For the past while, we’ve been harvesting a handful of beans, every couple of days. Just enough for the day’s meal, really. It would mostly be the yellow beans, with a few greens, and maybe three or for purple beans.
This morning, we had our biggest harvest, yet!
It is still mostly yellow beans, but they are on the bottom. It’s remarkable to me how, the plants that are the smallest and having the hardest time in this heat, is producing the most right now! Not for long, though, I think. There are LOTS of immature green and purple beans hiding under the leaves. We should start getting hauls like this more often, soon. :-)
This is the first time we had enough to make it worthwhile to preserve them. Not enough to make it worth breaking out the canner or doing some quick pickles or something, but enough to fill a bag for the freezer.
After trimming the ends, then cutting them to more equally sized pieces, I was able to use the blanching pot I’d found in the storage area of the kitchen, while trying to cat proof it (it’s right up by the ceiling and hard to get to!). This is the first time we’ve been able to use it. :-)
All those ice packs we have to help keep our food cold or frozen when we do our city trips are coming in handy. I used a bunch of them to make an ice bath to chill the blanched beans in. We don’t typically make ice with our well water, and the ice we do have is purchased, so I didn’t want to use any of that!
This variety of purple beans turn green when cooked or blanched. They are a somewhat less bright green; you can tell them apart in the foreground.
The blanched beans were laid out on a couple of trays and are now in the chest freezer, to be bagged later.
One thing about freezing produce. It’s very fast! I still hope to have enough to pickle or pressure can, so we have shelf-stable beans, too. :-)
This evening, I went over our beans and made our first real harvest!
We’ve picked a couple of beans, here and there, before, but this is the first substantial amount we have been able to gather. The yellow beans, for all that they are the smallest plants, are maturing the fastest.
A few purple beans, at the very end of the row, look to be newly nibbled on, but of the entire row, I could only find these few that looked mature enough to pick. As for the green beans, there are lots of them, but I don’t think they’re quite ready for picking. With the yellow beans, it’s at least easy to tell when they are ready. They turn from green to yellow. The green beans just stay the same green! :-D
After picking these, I stopped to look over other parts of the garden, including the Dorinny corn. These are the ones that were planted before last frost, and are the most mature. With the weather, they have had a hard time, but some of the cobs did seem to be ready to pick.
A whole four of them, including one that had its tip nibbled on by a deer a while back!
Generally speaking, they seem to have had good pollination; just the one cob that got its silks nibbled away has fewer kernels, which makes sense.
I had moved the garden cam to face the Dorinny corn and one side of the squash tunnel, in hopes of seeing what is eating the winter squash. One of the things I’ve done, after the last time a deer got into the Dorinny corn, and the one row of transplanted sunflowers, was move some of the distractions by the tulips, over to these garden beds. Two of those distractions were long strings of twine with jingle bells on them. I took our last couple of bamboo stakes and set them up along the side of the Dorinny corn block, with the bells strung between them.
I didn’t catch anything on the garden cam going after the winter squash, but I did catch a deer on several video files. It was nibbling at the ground in front of the string of bells, but never tried to go past it.
That was encouraging, at least.
Meanwhile, I currently have the corn in the over, wrapped in foil with some butter, salt and pepper, and am looking forward to tasting one! The beans will be enjoyed tomorrow. :-)
I have to admit, after yesterday’s damage, I was quite trepidatious about checking the garden beds while doing this morning’s rounds!
I was, however, greeted with a happy sight, first thing.
Potato Beetle is still here!
With him being gone for so many months, there’s no reason to assume he’s here to stay, so every day that we see him will be a gift. :-)
The down side is, he’s been mean to the other cats. Though he used to be part of the crowd filling the kibble house since we built it last fall, he chased all the other cats away this morning. Yesterday, he went after Nutmeg for no reason, and even growled at Junk Pile cat while she was hiding under the cat shelter. I’m hoping this will settle down once he’s been back for a while.
I found an Ozark Nest Egg gourd blooming this morning. Between the density of the leaves, the chain link fence and the protective wire around them, there’s no way I can look to see if there are any female flower buds developing. Of the few I could see, they were still only male flowers. The vines are pushing their way through the chain link fence, and we should be able to start training them up the fence soon.
If they don’t get eaten, first!
More and more tomatoes are starting to change colour. Until today, the most Spoon tomatoes we’ve had ripe at the same time was only three. Plus, we have our very first ripe grape tomato, from the Mosaic Medley mix of seeds!
Alas, there was more deer damage this morning, though nothing like what we found yesterday. This time, it was the yellow beans that got nibbled on.
I was able to pick a small handful of both green and yellow beans this morning, but I am not finding anything in the purple beans. While moving aside their leaves to look, I was seeing a lot of stems, and I wonder if they’d been eaten. The purple beans have so much more foliage, it’s harder to tell, compared to the other beans.
While the sweet corn and sunflowers appeared untouched, I found an entire Dorinny corn pulled out of the ground. The plant next to it has a big chomp taken out of the cob.
The ants were all over that cob!
I also found a cob that had been torn off another plant, with nothing but a nibble off the top. Curious, I went ahead and shucked it.
It was almost completely ripe! It was so well pollinated, too.
Well, I wasn’t about to let it go to waste, so I washed it and ate it raw.
It was delicious!
However things go for the rest of the season, at least I can say I’ve tasted both the Dorinny and the Montana Morado corn this year. :-D
I had one more find that I wanted to share, but I saved the photo for last. If spiders bother you, you might want to quickly scroll on by.
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Still here?
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I found a garden friend among the purple bean leaves.
I had been pushing aside and turning the leaves, looking for beans underneath, so it was a real surprise to see this spider, not being startled away. Just look at the grip it’s got on that egg sac! It didn’t move at all while I got close to take the photo. Such a good mama!
When I was done, I took the leaf off and put it on the ground in between some bean plants, where it was more sheltered.
Once I was back inside, I checked the garden cam files and confirmed that yes, it was a deer that had done this morning’s damage. The only other critter that triggered the motion sensor was Potato Beetle, while he was keeping me company in the garden yesterday evening.
I have a few ideas on what to try next to keep the deer out, but I’ll need to go into to town to find the materials for it. Today is a holiday here in Canada, and there is a festival going on in town right now, so I’m going to avoid it completely. :-/
With hot, dry days returning, my morning rounds once again includes covering the fall crop beds with shade cloth and doing a morning watering.
I was very, very happy to check the bean beds and FINALLY see pods developing! Other local gardeners are already harvesting large amounts of beans, while ours were still just blooming. Yesterday, I spotted the tiniest of pods developing – so tiny, I didn’t bother trying to take a photo, because I knew my phone’s camera wouldn’t be able to focus on them. This morning, I spotted these.
There are pods developing on all three types of beans.
While I had the sprinkler going over the corn and sunflowers, I worked on the summer squash bed. They have gotten big enough that I pruned the bottom leaves and staked them higher on their supports. There were a couple I had already done not long ago. Besides those, all of the squash were staked higher.
Not that you can really tell in the photo, at this point.
While I was working, as spotted a couple of plants with nibbled leaves, and even a nibbled sunburst squash. As we keep training the squash vertically, and keep pruning the bottom leaves, it should make it harder for ground critters to be able to reach to nibble on them. Which was not among the reasons we wanted to try growing squash vertically this year, but I’ll take it!
I didn’t take any photos because the sprinkler was running, but the sweet corn is starting to develop tassels! Switching to using the sprinkler to water them, and leaving it to run for anywhere from 30-60 minutes has made a visible difference.
When we build our permanent beds, we definitely need to have some sort of drip irrigation system, so we can be less wasteful with watering.
While the girls were doing the evening watering, I headed out to check some of the beds they hadn’t got to, yet. I thought I saw something this morning, and I wanted to check.
I did see something – and by evening, I saw more somethings!
The radishes are starting to sprout already!
“Champion” 24-30 days to maturity
“Cherry Belle” 21-27 days to maturity
“French Breakfast” 23-29 days to maturity
All three varieties were showing sprouts!
Here’s hoping these ones don’t disappear, like the ones we interplanted with our sweet corn!
I have been keeping a close eye on our summer squash, too.
This sunburst squash is of a size I would normally pick, but there is only one this big, so I will leave it until there are others to pick with it. We also have more of the green zucchini that is almost big enough to pick.
While watering the beans, my daughter noticed this…
Some of the purple bean flowers are starting to open! When I checked, some of the green ones were also starting to open, but they’re harder to see than the purple beans, with their amazing, bright colours.
While I’m excited to see them starting to bloom, I have to remind myself not to compare. I’m on several gardening groups for cold climate gardening, zone 3 gardening, and local gardeners. Today, someone posted pictures of their huge pea plants, and the basket of peas they had picked, just today.
These are our peas.
The purple peas are doing a bit better than the green peas. They are flowering and growing pods. But they are also struggling. They started out doing well, but have basically just stopped growing. By this time, they should be well up the trellises, much larger, and much closer to having pods that can be harvested.
It’s similar with the bush beans. The purple ones are doing better than the others, as they have from pretty much the start, but they are all a lot smaller than they should be. The sweet corn is also a lot smaller than I am seeing in other people’s gardens, which have corn the size of our purple corn, that was started much earlier and transplanted, or the Dorinny corn, which was seeded before last frost. Even the renter’s corn in our field is about waist high now.
I have to admit; seeing how well other people’s gardens are doing, in spite of the heat we’ve been getting right now, is sometimes rather discouraging. These are gardens in the same climate zone we are in, and many of them planted even later than we did.
I have to remind myself that these are completely different gardens, many of them established years ago. Even the new gardens are in very different situations. There are many reasons why our peas, corn and beans are looking stunted. The heat, certainly. Perhaps we’re not watering them as much as they need under current conditions. Maybe it’s because their roots have made their way through the thin layer of nutrient rich soil and into the nutrient poor soil, below, and even our fertilizing them isn’t enough to make up for it. Maybe it’s all the weeds and plants that were there before we planted. We don’t have access to good compost, we ran out of mulch and can’t get more, etc. The critter damage adds to the problems, but that’s a different issue altogether.
Plus, of course, we’re gardening in temporary locations. Even the beds that are where we will be gardening permanently will have high raised beds built in them, so the current beds are going to be completely redone.
From the start, as we planned where to plant different things, we knew that if we got anything at all from the farthest beds in particular, that would be a win.
But, my goodness, it sure would be nice to have a big basket of freshly picked peas right now! :-D
Gosh, it was so lovely to do my rounds this morning! It has finally cooled down (for all the rain we had yesterday, it was still hot and very muggy!), and as I write this, it’s a lovely 17C/63F outside. There is the possibility of more rain, then things are expected to get hot and sunny again. I don’t know of we’ve had enough rain for the burn bans to relax a bit; it would be nice to be able to light our burn barrel, or use the fire pit.
We do still have a few plant babies in the sun room that will eventually get transplanted. This morning, I found a new gourd seedling.
A third Ozark Nest Egg gourd has appeared! We only planted 2 per pot, so we have plenty of seeds to try again next year – starting much earlier, and with a warmer set up!
With the Thai Bottle gourd, if this one seedling survives, we might at least be able to try them, as they are edible at 4-6 inches. There is no wait for them to reach full maturity. The other gourds, however, were planted for crafting purposes, and with them sprouting so late, they just won’t have the growing season for it.
Another reason I’d like to set up polytunnels and/or greenhouses. Extending our growing season would open up a lot of options for us.
I’m happy to see the grapes are leafing out nicely! They had a slow start (which I am beginning to think is normal for them), but once they do, they grow really fast! There are new vines this morning that were not there, yesterday.
The Peruvian Purple Fingerling potatoes are filling their grow bags faster than any of the other varieties. Gosh, they look so pretty! I love that hit of purple at the stems.
One of the nice things about the clean up I was able to do in the spruce grove this spring, is that I can now cut through it to get to the main garden, while doing my rounds. This morning, I found this lovely explosion.
The wild roses are blooming! The rains have been a huge boost for them. :-)
As we continue to clean up the spruce grove, everything in here will be cut back and cleaned up. Unlike the spirea, which we are trying to pull out by the roots as much as possible, the roses will just be trimmed to ground level. Once it’s all cleaned out, they should grow back better than ever. This area, however, will probably not get worked on this year. We’re focusing more on the south and west sides for now.
Checking the various garden beds, everything it looking really good and strong. We do have a couple of mysteries, though. One is in the yellow bush beans.
A while back, I noticed a few of the seedlings appeared to have had their heads chopped off. Remarkably, the stumps still seem to be growing!
I’m not sure what did this. Normally, I would have thought it was a deer, but if it was, I would have expected a whole swath of seedlings with their tops gone, like at the ends of the spinach beds. Not 2 here, 1 there, and 2 more in the other row.
Well, whatever it is, it seems to have stopped coming over, as there is no new damage, and nothing is showing up on the trail cam.
There is another mystery, though.
All the radish sprouts have disappeared.
There had been so many sprouts, before the corn started coming up, and now, nothing. Not a trace. Not a stem or leaf to show it was bit by a critter, or cut by an insect. There were only 2 rows with the daikon type radish, but the watermelon radish was interplanted in every row of the other two corn blocks. The corn is coming up nicely, but the radishes have simply disappeared.
It is so very strange!
I should also take back the “no new damage” statement, though this damage is no mystery. Nutmeg has taken to following me along when I do my rounds, wanting attention. While looking at the sunflower transplants, supported by their twine, he decided to rub against the twine, then drop to the ground and start rolling.
Right on a sunflower, breaking the stem.
*sigh*
It wasn’t completely broken off, and it’s been put back between the twine for support, but I doubt it will survive.
Destructive little boy!
As I continued checking the beds, I would stop to do a bit of weeding, and he’d be right in there, pushing at my hands for attention, walking, sitting and rolling on top of the plants! I kept having to move him off the beds, only for him to jump right back, as long as I kept trying to weed.
When the girls and I were just starting to head home from the city yesterday, my husband messaged us to let us know that a low flying airplane had just gone over the house. This morning, it happened again, though it wasn’t an airplane.
Instead, we had a low flying helicopter! Seeing helicopters flying around is not that odd (there is a small airport not that far away), but seeing one flying this low certainly is. I don’t usually see ones coloured like this, either. Usually, they’re black.
When I was done my rounds, I uncovered one of the spinach beds to do some weeding and thinning.
Yes, these are just the thinnings, and just from one side of one bed! They’re packed down a bit in that colander, too. The spinach is doing just fantastic, now that they’re not being eaten by deer. ;-) I was able to uncover the bed on my own, but with are makeshift covers we have right now, it takes 2 people to put the covers back again.
I supposed we’ll eventually get to the point when we’ll have more spinach that needs harvesting than we can eat right away, so I’ve been thinking of what to do with any excess. I know they can be frozen, but why ruin good spinach? ;-) I’ve decided to try dehydrating them, then making spinach powder. This would keep for a long time in a jar on the shelf, and be a handy ingredient to toss into soups, or pasta dough or something like that.
I’ll have to get some photos later, but our chives have started to bloom, and I’ve started using them to make chive blossom vinegar. I picked up a bottle of white wine vinegar, and we’re just adding the cleaned blossoms straight into the bottle, after removing a small amount of vinegar to make space. It will get strained after 2 weeks in a cool, dark place, though we might keep adding more blossoms over the next few days, as the chives finish their blooming. We’ll count it as 2 weeks from when the last of them are in the bottle. :-)
*sigh* This post has been taking MUCH longer to finish that it should have. Our internet is crappy at the best of times, but whenever we get rains or winds (not even over us, but anywhere to the south of us), we start having troubles connecting. Getting images to load is the worst. It’s taken me half an hour to get the above image to load, and as I’m writing this, it STILL won’t load! Once I get the bloody thing to work, and hopefully get this post published, it’s time to get off the computer before I go completely bonkers!!
The Re-Farmer 