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
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
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
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
As much as I love all the rain we’ve been having, I was happy to have a mild, sunny day to get some work done outside. I finally got around to tending the big L shaped beet bed in the old kitchen garden.
This bed has had almost no tending, since we put the floating row cover on it to keep the critters out. This is how the two sides looked before I started.
Here is how it looked after a good, solid weeding!
There actually wasn’t a lot of weeds in there. After fighting my way through all the beet greens, following strands of weeds to their bottoms so I could pull them out by the roots, I found that there wasn’t much to pull out. The beets were actually choking out the weeds! Most of them were long and leggy and spread out, trying to reach the light, so when I pulled something out by the roots, I found I was removing quite a lot more plant than expected. The exception were all the sprouting Chinese Elms. It’s remarkable how deep and solid the roots are for a sapling that’s just a couple of inches high.
The beets themselves did not need any thinning, though I did accidentally pull a few out with the weeds. I wasn’t seeing a lot of beet roots developing, though. Hopefully, all the rain we’ve been having will result in a growth spurt!
When it came time ot put the netting back on, I took advantage of the big package of tent pegs I found in the garage. The sides of the netting was pulled tight and snug to the ground, so nothing can casually push its way under the netting. No more rocks and bricks to try and keep it down. For the ends, I wrapped the netting around boards, then weighted those down. There is lots of slack in the netting for the leaves to grow, though I don’t expect them to get much taller than they are now.
That done, I worked on the carrot bed next. One of the inner hoops had come down, the doweling holding it in place breaking off completely. Another was well on its way down, too.
Which made for a good time to tend the carrots, too.
There are two types of carrots in this bed, and these ones have been going to seed. Carrots do to see in their second year, so it seems the grounhogs eating their greens has fooled the carrots into thinking they are in their second year.
Carrots gone to see do not produce much of a root!
These carrots got weeded, but did not need any thinning. The other variety did need thinning.
Check these out!!! This is a variety from Baker Creek called Lounge Rouge Sang.
The two orange ones at the top of from the other carrots that had gone to seed, but had enough root that I wanted to keep them.
I checked my records, and those are supposed to be the Deep Purple carrots, from Veseys!
Here you can see what the Longue Rouge Sang carrots should look like, when fully mature. I just love the colours in them, and am happy to see that even the little carrots that got thinned out are showing them.
I’m so excited to see carrots! After the groundhog devastation, I really didn’t know if they would recover enough for us to have any at all. It’s a shame we couldn’t cover the larger carrot bed in the main garden area, too!
Once the bed was cleaned up, and I found new sticks to use to hold the PVC pipe hoops in place, the sides were pegged down tighter to the ground. The only places I used rocks to weigh the netting down was at a couple of corners, where there was excess netting to gather.
I still don’t know what the big green thing in the middle of the bed is. I had hoped it was the White Vienna kohlrabi that was planted there, but I not longer think that’s what they are. I’ve seen them pop up in a few other places, too. They don’t look like a weed, is about all I can say! I’m leaving them, just to hopefully see what they are. I’ve also left quite a bit of the mint that has been making it’s way through. In time, I hope to transplant them somewhere contained. For now, I just try to keep it under control so it won’t take over the garden – and we will still have at least a bit of mint to harvest if we want! :-)
There is still one more bed of beets by the retaining wall, covered in netting, that needs to be cleaned up, but that will have to wait for another day.
The Re-Farmer
Last night turned out to be one of those odd nights. I’d stayed up late to finish of part of a crochet project, then work the set up on the next part of it, before going to bed.
I didn’t sleep a wink.
This wasn’t even a sleepy night of tossing and turning or interruptions, but just plain, “hmm. I’m awake.”
The problem with such sleepless nights is that I end up feeling hungry. So by 4am, I finally gave up and got something to eat, then watched some Midsomer Murders on Tubi. By 6am, I figuring I could actually fall asleep, but it was getting light out, so I did my morning rounds, first.
As early as it was, Rosencrantz was already waiting for breakfast! :-D
While checking on the garden beds after switching out the memory card on the garden cam, I was very happy to see these.
The one Red Kuri (Little Gem) squash is changing colour so nicely! One of my crochet projects has been to make mesh hammocks for the squash and melons. We have all smaller varieties, so the vines can hold the weight. The hammocks are more to ensure that, if they do drop off their vines, the ones that are higher up won’t hit the ground.
After all this time, we FINALLY have another winter squash developing. Possibly more, but this is the biggest, and shows no sign of dying off like so many others have done. Which is, on the one hand, quite exciting to see. On the other, it’s a bit frustrating. Our first frost date is September 10, and it’s already August 24. Hopefully, we won’t actually get frost that early, but that chances of this, and any others, reaching full maturity before first frost is low. These varieties were chosen specifically for their shorter growing season, but even with our watering and fertilizing, the drought has set so many things back. Now, after all that heat, it’s our cooler days and almost cold overnight temperatures that are slowing things down again.
Ah, well. We shall see what the fall brings us.
Meanwhile, I did manage a few hours of sleep. It’s drizzling outside, so I think I’ll continue on the crochet projects I’m working on.
The Re-Farmer
The gardens seem to be really enjoying all the rain we’ve been having!
The Ozark Nest Egg gourds are having a growth spurt, and more flowers are blooming.
They are the first ones I’ve seen with only three petals on them.
So far, I’m only seeing male flowers, but I might be missing some. I’m not about to lift the chicken wire protection just to look.
On the leaf above the blossom, you can see that the cayenne pepper is still there! I’m rather amazed it didn’t get washed away.
The newest Mongolian Giant sunflower that opened is looking very nice. What surprised me, though, was…
…finding that it is growing stalk babies, too, now!
I don’t know if I’m supposed to prune them or something, but I’m leaving them be.
I even picked some teeny tomatoes and cucamelons this morning. :-)
It’s been interesting on some of the zone 3 gardening groups I’m on. Quite a few have been sharing photos of all their green tomatoes that they rushed to bring in, before the rain, so that they wouldn’t split. If you like at the tomatoes in my photo, you’ll actually see a couple of Spoon tomatoes that have done exactly that! I’m not concerned about that, with these little guys. What caught my attention more, though, were all the people talking about getting overnight frost. !! They are all at much higher elevations than we are, so while they are zone 3 like we are, us being so close to sea level makes a difference.
The Re-Farmer
While checking on the sunflowers this morning, I found one of the Mongolian Giant seed heads finally starting to open.
I had actually expected this one to open up first. Look how dark the middle is!
Hard to believe this is the same type of sunflower as this…
They look completely different!
One of the smaller seed heads sprouting out the side is starting to open, too.
With our fall planting, only a few of the rainbow chard has survived the grasshoppers and the heat. Enough that, when they are large enough, we can find out if we actually like chard! :-D
The lettuces protected by the window screen covered frame are coming up quite nicely! It’ll still be a while before they are large enough to start picking baby greens for salads, but being under the adapted cover, they should be protected from both groundhogs and insects, so I expect to actually have some this time. Unlike our first planting in the spring, that got eaten before we’d had more than a handful ourselves! Even the weather is supposed to be cooler and potentially rainier, over the next while, so we won’t have to use the shade clothes, either.
As rough of a gardening year it has been, we’re still getting some produce, and I’m happy with that!
The Re-Farmer
While doing my evening rounds, I was able to gather quite a substantial harvest from the garden!
The yellow beans are, as could be expected, winding down right now, but there was still quite a lot of them. There were plenty of green beans, too, but it was the purple beans that stole the show! There were so many ready to pick this time!
I picked a few sweet corn that seems like they might be ready, just to see how they were. Though their silks are drying, they are still quite immature. My expectations are on the low side for these, given how nitrogen poor the soil is, but we shall see as time goes by.
I was really happy to have so many sunburst squash and zucchini! I also had to straighten up a lot of the support poles, as the wind had blown them over somewhat. However, I can definitely say it was much easier to find and harvest the summer squash grown vertically! Last year, I was picking sunburst squash and zucchini pretty much daily, but this is the first time we’ve had a substantial amount to pick. They did not get eaten before we could get to them! The cayenne pepper is definitely working!
I applied more over everything after I finished picking things. The rains would have washed it all off by now. We might get more rain today, then off an on over the next week, but I don’t expect to get much here, so I wanted to make sure the garden beds had their spicy protection.
There was enough picked that we could blanch and freeze some more, but this time I’m keeping them for having with our meals. In fact, I’m enjoying some of those beans with my lunch as I write this, sauteed with our Purple Stripe garlic (crushed and chopped) in butter, then braised until tender, then seasoned and stir fried with rice and some of the grass fed beef we got with the package we ordered a while back. It turned out very well!!
It may almost be the end of August, but we’re finally getting to where we can probably eat from our garden every day. :-)
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 