much smaller when transplanted, then all but one got their heads chomped off by deer. And yet, not only are they recovering from the deer damage, they are producing seed heads! Meanwhile, the ones that were direct sown are looking a lot bigger, you can see where the seed heads are starting to develop, but so far, they still have not actually emerged as obvious seed heads.
I do want to try these sunflowers again, but I think we will have to invest in a seed tray heat mat to start them indoors, to help with germination.
Yesterday, we picked summer squash and beans. Today, it was tomatoes!
Because of their small size, I use one of the red Solo cups to collect the tomatoes, and this time I quite nearly filled it to the top! That’s the most we’ve gathered, yet. :-)
You can see a few of the tomatoes have split, from all the rain we’ve had recently.
I also “topped” the tomatoes this morning. I had no idea this was a thing, but a couple of garden related channels I follow had talked about it. It is only needed for indeterminate tomatoes, as they just keep growing taller, putting out more blossoms and fruiting, until the first frost kills them. That leaves a lot of green tomatoes. For this time of year, pruning the tops off the plants will stop them from getting bigger, and the green tomatoes will start ripening faster, instead of staying green longer, so there will be more ready tomatoes before first frost hits.
If that is what starts happening, with how loaded the tomatoes are with green fruit, that should hopefully mean we will start harvesting enough at once to make it worth preserving them in some way. With their small size, I’m not entirely sure what method we’ll use, yet. Only my husband and one of my daughters eats tomatoes, so it’ll pretty much be up to them to decide that one. :-)
Thinking ahead to next year, the Spoon tomatoes are fun, and they’re great for fresh eating – we’ll likely grow them again, though they are also likely to self seed. The Mosaic Mix tomatoes are doing well and being enjoyed, but we want to try others. There are several varieties of cherry and grape tomatoes my older daughter wants to try, and I want to grow paste tomatoes. I may not be able to eat tomatoes fresh, but I can eat them if they’ve been processed enough before being used as an ingredient. Plus, we have the Yellow Pear variety of tomato we already picked up seeds for to try.
We need to start going over our plans and wish lists for next year’s garden, so we can plan and prepare things this fall.
The Re-Farmer
Last night, for the first time in about two years, we actually used our fire pit and had a cookout!
We even used the new fire grill my brother and his wife bought for us, for the first time. <3
It was spur of the moment, so all we had on hand was hot dogs – I missed getting a photo of toasting the half-frozen buns around the edge of the fire grill. I’d finally burned away the vines and whatnot that had been sitting in the pit for many months, then decided to go ahead and build up a cooking fire, using apple wood we’d pruned a couple of years ago.
I think we did actually light a fire once last year, to burn off the invasive weeds that could not go into the compost that were in there, but that was it. Even in previous years, when we used the fire pit, we had the hose going constantly spraying water around the pit, just to be on the safe side. The only time we didn’t need to do that was when we had a cookout in the winter, and there was two feet of snow. We’ve had enough rain in the last while, there was no need to do that. We just had the hose nearby for dousing the fire later.
It was an absolutely gorgeous evening for the fire pit. So very relaxing.
Gosh, I missed doing this!
The Re-Farmer
The last few days have been cooler and damp. Thankfully, we have not needed to do any watering at all of late.
I think some of the plants in our garden have gotten confused! :-D
We are finally getting some “big” Tennessee Dancing Gourds. Most have been turning yellow, soft and falling off before reaching this size. Now, we have several that are getting bigger, like this one. The vines are still blooming and being prolific in growing new little gourds! Gosh, they are so adorable!
We still have just the one little luffa gourd. I suspect it is not going to live to get full size, but who knows?
Some of our Giant Rattle poppies have dried out, and when shaken, you can hear the seeds rattling inside. They are not even close to how big they should be, but that’s okay.
Remarkably, there was even one last poppy flower trying to bloom!
My big surprise is the Crespo squash.
These are remarkably resilient! I didn’t expect them to recover from the critter damage much at all, but now that it’s no longer getting eaten, it has started to shoot out new vines and leaves, and… !!!
It’s blooming again! Which just blows me away. Unfortunately, it is way too late in the season for fruit to develop. Particularly since these are supposed to get quite large.
I really look forward to trying these again next year. Even with the critters and drought, they seem to do very well in our climate!
I finished off my rounds this morning by doing some harvesting in the garden. The beans in particular had plenty to pick. :-)
I found a yellow bean, growing on a green bean plant!
It didn’t get picked. It felt completely empty. Any beans it might have had did not develop. I did find one other yellow bean among the green beans, on another plant, that did have developing beans in it, but it was super soft for some reason.
There as a big enough haul this morning to need two containers! :-)
Among the sunburst squash, we have the one plant that is producing green squash instead of yellow, though some of the developing squash have streaks of yellow in them. An interesting mutant plant! :-D
The yellow beans are pretty much done. We’ll still be picking them for the next while, but just a few here and there.
I found flowers on both green and purple bean plants! Just a few, but still a surprise, this late in the season. We’ll be having plenty of those to pick for a while, from the looks of it. Lots of little ones developing on the plants.
Our first potatoes! We could have picked potatoes earlier, but we’ve been leaving them for now. This morning, I decided to reach into a few bags and dug around until I felt a potato and pulled it up. These are the yellow Yukon Gem and red Norland potatoes. I did not try to pick any of the fingerlings, yet.
That’s a pretty good harvest for the day! There are enough beans there to do another bag for the freezer, if we want. :-)
I used a bit of everything when I made breakfast this morning. :-)
I made a hash using all three types of beans, a couple of sunburst squash, a zucchini, and one of each type of potato. I also used onion and garlic that we harvested earlier. Even the oil I used to cook with was infused with our chive blossoms, and the dried parsley on top is from last year’s garden.
It tasted great, too! :-)
The Re-Farmer
