forme de couer tomatoes

Our 2024 Garden: a surprise harvest! Plus updates

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Okay, so the garden is pretty much done.

The red onions have been left, since they can handle the cold nights, and still aren’t quite ready for picking. With various distractions related to our plumbing issues, the potatoes still need to be harvested. The sunchokes are still green and growing, so they won’t be harvested for a while. Mostly, the beds are ready for winter clean up – once we can get to them!

What I wasn’t expecting was this.

That’s right. I harvested tomatoes this morning!

When my daughter harvested this bed, she left behind the really tiny tomatoes, or the damaged ones. However, as more of the foliage died back, I could see some green tomatoes that looked fine, and seemed to have gotten missed. The foliage in this bed was so dense, that’s no surprise. I basically ignored them, though, figuring they were frost damaged by then.

This morning I could see they had continued to ripen! Hidden in the middle like that, it seems they got protected from our first frost and following cold nights, too.

So I picked them and added them to the bins and boxes of green tomatoes in the old kitchen to ripen.

We have quite a few things slowly ripening. Yesterday, my older daughter grabbed all the ripe hot peppers, cleaned and prepped them, then set them in the oven to dehydrate. Eventually, they will be made into a powder.

Now… my older daughter is pretty much the only one that can eat these. My husband used to love spicy food, but the medications he’s on have really messed with his ability to taste or tolerate foods. My younger daughter can handle a bit of heat, but not as much. My, I can’t tolerate spicy food at all.

So she has taken over preparing the hot peppers as they ripen and, once dehydrated and powdered, she will have enough to last a very long time! We won’t need to grow hot peppers for some years. 😁

Now, these are hot peppers, but not exceptionally hot peppers. They’re not the kind where you need to wear gloves or anything.

Normally.

It turns out that, after processing about a dozen remarkably large hot peppers, that becomes a problem.

Not right away, though. My daughter had no issues at all while working on them. She was careful about washing her hands before touching things, too.

Then she made herself a sandwich.

The pepper oils from her hands – even after being washed – got onto her sandwich, and it was so spicy, it started to burn her mouth. She ended up having to drink straight cream to reduce the pain!

Then her fingers started to burn.

It happened slowly, over several hours, but eventually she could barely even use one hand.

She sprung for take out for supper, so I went into town to pick up the food. By the time I got back and she regaled me on what had happened, I could see the tips of all her fingers were bright red!

Lesson learned. Even mildly hot peppers can become a problem, if you’re processing enough of them at once!

Gloves needed!

Meanwhile, even her lungs were starting to burn!

These were being dehydrated in the oven. We had the kitchen window open and the fan running. The house smelled amazing, but we still had to stay out of the kitchen as much as possible, so as not to breathe too many of the hot pepper fumes. Even the cats were staying out of the kitchen!

Speaking of cats, they added another distraction. My younger daughter tried to go to bed early, only to discover a cat with a messy butt made a mess on her bed. She had to wash all her bedding.

We had been working to clear my husband’s bedroom, and started doing his laundry, too, so that was already set up (yes, we are still running the hose out the window for the washing machine to drain into the yard). The girls were going to start the laundry and my younger daughter was going to use her sister’s bed for the night.

Which is when they discovered more mess in the middled of her sheets, from a cat or cats that squirmed its way under her covers.

So they were both up all night, doing load after load of laundry. Some things needed to be washed twice, just because of their size. They didn’t get to bed until past 6am.

We’ll be more laundry today, too. My husband has set up his CPAP in my bedroom so he could sleep with me.

Sleeping in the same bed as my husband! Imagine that. 😄

That will give us a chance to strip his hospital bed and wash things like his pillows and body pillows, along with the extra blankets he puts under his sheets. The mattress for the hospital bed has a sort of thick vinyl instead of fabric, so it’s easier to clean. Unfortunately, it doesn’t breath, and causes my husband to sweat. The extra layers under the sheets help prevent that.

I did finally find an XL twin fitted sheet on Amazon for his mattress, which is several inches longer than a standard twin mattress. We’ve confirmed the new sheet fits properly, so we’ll need to get a few more. For now, though, he has only one fitted sheet that actually fits the mattress on his hospital bed.

We’ve been working most of yesterday on clearing his room so we can access the corner behind the plumbing for the tub. This is where we will be cutting an access panel, but it’s still covered by the wardrobe. My husband doesn’t really use the wardrobe, and the girls have said they’ll take it upstairs – but they will need to move out their little bar fridge for the space. They don’t use that much anymore, so we were already talking about moving it to my room. I’ll have to find space for that, though.

Once we get that figured out, we can start moving things around but, for now, we still have one more corner of husband’s room to clear and clean, where has his own tiny fridge to store his injections. This will give us the opportunity to defrost and clean it, too, then move it to where it will be more easily accessible.

The bonus of moving the girls’ fridge out from upstairs, to make room for the wardrobe, is that it frees up a grounded outlet.

That means they can get an air conditioner and actually be able to plug it in! The upstairs gets so insanely hot in the summer, they really need one up there.

That will not happen for a while, though, since my daughter will be paying for what we end up needing to get the bathroom walls repaired.

So all of this rearranging and cleaning and figuring things out is happening at the same time – all because the hot water tap in the tub broke.

There is nothing we can do in the bathroom itself right now. The fan it still running to dry the rotted aspenite. My brother will be looking at it when he comes out on Friday evening (today is Wednesday).

We will have to pull out the tub to be able to find and cut away all the rot, and I’m not even sure how that will be done. It does seem like the tub is in two parts; the tub itself, resting on top of a flat panel that hides the underside of the tub.

Well, we’ll find out when the time comes.

Until then, we’ll just take advantage of the disaster and do the clearing, cleaning and rearranging we need to do, anyways.

On the one hand, I’m glad this has happened now, and not in the middle of winter.

On the other, this keeps me from getting outside stuff done, and from finishing the cat isolation shelter!

Hopefully, I’ll be able to get some of that done today, since there’s only so much I can do in my husband’s bedroom before I need my daughters to help out. It’s so close to being finished, too!

Ah, well. It is was it is.

Little by little, it’ll get done!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: sleepy bees, afternoon harvest, and our mighty Crespo squash!

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Today was another one of those days where I just quickly fed the outside cats early, and left the rest of my morning routine for later. As I write this, we are at 16C/61F, with a “real feel” of 13C/55F.

I’m quite enjoying this, but it’s a bit cool for the garden.

And the critters.

Like these snoozy bumble bees!

Yes, there are three bees in that squash blossom!

Before I did what would normally be my morning rounds in the afternoon, I headed out to the town north of us to pick up more cat kibble at the livestock supply place. The inside cats’ kibble was out completely. With my mother’s upcoming eye appointment in the city on the day we would normally do our first stock up shop in the city, I decided to get two 40 pounds bags this time, for both the outside and inside cats. While I was in town, I hit the grocery store for a few items as well. Normally, I wouldn’t, as groceries are quite a bit more expensive, but not as expensive as the extra gas it would take to drive to the town nearer to home, where we usually do our smaller trips.

Once back home and everything put away, I gave both the inside and outside cats a light feeding. The outside cats were practically fighting each other to get at the bowls.

The inside cats, not so much! 😄

After feeding the outside cats, I could finally walk without having them try and trip me, meowing for food, and I was finally able to do the rest of my rounds. There was even things to harvest!

The two larger melons you can see in the photo fell off their vines as soon as I lifted them.

That little Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon is so tiny! With the stem completely shriveled up, though, there was no point in leaving it. I’m curious as to what it will look like, inside!

With the cooler weather, I wasn’t actually expecting to harvest tomatoes, but some of them looked ready enough. We have so many other tomatoes inside right now, these can stay in the bin in the cat free zone to ripe more before we use them. These are the Forme de Couer tomatoes – including one green one that broke off its vine as I was harvesting the red one next to it – and Black Cherry tomatoes. No San Marzano or Chocolate Cherries to harvest this time around.

Last night, my older daughter made a large pot of tomato soup using fresh tomatoes that was quite delicious. After I finished what I was doing outside, I got the Crockpot set up to make more tomato sauce/base. I used some of the small onions that were harvested yesterday, as well as 8 or 10 cloves of our garlic – the strings of garlic have been brought in from the garage and can now go into the root cellar, making room for the onions that can be braided. Then I just used up what vegetables we had on hand. This time, that included a Little Finger eggplant, one Dragonfly pepper (any more than that, and I probably couldn’t eat it), the one little green zucchini we had, and all the beans that were left over. It got whatever seasonings I felt like using (basil, thyme, paprika and turmeric, this time), plus salt and pepper, along with some olive oil and apple cider vinegar. Then as many tomatoes as could be fit into the Crockpot were added. This time, I seeded them, only to reduce the amount of liquid, so it won’t take so long to cook it down to the thickness we want.

This will be left to cook on high for a few hours, while there are people up and about to tend to it, then on low into the night, for maybe 6 hours. When the time runs out, the Crockpot automatically switches to the warm setting, which is still hot enough to keep cooking it. In the morning, it will be blitzed with the immersion blender, then go back on high, with the lid propped open to release moisture, until it’s cooked down to the thickness we want.

After that, we leave it to cool down completely, generally using some of it as a pasta sauce while it’s still hot. Once cooled, it’ll go into freezer bags and into the freezer. We can then use it later as a sauce, as the base for a tomato soup, or included in any “use watcha got” soup we make.

But I’m getting ahead of myself!

When I first headed out to check on the garden beds, I just had to get some photos of the Crespo squash. Our mighty, mighty Crespo squash! It is absolutely thriving!

I actually found two new squash developing, including the first one you see in the slideshow below.

Yup. That’s in the cherry trees! That one looks like it will be a survivor. It’s even bigger than the one in the second image that I’ve been watching. I wasn’t sure if that one got well pollinated or not. It’s starting to look like it has, but the first one that started growing in the trees died off when it was bigger than this, so it’s hard to say at this point.

The next photo shows one on a vine that’s stretching into the spruce grove. I’m pretty sure that one was successfully pollinated, and has a good chance of survival.

The next photo is of another surprise find. It was buried in the tall grass, so I weeded around it and set it on a brick to keep it off the wet ground.

I didn’t try to get photos of the two larger ones growing inside the bean trellis, but I just had to get a photo of the largest one, with my foot for perspective. THAT is more like they are supposed to look like. Though this one is still small for the variety, it’s the largest we’ve ever managed to grow, and I’ve been trying to grow these for something like four years now!

This new bed and location is definitely ideal for this squash. Even the deer are leaving it alone! Which is surprising, since they go through the path right next to the squash, to get in and out of the spruce grove, and I know they were eating the sugar snap peas in the bed not far away. The first year we grew these, the deer and groundhogs got to them several times before we could get enough barriers around them.

Now, we just need the frost to hold off longer, to give them a chance to mature more!

It would be great if we had another mild winter like last year, but that was a strong El Nino year, and this year we’re getting a strong La Nina – which typically means a colder, harsher winter, in our region. Which seems to be what the Old Farmer’s Almanac is predicting, too.

We shall see.

Until then, I’m going to appreciate the upcoming warm weather that’s in the forecast for the next week.

I know the garden sure will, too!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: triple harvest!

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Harvest was split between morning and evening today!

I did a double harvest as part of my morning rounds today. Here is what was ready to be picked.

Three Summer of Melons blend melons were ready to pick this morning, as were some Dragonfly and Sweet Chocolate peppers, a handful of beans, a few Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, a G Star patty pan squash and a Goldy zucchini.

After brining those in, I grabbed another bin before checking on the tomatoes in the Old Kitchen Garden. If you click to the second photo in the slideshow, you’ll see a few San Marzano tomatoes, some Black Cherry tomatoes, and mostly Forme de Couer tomatoes – including a branch I found that had broken off.

I’ll admit, part of the reason I wanted to pick eggplant this morning was to see how the new set up worked, with the vinyl wrapped around the box frame. You can see that in the last photo of the slide show. It seems to be holding up, though we haven’t had a severe wind to test it out yet. More importantly, having the overlap in the middle of the long sides made reaching into the bed to harvest easier than having the overlap on the short ends. So far, I’m happy with how it’s working.

Soon after I finished my morning rounds, I grabbed a melon and a couple of bell peppers for my mother, then headed out to her place for lunch, then helping her with her errands. That took a while, so it was very late in the afternoon by the time I got home.

I’ve been eyeballing the winter squash and pumpkins for a while now, and decided it was time to harvest the ones I was sure were fully mature. After picking, they will need time to cure. Normally, I would have set them up on the picnic table under a canopy tent, but the picnic table is finally giving out and can no longer hold much weight, and the frame on the canopy tent was finally broken beyond our ability to jerry rig it. In the end, I decided to set them in the garage, in front of my mother’s car. The back door and one of the front doors are kept open to allow for a cross breeze, which I hope will be enough for them. We moved the swing bench into the space in front of my mother’s car, now that all the bags of cans are outside, so I put a couple of boards across the arm rests to set the squash on.

After brushing off a whole lot of dust and old spider webs!

Then I grabbed the wagon and a utility knife and headed for the garden!

These are the ones that I felt were ready for harvest.

It’s a good thing this wagon is rated to 300 pounds, because all those squash together were pretty heavy!

In the next photo, you can see them laid out on the boards. I tried to put the smaller ones in the middle, and the heaviest over the arm rests.

In the middle front is a small, dark green squash. That is the first Crespo squash that formed. It got to this size and just didn’t get any bigger over the weeks, so I figured I may as well pick it.

There are four pumpkins from the free seeds I got from my mother’s town. Their pumpkin festival is this weekend. While with my mother, she told me one of her neighbours had some beautiful pumpkins in her section of the garden area. My mother offered to buy one, but she said not; they are for her grandchildren. So I offered my mother one of ours. She said yes – but just the smallest one.

She doesn’t want to actually do anything with it. She just wants to have a pumpkin for a few days. Just to make her happy! Then we can take it back and do whatever we planned to do with it. 😄😄

The rest are from the Wild Bunch mix of seeds we go, so we don’t know the names of them. I thought the two green, flattish ones were a Turban squash, but those get very bright and colourful. They might be a Buttercup squash, but from the images I can find, those are smoother. Still, that’s the closest I can find to what these might be.

There are two of those green ones that might be Buttercup squash. Then there are two of the slightly elongated orange ones with a point at the blossom end that looks a bit like a second them. Finally, there are two large orange ones that are round and slightly flattened.

Some of these have some damage to the skin. I tried to put them on boards or bricks to protect them from damp soil, but these still got too wet on the bottoms.

We’ll just have to eat those ones, first.

These will stay in the garage for a week or two before being moved into the root cellar, or eaten.

Except the pumpkin that will be going to my mother, of course!

I’m pretty happy with this haul. There are still more winter squash in the garden, and I hope the frost holds off long enough for at least some of them to finish ripening. The long range forecast has changed again, of course, and right now it looks like we won’t get cold enough for frost until we get into the second week of October. If this is at all accurate, we’ve got at least 2 – 2 1/2 frost free weeks ahead of us.

A lot can happen in two weeks!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: morning harvest, and look what I found!

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I had a really slow start to the day. For some reason, I just couldn’t fall asleep last night. By around 3am, I was hungry, so I got up to eat, then went back to be. I finally fell asleep somewhere around 4 am.

I still woke with the light, 2 or 3 hours later. I asked my daughters to take care of feeding the outside cats for me, so I could try and get more sleep.

Which sort of worked.

I finally got up around 11 and was sitting down to breakfast by about noon. That’s the one bonus of having my daughters take care of feeding the cats for me in the morning. Normally, I do my rounds and morning routine before I eat, which usually means I’m famished by the time I get inside.

By the time I finally went outside to check on the garden, it was mid afternoon. We’d reached our predicted high of 24C/75F. I don’t know what the humidex was at the time, but as I write this, coming up on 7pm, we’re at 21C/70F, while the humidex puts us at 24C/75F.

I feel like that’s on the low side.

Here is what I was able to harvest while checking on the garden.

Those three melons sure take up a lot of space in my giant colandar! One of them looks like it’s a bit over ripe, but it did not want to break free from its vine.

There are actually a few San Marzano tomatoes in there, but they rolled under the melons, along with some of the Black Cherry tomatoes. Since I harvested so many Forme de Couer tomatoes yesterday, there wasn’t much that needed picking today. There was one larger G Star patty pan I decided to pick.

What I was really happy to see was that red Cheyenne pepper! I was eyeballing it yesterday, when it still had a green tip. There’s another one that’s almost ripe that I will likely be picking tomorrow. The hot Cheyenne pepper plants have a LOT of peppers on them, so we will likely have enough hot peppers to preserve and supply us for a very long time. My daughters tried having one with a meal, using an entire small ripe pepper. Small as it was, it turned out to be too much, so they know to use a much smaller quantity in the future. This one large pepper would be enough for many meals.

Everything in the garden was most definitely feeling the heat. We keep getting vague forecasts for possible rain, but I decided to go ahead and water the garden, anyhow. I’m glad I did. Looking at the weather radar, it seems the system is going to blow right past us. The weather app on my computer actually says we are getting rain right now, which we are not.

While watering, I noticed that we are finally having more bell peppers starting to blush. The purple ones get dark very quickly, and we’ve got a couple Sweet Chocolate peppers that have started to turn. Today, for the first time, I could see another colour. I couldn’t tell if the one pepper I could see will be turning orange or turning yellow, but it is definitely getting bright.

When I got to watering the west melon bed, I found a lovely little surprise among the leaves that are dying back.

It’s a Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon!

It’s absolutely tiny – about the size of a softball. I’m very happy to see it, though. After spending most of the summer assuming the big vine in the bed was the one surviving watermelon, only to finally realize it was a winter squash, I thought we wouldn’t have any watermelons at all, and that the transplant had died.

They are supposed to get quite a bit bigger, but I don’t care. By the colours of the stripes on the outside, it may even be close to ripe.

I wonder how many more surprises like this I will find, as the leaves and vines die back?

I took footage for garden tour video on the 10th – our average first frost date – but haven’t had a chance to actually make the video. Now I’m glad it got delayed, as I can include things I missed, like this watermelon, when I’m editing it.

Gosh, September is already half gone.

Where did the time go??

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: the most tomatoes, yet – and a baby luffa

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Oh, what a day it’s been! I’ll cover that in another post, though.

When I got home, my daughter was doing a walkabout, checking the yard for fallen branches and whatnot. We are supposed to get rain today but, so far, it’s just been sprinkles. I hope we get more, because I’ve been holding off watering the garden for it.

Instead of rain, we’ve been getting gusts of high winds. The catio Gouda is still in for 1 more night just has the temporary plastic roof over it, and the wind was tearing it loose from the cord that’s tying it down. We ended up putting a large floor mat on top to weigh it down, then added weights to that, to keep it from being blown off. I’m so glad we did, because that plastic would have been blown right off, not long after we did it!

Gouda, however, seems to be doing okay in the catio. He’s not too pleased about being stuck in there – and the other cats are not pleased about not being able to go in and steal his wet cat food! He only has to be in there for one more night. The catio’s walls are all mesh, but he does have his box nest with a blanket in there, and is using it. The catio is also sheltered by the house on one side, and a tree on the other, and branches above.

I’ll still be much happier when the isolation shelter is done, with a fully enclosed top level.

After we took care of that, we went through the garden beds and ended up picking another melon that had fallen of its stem, and a handful of the purple pole beans.

Then we started on the tomatoes in the old kitchen garden.

They haven’t been harvested for the last couple of days.

My daughter ended up bringing over the basin from the old kitchen to hold them all!

In the basin is a few San Marzano tomatoes, a whole lot of Forme de Couer tomatoes, and Black Cherry tomatoes.

In the second photo of the slide show, I was able to zoom in for a picture of a newly blooming female luffa flower. There is one other that I spotted, but there are no male flowers at all, anywhere. The male flowers bloom in clusters, making them easier to spot. I supposed it’s possible there are some way up high and hidden among the lilac branches, but it seems unlikely.

We have a whole bunch of things we will be doing with tomatoes over the next while; one of them is going to be using the slow cooker to make a sauce. It’s big enough that we should be able to use most of the tomatoes we’ve got waiting to be processed, along with a few other vegetables we have that can be included.

I won’t be starting on that for a while, though. I need to just sit and decompress for now. Much progress has been made in getting my mother into supportive living, as she has been wanting for some time now, but my goodness, am I ever mentally exhausted right now!!

I’ll cover that in my next post. Just writing about it, as much as I can on a public blog, will be very therapeutic!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: harvest, and identifying compost tomatoes

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While doing my morning rounds and checking the garden beds, I spotted a bit of colour among the compost tomatoes!

The first to photos look like the Indigo Blue tomatoes we grew last year. The last photo looks like the Roma VF we grew last year.

Given that we are two days away from our average first frost, I don’t expect any of these to ripen.

I did get a pretty decent harvest this morning – and even remembered to bring my big colander that I use specifically for this.

There was barely a handful of all three types of beans. At this time of year, having any at all is a treat.

There is one melon that came off its stem, but I’m not sure if that was because it was ripe. This melon was starting to soften in a spot next to the stem.

I grabbed a couple of the largest Dragonfly peppers, and the single Goldy zucchini and G star patty pan. The zucchini does have a couple more on the plant that can be harvested in a few days. The G Star patty pans are still blooming, but I’m not seeing any developing squash. The white patty pans are blooming lots, but still only male flowers.

The red tomatoes are all Forme De Couer – including the one green one. I was trying to get a red tomato, and the green one broke off, instead! The small tomatoes are the Black Cherry tomatoes.

I was in the process of watering the old kitchen garden from the rain barrel when my brother and his wife showed up with another load. While my brother was clearing the space they wanted to unload into, I was able to give my SIL some tomatoes. She chose the red tomatoes, but tried a Black Cherry, too. As we were leaving the yard, I spotted a single Chocolate cherry and gave it to her to try, and asked her if she could taste any difference. The Black Cherry tomatoes aren’t getting any darker, and look just like the Chocolate cherries, so I was curious. She didn’t find a lot of difference in the taste, except that the Black Cherry seems a touch sweeter, while the Chocolate cherry seemed a bit more acidic. She really liked both.

After that, I helped them unload, and they are on their way home. After a hydration break, I’m heading back out to finish watering the garden. We’re expected to reach a high of 24C/75F today, which isn’t too bad. Over the next couple of days, we’re supposed to hit highs of 28C/82F, and later in the week, we’re even supposed to reach 30C/86F. On the 10th, our average first frost date, we’re expected to have a high of 28C/82F, and a low of 13C/55F. Which would mean no danger of frost at all!

Looking at the long range forecast, it will be another 10 days before we start getting overnight lows below 10C/50F again. We’ve dropped down to 6C/43F a few times over the past week. If the long range forecasts are at all accurate, we won’t get those lows again until the last week or so of September, and won’t get risk of frost temperatures until October.

I wouldn’t be surprised if all those forecasts changed by the end of the day, but if it does, I hope it changes to warmer, not cooler, temperatures! The garden needs every frost free day it can get!

Still, I’m happy with what we have. It is more than I was expecting for this year!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: first onions

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While doing my rounds this morning, I found a few tomatoes to pick. We have enough in the house now, that we can start looking into makes sauces or soups, or other ways to process and preserve them.

My initial thought was to make a big batch of tomato soup, and freezing it in individual portions. With that in mind, I picked our first onions of the year.

We planted a lot of onions, but we’re not going to get much out of them, as far as size goes. So many of them have already had their stems broken, like the ones I picked this morning. Most look like they got rolled on by cats or something. I’m not sure, when it comes to the bed that’s almost all onions in the main garden area. The ones planted in the old kitchen garden were definitely flattened by cats. They actually seem to enjoy napping on the onions! The ones planted around the San Marzano tomatoes in the main garden area have been crushed by the tomato branches.

My plans to make tomato soup, however, changed rather quickly. I found out my brother was on his way, along with the guy with the triple axle trailer. I ended up spending most of the day outside, and got quite a bit done in between loads.

The tomato soup will have to wait for another day. With the way things are going, I might have to get my daughters to do something with the tomatoes, instead.

We shall see.

Meanwhile, we’ve got our very first Frontier yellow bulb onions harvested.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: evening harvest, with another first! Maybe two

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I hadn’t planned on harvesting anything while doing my evening rounds.

My garden had other plans!

I ended up using the bottom of my shirt to carry everything, because I didn’t have my usual giant colander that I use for harvesting and washing the produce.

My shirt got very loaded down!

Before I got to that point, I spotted these seed heads.

While shifting and preparing the low raised beds, I spotted a small plant I recognized as a flower that shows up in our main garden area. Rather than tossing it with the weeds, I decided to transplant it into the log framed bed, with the onions I’d been finding. I had no idea if it would survive a transplant.

Well, not only has it survived, it has thrived! It has become quite large and, while the flowers are not particularly large, the seed heads are amazing! Each one of those puffs in the photo are bigger than the palm of my hand.

I don’t want it to seed itself in the raised bed, so whenever the seed heads open like this, I gather the seeds and let them loose in an area just north of the beds. I figure at least some of them will manage to germinate, in the spring.

While checking on this bed, I also spotted one of the larger melons starting to look a bit yellow. I went to pick it up and it fell off its vine, so I included it in my harvest.

Since this from the Summer of Melons mix, I have no idea if this is a variety that turns yellow like this at maturity. I suspect not, to be honest. Still, we’ll crack it open and see what it’s like inside. So I’m not sure if this is a “first” for the melons or not.

You may notice something else different in the photo.

A bright red Cheyenne hot pepper! Red from stem to tip! There was another, next to it, that is about half red. We grew these previously, in grow bags, but they stayed green. When we had frost predictions, we tried to protect them, but were late covering them up one nice. The next morning, I harvested all the green peppers that weren’t frost damaged, and we set them up in the living room. They did turn red as as they dried, eventually, but they didn’t look very palatable. So I’m very happy to have some ripening while still on their plants!

I think I could have harvested several Dragonfly peppers. Some are quite large and so dark a purple, they look black. I will wait a bit, though. I think we’d end up with too many to use quickly, so I want to be prepared to dehydrate some of them, before I bring them in.

As for the cherry tomatoes, they got all mixed up while I was carrying them in my shirt. I honestly can’t tell the difference between the Chocolate cherry and the Black cherry! I’ll have to ask the family if they can tell the difference by taste.

I’m really quite happy with the harvests we’ve been getting. I had been so sure that we’d have almost nothing to harvest regularly this summer, except maybe tomatoes, since we have four varieties. Granted, this is the sort of harvesting we should have been getting in July and early August, not in September, but I’m just so happy to have anything at all!

If the temperatures stay mild enough, though, we should have a pretty awesome harvest of winter squash and melons! I’m quite looking forward to it!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: grapes getting there, and a bit of a harvest

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As part of my morning rounds today, I checked on the grapes, got a bit of a harvest, and did some watering, as we were expecting to get very warm today.

The first picture above shows how dark some of the grapes are starting to get. There are still more green than purple grapes, but they are coming along!

Though I’d picked quite a lot yesterday, I still was able to pick some beans and Forme de Couer tomatoes this morning. We are at that stage with these tomatoes where a lot of people pick them to finish ripening indoors. We don’t have the space for that, but I try to pick as many as I can, just to reduce the weight on the vines. I’m going to have to snag one or both of the girls tomorrow morning to help add more supports to some of the vines and stakes. We were actually supposed to do that today, but other things happened, instead!

That will be a topic for my next post, though.

Yesterday evening, I did go through the tomatoes that I could reach (not very many, among the Black Cherry vines!) and the trellised melons and pruned their tops. This should trigger the plants to focus more on ripening their fruit, rather than trying to grow more of them. I probably should have done that a while ago.

Only 7 more days (not counting today) before our first average frost. There are people in one of my zone 3 gardening groups that are expected to get frost tonight!

We have no way to cover the squash, trellised melons or tomatoes. The only beds we’d be able to cover is the eggplant and hot pepper bed, and the bell peppers in the high raised bed. We just might be able to cover the melon bed that isn’t trellised, too, but anything we use would be resting directly on the plants.

We’ll have to watch the forecast closely. If it comes down to the wire, we might have to just harvest everything early. I pray it doesn’t come to that!

Just a few more frost free weeks, please!!!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: evening harvest, and a little friend!

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Since I was heading to the city today, I didn’t try to see if anything needed to be harvested, while doing my morning rounds. I did it while doing my evening rounds, instead.

When I do my rounds, I usually have a cat or two, following me around. Sometimes, it’s Rolando Moon, wanting me to give her pets, then trying to scratch or bite me after I do. More often, of late, it’s been Syndol, who likes to be carried around, if he can convince me to pick him up. Other times, it’s this year’s Not-Junk Pile, (the previous Not-Junk Pile is now Toni the Tripod, and indoors. 😄) will follow me around.

Today, I had tiny friend, following me around!

I believe this is the kitten that pushes its way into the old kitchen – I really have to watch my feet when I open that door! – to explore. It even lets me pick it up and cuddle it for a while. This is the first time I’ve had one of this year’s kittens actively following me around the yards and garden beds, though. It’s hard to tell some of the white and black kittens apart, though. A few have distinctive markings, but the others… they just run around too much for us to get a good enough look at them to identify which is which!

I quite enjoyed having kitten company while harvesting these.

We’ve got all three types of beans in there, plus some Black Cherry tomatoes, and some Forme de Couer tomatoes. It’s getting that we have more tomatoes for fresh eating than my family can consume! Not enough to warrant going any canning or freezing, though. It’s been the same with the beans; more than we can eat right away, but not enough to make it worth processing. I think we might have enough to do a jar, maybe two, of quick pickled beans, but that’s about it.

It’s such a strange year. We plant with the goal to have enough to process for the winter months, but the spaces where we would have been planting stuff we’d harvest throughout the summer ended up being mostly winter squash and melons. Even the corn we planted as a trail of one variety, so not a lot there. We didn’t plant anywhere near as many beans, carrots, peas and summer squash we normally would have, and what we did plant, most didn’t even germinate. Even with three varieties of potatoes (only two that were planned), there isn’t a lot. We did plant four varieties of tomatoes, but cut back on how many plants we put in the ground – we still have tomatoes in the freezer from last year!

I am happy that we have so many winter squash and melons, but it’s going to be touch and go as to weather they’ll reach full maturity before the frost hit. The long range forecast still says we’re going to have a very hot two weeks in the middle of September, but the weather will do what it does, and the forecasts will probably change a few times between now and then! As it stands right now, we might not get a first frost until October. Which has happened before, since we’ve moved here. I seem to recall a fall where we didn’t get first frost until November, though I could be wrong on that.

Still, we’re expecting a few overnight lows that are on the chilly side, so I want to have that plastic around the eggplant and hot pepper bed soon. While not all the eggplants are fruiting, with the ones that are, I’m quite happy with what I’m seeing.

As an aside, while I was writing this, I got some updates on Button. He is doing fantastic, and getting spoiled rotten! In one photo sent, you can tell he’s getting bigger… but then there was a photo with him behind The Wolfman, and suddenly, he looks miniscule again! 😄😄 He’s got vaccinations and ear mite treatment this week, and then he’s ready to go. The woman that wanted to adopt him is still interested in him, and we’re hoping that doesn’t change, but sadly, too many people do change their minds at the last minute. The Cat Lady and her family have a whole bunch of cats living with them now, because of this.

We also just treated the eye baby kitten for the night, and gave her a feeding of cat soup, with my daughter holding her wrapped in a towel like a purrito. She seems to be getting quite used to the routine and accepting the ministrations, even if she doesn’t like parts of it. The swelling around that one eye does seem to be going down, but I’m still sure the eye itself is lost. Not even the rescue has a budget for her and, while it was suggested we could try turning her over to the humane society, chances are high they’d just euthanize her.

Which I shouldn’t be having a problem with, since we really do need to reduce the population, but I’d like to give them at least a chance to get adopted out.

Well, it’s time to call it a day and see if I can get some sleep tonight. Tomorrow, I need to follow up with the septic companies that haven’t called back yet. If I can’t get through to them, we need to contact the one company I did reach, and start making arrangements. This cannot be put off, now that we know about the problem!

Hopefully, the next time I write about it, I’ll have good news to pass on!

The Re-Farmer