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!
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!
It has been a bit longer than usual since I’ve actually done a morning harvest. With all the stuff going on for the past while, I lost track of time! I do try to harvest at least every other day. Since I’m in the habit of taking pictures what I harvest, unless it’s just one or two tomatoes or something like that, I checked the dates on my photos. Turns out, I haven’t done a harvest in 4 days!
In the photo are a few San Marzano tomatoes at the top, some black cherry tomatoes, and a nice bunch of Forme de Couer tomatoes. I had to battle some very spiky stems to reach those G Star patty pan squash! With the beans, there are all three varieties in there, including a very decent amount of the Royal Burgundy bush beans – but this is the first time I picked any of the green Seychelle beans from the main garden area, and not just from the trellis over the Crespo squash. I had planted some Seychelles in the gaps where the purple Carminat beans failed to germinate, but I think only 3 Seychelle germinated. However many there were, there’s only one plant left, and it’s finally producing beans!
Among the Carminat beans, I found a couple that had gotten too big to harvest; they would no longer be tender, so I left them on the vine. There probably isn’t time enough, but who knows. They might fully mature and give me a few seeds I can plant next year! This is definitely a variety that grows well here, and we do enjoy them, so we do want to grow them again.
Of course, along with checking on the garden, I checked on the kitties. After setting the food out, I tried to do a head count.
I counted 34 cats and kittens.
*sigh*
I don’t even want to think of how many there would be, if we hadn’t lost so many kittens this year, and at least one adult. There are other adult cats that I haven’t seen in a while, but they may come back and stay for the winter. Some of them, anyhow.
Eye baby is pretty active among the kittens, but also has her favourite place to hang out, in the cat cage.
Which she can’t do right now, because I took that cat bed out to give it a wash!
Her cuddle buddy doesn’t seem to care, either way! This bigger kitten seems to be rather protective of eye baby.
Or just likes to use her for a pillow.
~~~~~ pause for interruptions and treating of eye baby~~~~~
I’m back!
We just gave eye baby her daily dose of antibiotics, and a feeding of cat soup from the modified bottle. I did something a bit different, this time.
I remembered we were gifted one of those mixers, where you can make individual size smoothies or whatever. I used that to make the cat soup. It worked. We had zero issues of bits paté clogging the nipple.
Why didn’t we think of this before? 😄
I still don’t know what to make of that eye. I think it’s getting better overall, but I also still think the eye itself is lost.
Oh, and we have determined something else. At least I did, only just now, when I let eye baby back out in the sun room.
She, is a he.
The girls had been able to determine that when they took care of the cats outside recently. A couple of the kittens, including eye baby, decided to roll onto their backs and give a good view. The other kitten was female, but eye baby is definitely a little boy.
But I am getting ahead of myself!
Aside from my usual morning routine, I had a day “off” today. A friend of mine from another province is in town right now, and we had a lunch date!
After getting one of the girls to distract the outside cats away from the truck with some treats, I headed to town a bit early. There was a store I wanted to check out, but I didn’t find what I was looking for. What I did get, however, was clear Gorilla tape. That will be very useful in setting the “greenhouse” around the eggplant and hot pepper bed. I’m hoping that the two clear shower curtains, or the two clear table protectors, with be long enough to go all the way around the box frame, and I had been wondering how I would join them together. This should be strong enough to hold.
I then went to the dollar store and ended up getting a several packages of angle braces that can be used to reinforce the donated cat shelter, instead of the triangle blocks of wood I was intending to use. These would be much better for the size of wood the shelter is made out of. I also got a few more things to use on the shelters, plus new sonic deer/wildlife screamers for the truck. I was down to one, and they’re not much good if there isn’t a pair of them.
I had just finished putting them on the truck and started heading to where we had arranged to meet, when my friend caught up with me. Perfect timing!
We had intended to go to a fish ‘n chips place for lunch, at 1pm, that had reopened recently. They’d had a fire some time ago, and it took quite a long time to get things up and running again, and I wanted to see the renovations. They were so incredibly busy, though, we barely got in the door, and saw that every table was full (granted, there isn’t room for a lot of tables anyhow) with lots of people waiting to place orders at the counter. So we left and walked up the block to a Thai place. I’d thought this place had closed and moved to the city, but I guess they’d opened a second location, instead. I haven’t been there in years, but my friend has been going there regularly since she’s been in town.
We have a very lovely, quiet, lunch, with excellent service!
It was really great to be able to sit and talk and get all caught up with each other.
After lunch, we just walked around and went to different places, checking out the marina and the local art club’s art gallery, and stopping at other restaurants for her to collect take out menus for her mother, who still lives out here. One place didn’t have any take out menus and the guy I asked said it was all their website, but her mother isn’t online, so that was of no use for her!
Town was really busy, as a lot of people use this long weekend to close up their cottages for the winter, and spend one last weekend on the beach before their kids go back to school. It wasn’t too bad, really, but neither of us enjoy crowds! All in all, though, we spent a couple of hours just hanging out together, and it was grand!
After we finally said our goodbyes – we may or may not have a chance to get together before she has to leave – I made a quick stop at the grocery store before going home. My husband has a birthday this month, so we’ll be doing things for him over the next week or so. We never celebrate birthdays on the actual day. 😄
I picked up some snacks he likes for now, and the girls tucked away the ice cream I got for later. My younger daughter plans to bake him a cake. His take out meal of choice was Chinese food, and I confirmed their hours while I was in town and got a fresh take out menu, just in case anything had changed.
They don’t have a website. 😄
We will be able to do the take out on Tuesday – after the long weekend is over!
It looks like I’m going to be doing a lot of running around over the next couple of weeks. We’ve got not only my husband’s birthday stuff going on, but the girls and I are taking my mother out to a nature reserve as part of her 93rd birthday celebrations – sort of. My mother said she didn’t want any fuss for her birthday this year, but she did want an outing to the nature reserve with my daughters, so we’re going to do both. Then there’s at least one appointment for my mother that I will be driving her to, and hopefully another in her home with the home care guy. My husband has to get to a lab for some bloodwork. I will hopefully see my friend one more time before she leaves. I also need to get back to the town my mother lives in to pick up kibble and lysine at the feed store, and will likely be back another day to pick up the clear plastic roofing material I’d ordered from the hardware store.
All of that in just the first two weeks of September, and I’m sure I’m forgetting something!
Meanwhile, I still don’t have the date for the spay/neuter the rescue has set up for us! I’ll have to contact her again. They’ve been insanely busy, too.
A couple of weeks from now, we should have someone coming in to excavate and repair the expeller on our septic system.
This is going to be a really crazy month!
After that, things should settle down, though.
I hope!
Pretty much all of this is good stuff, though, so no complaints!
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.
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!
I have what have become the usual beans – all three kinds – G Star patty pans and Forme de Couer tomatoes, but today I picked the largest of the purple Dragonfly peppers. There are quite a few more, but I’m giving them more time to ripen.
Of course, I also fed the outside cats and, as I was going around the sun room door, I found a little green friend.
This little guy was not much bigger than the top of my thumb! He was above the rain barrel, where I have a board for the diverter to rest on, this rock, and a brick on the other side, to hold it in place.
In yesterday’s sudden, severe storm yesterday morning, the brick actually got knocked right off, and the diverter almost did, too!
Gosh, I love these little tree frogs! I like all the frogs, but these ones are just too adorable!
That was about all that was usual about today, but the update will need its own post, next!
While checking around the yard and garden beds for storm damage, I noticed a whole lot of the black cherry tomatoes were looking dark, so I picked a few.
I honestly don’t know if how ripe they are, but these are indeterminate tomatoes, and with so many of them on the clusters looking like this, I thought some of them had to be ripe. I’ve asked my family to let me know after they’ve tried them!
This image is from the T&T Seeds website, where I bought them from, and it is supposed to be what they look like when ripe. Not quite there, I guess! I only picked the four, though. There’s almost a dozen that looked the same as the ones I picked, so we’ll see over the next day or two, if they get dark like in the company’s photo or not.
It should be interesting to see just how many we get of these! We have only 6 plants, but they have grown so incredibly tall, up into the lilac branches about. High enough that if things start ripening near the top of the vines before frost hits, I’d need a stool or something to be able to harvest them!
I was in a world of hurt this morning, after all the stuff done yesterday. The girls took care of feeding the outside cats. We gave eye baby her medication and a modified bottle feed last night, but then she went back outside. She’s getting too active to keep her in a cat carrier all night. Since we can’t wash her eye anymore – it’s not leaking, but is still insanely swollen – and no longer have eye drops, we didn’t take her in this morning. She seems to prefer kibble, anyhow. We’ll bring her in for her antibiotics in the evening, then let her back out again.
I tried to get more sleep, but got messages from my brother and couldn’t fall asleep after that. I’ll get to that part, later.
It was late morning before I got outside to check on the garden and see what could be harvested. We were supposed to get storms last night, but only got a brief rain. We were now being told to expect thunderstorms in the late morning, but very briefly. While I was in the garden, I could hear thunder in the distance.
That big G Star patty pan squash grew so much, just overnight! Yesterday, it wasn’t much bigger than the other one!
I finally picked our first yellow zucchini.
Those are all Forme de Couer tomatoes; no others were ready to pick. The beans are mostly the Royal Burgundy bush beans, which I did not pick at all, yesterday, with maybe a half dozen Carminat pole beans.
I do have to share about the enameled tub the harvest is in. It has been hanging on the wall behind the warming shelf of the wood cookstove for I don’t know now many decades. I brought it out and washed it, thinking we might need to use it for sponge baths, if we couldn’t get the septic going again.
I actually remember my mother bathing me in that, when I was a wee one. She had it on the table in the kitchen, close to the stove, with its reservoir of warm water handy. It was probably used for my late brother, too. Which would make it older than I am!
I hadn’t brought a container with me while going through the garden, and just used the bottom of my shirt to carry the produce. As I was transferring them to the tub, I could hear the thunder and figured I would top of the cat kibble outside, but just in the kibble house and sun room, so the cats would be sheltered next to food. I was in the process of putting the kibble out when the storm hit.
Hard.
We went from basically hot and muggy with no wind, to driving rain and winds strong enough for things started to get blown around, and I was half expecting branches to start breaking off! I got completely soaked in seconds!
Once back in the sun room, I made sure to tie off the outer door and partially close the inner door – normally, during the day, both are kept wide open. Cats where running all over the place, trying to find shelter. A number of kittens that normally run away from me ran into the sun room, saw me there, and panicked – but didn’t run back outside into that driving rain!
The storm has already passed, though. The system is continuing to the north east, and it looks like we got it pretty mild, compared to other places.
I’ll still be waiting a while before going back outside!
I need to go check out the expeller for the septic, out by the barn. I remembered that the septic guy had suggested that, if we still had problems, to take the cap and inner pipe of the expeller out completely, and leave it off for about a month. The grey water would build up in the outer pipe and overflow it, eventually, clearing out any collected gunk from inside the pipes that might be clogging the pipe. I was thinking of taking it out and seeing if there was any outflow.
My brother had had the same thought, and messaged me this morning about it. I’d told him about the septic guy suggesting leaving it out for a month, but my brother wasn’t too keen on that idea; that cap is there for a reason. But it might we worthwhile to do it for a few days, at least.
I was going to do that after topping up the cat kibble, thinking I had time before the storm hit.
I was wrong.
😂😂
So I will have to go out there later today, and see what there is to see!
My brother and his wife are still on their way here. My brother had estimated the tractor could average 20km/h. Now that they’ve been on the road for a while, my SIL thinks it’s more like 12km/h
It’s going to be a while for them to get here, still!
Before I got the messages about this, I’d gone outside to open the gate and get things done out there, so I’d be there when they arrived. One of the first things I did was harvest potatoes at the chain link fence.
On the right, in the photo, are the last of the red thumb fingerling potatoes that I could find. There were some surprisingly large ones in there, for the type of potato! Especially considering we planted the little potatoes that were left from last year, out of the bin we’d been going into throughout the winter.
The potatoes on the left are the purple caribe. These are the ones that most of them did not come up at all. Just a few in the middle of the bed, and a couple at one end. I’ve left the couple at one end, and just harvested the ones in the middle.
There aren’t a lot but, under the circumstances, it’s actually better than I thought it would be. There are some decent sized potatoes in there! Unfortunately, I damaged some with the garden fork. The soil had become quite compacted, so I had to use it quite a bit. All that means is, we have to use the potatoes right away.
No hardship there!
After harvesting the potatoes, I set the bin in the sun for now. I was going to start weed trimming around the house, in preparation for lawn mowing soon. Next to the house is a row of lilacs with the cherry trees in the middle. The cherry trees keep trying to spread through their roots, so I decided to cut those away, first.
There turned out to be a lot more than I expected!
When I got the messages about the delay, a paused for a while and had some supper.
Which is a good thing, because I was inside to hear that the septic pump was running and not shutting off again.
This happened earlier today. The filter was empty and the pump was running dry, so I shut off the power switch, primed the filter, then went outside to check the tank. I used the hose to spray the float free, and when I turned the power back on to the pump, it did not turn on.
I was expecting the same thing this time, but when I opened the tank, I could see that it was full enough to trigger the float. The pump was running, because it needed to.
I went back to the pump and turned the power on. The pump started running, but nothing was happening in the filter. It didn’t even drain through the outflow at the base. The pump was running, but nothing was happening.
I opened up the access pipe in the floor and ran the hose through – it was pretty clogged in places – but I didn’t want to run too much water through there with the tank already so full and not being emptied. It made no difference, anyhow.
I’ve left it off and sent a message to my brother and SIL, letting them know about it. I hate to even bring it up, considering how hot and exhausted my brother is going to be by the time they get here. No AC in the tractor! I heard back from them while I was writing this post. They’ve arrived at a gas station in the town my mother lives in and have stopped for a break.
After the update, I went to check on the pump again, and found the filter reservoir had drained. It shouldn’t do that. I topped it up, and started seeing … gurgling? … from the outflow at the bottom.
It shouldn’t do that, either.
Turning the power on, the pump ran, but again, no flow. The tank is not draining.
This is not good.
Once I’ve posted this, I’m going to head out to the outflow pipe near the barn to see if anything has happened there. I think the renter’s cows have been rotated away again. I haven’t seen them in a while. Which means the electric fence should be off.
We have had so many problems with this septic system! Especially this year.
We’ve got Forme de Couer tomatoes – and from the looks of the plants, we will soon be inundated with ripe tomatoes! There’s just two San Marzano tomatoes, and I wasn’t seeing any others that looked like they were starting to ripe. There were just a few Seychelle and Carminate beans to gather this morning, but we got plenty yesterday, so that’s not surprising. I gathered more corn than I expected to. Especially considering I’d picked some yesterday, too.
We’re set for another hot day today, and I thought I’d be watering the garden this morning. It seems we got more rain during the night, though, and it wasn’t needed.
Check it out! Our very first – and so far, only – Magda squash! I picked a couple of patty pans smaller than before, more to encourage the plants to continue blooming and producing.
I picked a few oddly small corn cobs that turned out to be ripe, but just… oddly small. There are a few green Seychelle beans, a decent amount of the Royal Burgundy bush beans, but it’s the Carminat beans that really surprise me. So few plants, and they are so productive!
There are a few chocolate cherry and Forme de Couer, and in the second photo of the slide show, you’ll see that we are FINALLY having black cherry tomatoes turning colour.
There are still some sugar snap peas being produced, and that bed where I was finally able to identify a volunteer.
A bit of greenery showed up at the very end of the bed. I thought it might be a weed, but something seemed familiar about it, so I left it. Now that it is bigger and even starting to bloom, I have been able to confirm:
It is an Aunt Molly’s ground cherry.
I am quite surprised to see it. We grew those a couple of years ago, in the spot next to the compost ring, where we now have a new framed bed with Crespo squash and Seychelle beans in it. There is another raised bed between that and the bed this ground cherry showed up in.
One of the things I was testing out with the ground cherries was whether they would easily self sow, as I’d been hearing from some people who have started to view it as a weed because it’s so hard to get rid of. The next year, though, nothing showed up. For one to now show up here is a bit of a mystery. I have no idea how it could have gotten there. It’s not like we had birds eating the ground cherries and potentially pooping the seeds out. The fruit was too thoroughly engulfed in leaves for any birds to get at. No other critters seemed interested in them, either.
I’m not going to complain, though. This is a lovely surprise, and I hope it actually gets a chance to mature and produce fruit, before our season runs out!
The Re-Farmer 