While doing my morning rounds, I make a point of looking at the squash blossoms to see if any need to be hand pollinated. With the chilly nights we’ve been having – we dropped to 6C/43F last night – I’ve been finding bees in the flowers, curled up and covered in pollen.
We’ve got so many tomatoes inside already, waiting to be processed, and I still have the unripe Romas sitting on screens under the market tent, until we have room to move them indoors, but when they’re ripe, they’re ripe. They need to be picked!
Then there was just one, lonely zucchini. 😁 Which I’m quite happy with, since we almost had no surviving zucchini at all, this year!
With the overnight temperatures dropping lower than forecast, I find myself wondering if we should gather all the tomatoes and bring them in to ripen. We’ve got a couple of nights coming up that are now predicted to drop to 6C/43F overnight. Considering that we’ve been hitting that on nights we were supposed to drop to only 10C, it has me concerned. Sunday is the 10th – our first average frost date. We’re supposed to have a high of 18C/64F that day, and an overnight low of 6C/43F. The next day is supposed to have a high of 17C/63F, with no change in the low. After that, things are supposed to warm up again. Depending on how the forecasts change, we might be trying to cover the tomatoes, peppers and melons. There’s no way we can cover the squash bed. It’s just too spread out.
So many things depend on the weather right now. For things like the winter squash, peppers – only the Sweet Chocolates are far enough along to have ripe ones to pick – and our one eggplant that’s trying to grow fruit right now, a frost would mean no harvest at all. The carrots, onions and purple potatoes would be fine, at least.
Well, we shall see when the time comes. Just praying for the frost to hold off long enough for things to finish ripening, though even chilly nights will slow things down.
I know the bees would sure enjoy the warmth hanging around longer!
Well, I’m going to be running around tomorrow, after all.
But first, while doing my evening rounds, I found myself bringing in a small harvest.
At first, I thought I’d just grab the few ripe Indigo Blues I spotted, but then I noticed the Red Swan beans, among the purple corn. The plants are small and sparse, but once I started looking around the leaves, I kept finding more and more larger bean pods! The yellow zucchini was one I looked at this morning and thought would wait until tomorrow or the day after, but it was noticeably bigger by the evening.
I really should know better than to move the peppers to see how ripe they are. Where the sun hits turns brown rather quickly, while the parts in shade stay green longer. They are completely ripe when they are all brown. The problem is, their stems are fragile, so when I move a pepper to see the other side of it, it just snaps right off!
Which is fine. My daughter is using it for her meal right now.
Meanwhile…
While still at my mother’s, I got a message from my husband letting me know there was something to pick up at the post office. One of the packages was RAM for his computer. He was very excited about it.
Some time later, I came out and noticed he wasn’t in his room. Eventually, I found him in the living room, reading on his tablet.
Not a good sign.
He had installed the RAM, which was absolutely the right hardware for his computer, but when he turned it on, it wouldn’t work. He just had a black screen with a spinning circle on it.
Turns out, this is a known problem with his brand of computer. It doesn’t like being upgraded.
After fighting with it for a while, he reinstalled the original RAM.
And it still didn’t work.
His computer was dead.
At which point, he pain killered up and lay down for a while, because installing the hardware really did a number on his back. When he couldn’t handle being prone anymore, he moved to the living room.
At least he was still able to research his issue, then try something else.
Ultimately, he was able to get the original RAM working again, and he has a working computer again.
He’s also going to return the RAM.
That requires printing out a return label.
The printer is in my room. We don’t need to print a lot of stuff, but the self cleaning uses a lot of ink, anyhow. I’m out of cyan and magenta. You’d think we’d still be able to print out a black and white label, but nope. Even when it’s set to black and white, if more than one colour of ink is out, the printer simply won’t print.
Which means that tomorrow, I have to go to the nearest place that sells this brand of ink.
Which is a Staples, in the smaller city.
Then, after the ink is installed the the labels printed, I’m going to have to go to a Purolator to send the return out.
Which is driving to either the town we usually go to, or the town my mother lives in. Considering were the Purolator depot moved to in town, there isn’t really any difference in time or distance between them.
So I’ll have a couple of hours, more or less, of driving to get the ink and bring it home, then another 45 minutes to an hour of driving to get to a Purolator.
A significant portion of the refund is going to have to go back to paying for the gas and ink!
Well, so much for starting on that tomato sauce tomorrow.
I noticed the leaves on the Roma VF were looking like they got a fungus. I don’t know if it’s tomato blight or something else, but they needed to be pulled.
I started by picking the ripe and almost ripe tomatoes first, then my daughter and I picked the green and mostly green tomatoes and pulled up the bamboo stakes. Then she pulled the diseased plants, while I picked ripe Black Beauty and Indigo Blue tomatoes.
The green and almost green Roma are currently on the screens under the old market tent, while the ripe and almost ripe went into a box for indoors. These corrugated plastic boxes are very handy, but they have air circulation holes on the bottom and sides that are a bit big for some of the tomatoes, so I lined the bottom with carboard egg trays to keep them from falling out.
The Roma tomato plants will be allowed to dry out and will get burned with our paper garbage. That might be a while, since we are actually getting rain today! I’m even hearing a bit of thunder.
We now have a whole lot of very ripe tomatoes ready for processing. I’ll be doing more tomato sauce, first. I’m thinking of dehydrating some in the oven, late, and preserving some of the dried tomato in olive oil.
I’m still looking at recipes for making tomato sauce using roasted tomatoes and figuring out how I want to do them. I want to use as few cooking vessels as I can get away with, so there’s less to wash up! 😄
I’m heading to my mother’s this afternoon, then taking her to a medical appointment, so I thought I would bring some things from our garden to her.
I picked the potatoes from under just one Irish Cobbler plant, which had a pretty decent amount of larger potatoes. There were also small ones, so I just buried them and the plant roots again. There’s a few orange carrots, a zucchini we harvested earlier, some Roma and Indigo Blue tomatoes and a Sweet Chocolate bell pepper. While cutting some thyme, I noticed a shallot that got missed, so I grabbed that, then added a couple more we’d harvested earlier. I also cut some spearmint for her. I decided to add one of the Black Beauty tomatoes we harvested earlier, too. The softest one I could find among the lot. After bagging it up, I remembered to grab a head of garlic for her, too.
My mother being my mother, I expect to get a lot of snarky comments and backhanded insults. 😄 She’ll have issues with the brown pepper and different coloured tomatoes. She did ask me to give her some of the tomatoes to try, but then launched into a long speech about how bad it is to have not-red coloured tomatoes. And, of course, she’ll tell me how my sister brought her soooooo much from her garden, and it’s so much better, and she’s just one person, so it’s all too much, and how bad it was for me to bring more.
My mother is very predictable. 😁
But I’m giving them to her anyways. Who knows. She might actually show appreciation for a change. 😄
We did have one really nice, ripe Indigo Blue Chocolate tomato for my daughter to taste test. I’d picked three and put them in my pocket so I could use both hands. One was so ripe, it split when I bent over, so it needed to be eaten right away.
My daughter found them absolutely delicious. Nice and sweet. Juicy, but not too juicy, with a rich tomato flavour. We have others harvested that will need to be eaten quickly, and I don’t think that’s going to be a problem at all! 😄
The Indigo Blues are an indeterminate tomato, so I can expect to be able to harvest small amounts of them more often, from now one. The Romas are starting to ripen in mass quantities, so I might just wait on processing the ones we’ve picked, so we can do larger quantities all at once.
On another note completely, we did try to use the new bread machine yesterday.
Something went wrong, but I don’t know what.
I came into the kitchen to check on it, and it was off. There was still power to it – the display was showing the exact settings I started with for a basic 1.5lb loaf. It should have been showing a count down on the time. It just wasn’t running. The bread dough had been completely kneaded and was just sitting and rising the pan, so I left it. Later on, my older daughter took the dough out and baked it in the oven, so we now have one, perfect little loaf in bread jail to try.
Hmmm… I wonder. We keep our bread in a bin – bread jail – to protect it from the cats. I wonder if maybe a cat stepped on the controls while we were not around, and shut it off? We’ve set the bread machine up on the counter near the microwave, where it could be plugged into an outlet on a different breaker, and plenty of space around it for when it’s hot and baking. It’s the one counter the cats are allowed on, as they like to sit and look out the window.
That’s about the only thing I can think of, other than mechanical failure.
My daughter plans to try again, later, so we’ll see!
Who knows. I might come home to some fresh bread to try. :-)
I headed outside to check on things just a little while ago. The winds are quite severe right now, and I was eyeballing some of the trees, wondering which one was going to come down, next! At least the wind is blowing in a direction where they would fall away from the house, not towards it.
After picking up a few fallen branches – not many – I checked on the garden.
The trellised tomatoes definitely needed some help! Even a few of the Romas needed to get extra support. The big surprise with them is how many of the almost ripe tomatoes I’d left behind were now ready to pick! I hadn’t planned on that and ended up using the bottom of my shirt to hold them all.
I had to add more support to a number of Indigo Blues and Black Beauties, plus adding structural support to the Black Beauty trellis. With the wind direction going through the garden, the plant laden trellises were acting like sails!
These are all the tomatoes that were picked today, including from this morning. On the left are the Black Beauties, including a broken branch I found, with a couple of tomatoes on it. I just looked up how to tell when Black Beauties are ripe, and I can’t say it helped much. From the photos and video I saw, the are supposed to get more red on the bottom. Other articles said they get completely dark. As you can see, one is completely purple on the bottom. The colour is photo sensitive, so the parts that get the most sunlight are the darkest. The ones with bright green on the bottom are at least clearly not-ripe. The information I found also said they should start to be soft and slightly squishy. They are all rock hard! Which means even the all purple one is not ripe.
I think.
They are now laid out on a screen in the cat free zone and will hopefully continue to ripen. The Roma VF tomatoes don’t need more time, but they will be fine like this until we find a sauce recipe we want to try. The Indigo Blues, for the most part, should be ready for fresh eating now.
I think.
On a completely different note, our new bread machine has been cleaned and set up, and we just need to wait for a couple of ingredient to reach room temperature before we start our first basic loaf. I’m quite looking forward to it!
Meanwhile, I’m going to start looking up some basic, refrigerator tomato sauce recipes now!
This morning, I had the largest harvest out of the garden for this year, and it was almost all tomatoes!
There are a couple of handfuls of green and yellow beans under all that.
I wasn’t sure about the Indigo Blue tomatoes, and how to tell if they were ready. Last night, I was reading about an almost identical Indigo type tomato (honestly, I think it was the same tomato with a slightly different name, because it was from a different company than where I got these), and it mentioned the bottoms getting very red when they ripened. We had some that have been red on the bottoms for a while now, so I decided to pick them. I’m glad I did, because they were starting to split!
As for the Romas, I picked the ripest looking ones, including the one I found had fallen off on its own. Some might have been good with a bit more time on the vine, but I wanted to get the weight off the vines. These are very prolific! According to my daughters, they’re not very good for fresh eating, though. There are enough to make some tomato sauce or something along those lines. Probably not enough to make it worth breaking out the canner, so likely just for the fridge and immediate use.
After finishing my morning rounds, I headed out to do some errands. My first stop was the post office; my husband had ordered a new exercise ball, now that we have a cat free zone to store it in, in between uses. Then I gassed up before heading to the nearest Canadian Tire and Walmart stores. It started to rain while I was heading to the gas station, but while driving to the next city, it cleared up – though it was still hazy from all the smoke! I was amazed all that rain wasn’t enough to get rid of the smoke. In the time it took me to get home, though, the winds have picked up and are now blowing from the south, so the smoke is being blown away from us, instead of towards us. I can finally flip the fan in my window to blow air in, instead of out!
[Update: Well, I’m confused. We’ve got 3 weather warnings right now. Two for wind, one for smoke. According to the weather maps, the winds are coming from the north/northwest. But as I drove home, the car was being buffeted from the south side of the road. As I look at the security camera live feed, I’m seeing trees being blown around, and it looks like it’s from the south. I look out my window, and it looks like they’re being blown from the west. So I guess things are swirling around a lot! I’ll be looking for downed trees and branches, when this is over.]
At the Canadian Tire, I was after pellets for the litter boxes. They keep them in the vestibule by the exit, and I saw the hardwood pellets, but when I was ready to pay for a couple of bags, I was asked if I wanted hard or soft wood. The hardwood pellets had gone up in price awhile ago, so I got the softwood pellets.
Then I picked up the bags on the way out and realized the price on those had gone up, and they now cost more than the hardwood pellets. It’s only a difference of 50¢ a bag, but I’ll have to remember that. I do wish Walmart had them in stock more regularly, because they’re almost $3 per bag cheaper.
While at the Cdn Tire, I went looking for puppy pads, but the ones they had were far more expensive. I did, however, find some carpet powder designed for cat or dog mess cleanup. I’d run out of that awhile ago, but couldn’t find any the last time I was in the city. I also found the fire bricks I’ve been slowly stocking up on. The last time I was at a Canadian Tire, it was a different location, and I couldn’t find them, nor even the section they would have been in. The lady I asked didn’t even understand what I was asking about, and assumed they were a seasonal item. I’ve been buying the bricks in groups of four. By the time we will need them when building our outdoor kitchen, I hope to have enough to spare for other projects.
I found the puppy pads I needed at Walmart. Things seem to have improved in that respect. I’m no longer finding giant turds under my desk. Just giant pee spots. It seems Two Toes has figured out the litter boxes for at least one job! I came home to no mess at all, so maybe she’s figured it out for the other job. Thankfully, the kittens seem to have all figured out the litter boxes. Finally! Still, I was almost out of puppy pads already. I need at least 4 of them to protect the space. Two folded in half, and partway up the wall, and two fully open, layered on top and covering extra carpet. I’m also using pet odour eliminators and, now that I have it again, the carpet powder to dissuade cats from the area.
After talking it over with the family, we decided it was worth it to dip into savings a bit and pick up a new “toy” for the kitchen.
I got a bread making machine.
These were our choices.
The box on the right, with the white background, is a larger machine and has two different size Express settings, while the other, with the blue, has one Express setting, but also a yogurt setting. We’re more likely to be making yogurt than Express bread, which needs both bread flour and fast acting yeast. I did get fast acting yeast, but we never buy bread flour.
I believe the one on the right was a Hamilton Beach brand. It was $10 cheaper. I went with the blue boxed Oster brand for one simple reason: the other brand had only one box on the shelf, and it was bashed up. The outer packaging of the Oster brand didn’t list what its 12 functions were, so I couldn’t use those to decide. I didn’t see the list until I opened the box at home and read the instruction manual.
We’ve considered getting a bread machine for some time. With the summer heat, it’s really unpleasant to be kneading dough during the day, then the baking heats up the house even more, so my daughter would stay up all night, baking bread. All of us are also broken, one way or another, and it’s been getting increasingly painful to knead dough. So we’ve been buying most of our bread. With this, we can put everything in the machine and have fresh baked bread by morning, without wrecking anyone’s back or knees, and without heating the house up. Plus, if we want, we can set it to just make the dough during the night, then take it out and bake it in the oven in the morning. A friend of mine does that and says it really improves the taste and texture that way.
The only thing we’ll have to be careful of is, where to set it up and plug it in. As it is now, we can’t run the AC and the kettle at the same time, without tripping a breaker! The kettle is on a power bar, but the AC has to be plugged directly into the outlet.
That’s one way to find out that particular outlet is on the same breaker as the dining room outlets – plus the living room ceiling light and the kitchen’s range hood!
Hopefully, we’ll be able to get it set up and bake our first loaf of bread tonight. 😊
Well, this morning sure didn’t turn out as expected, but I’ll write about that in another post. For now, here are how things are going in the garden.
I picked a lot of beans yesterday, so there weren’t many that needed picking today. I found three Gold Ball turnips that looked ready to harvest – one of them has even started splitting! I also harvested the big G-Star patty pan. My daughters had spotted it when they were out earlier in the morning, were really excited to see how big it had gotten and were wondering what plans I had for it. I have no interest in letting it get big enough to go to seed, as everything in the squash patch will likely be cross pollinated. I could have let it go larger, but as long as its there, the plant isn’t producing more squash. So I’ve picked it, and will let my daughters decide what to do with it! 😄
I posted more photos on Instagram, from last night and this morning.
While checking the Indigo Blue tomatoes last night, one of them fell off in my hand! So I guess it’s ripe. 😄 It was also very cool to see that radishes are already germinating!
In the squash patch, there aren’t a lot of squash forming, but some of the ones that are, are getting big fast. Like the North Georgia Candy Roaster. The squash plants in the compost pile, however, are really amazing. The mystery squash – there are two of them so far – bear no similarity to any squash we’ve grown before. Whatever cross pollinating happened, I can’t even guess which they might be. We had so few squash winter squash last year, and even fewer that would have had viable seeds that ended up in the compost pile. As for the three biggest and roundest squash, they are getting patterns on them, and I can now tell that they are a hulless seed pumpkin.
A surprise this morning was with that volunteer All Blue potato. The resent storms had knocked it over, but it’s still blooming and looking very strong and healthy. The other potato volunteers don’t seem to be growing, but this one is doing very well. It is also growing “berries”! Potatoes do go to seed, but this is the first time I’ve had one do it. I am absolutely going to let this plant go through its entire life cycle and harvest the seeds. With potatoes, if you plant the tubers, you get the exact same potato. They’re basically clones of the original seed potato. With seeds, however, you will get new varieties. I have heard of a single potato variety that has seeds that grow true to the original. Otherwise, they are like apples, and every seed will grow a new variety.
Someone in one of our local gardening groups posted pictures of their potato plant doing the same thing. From the conversation there, I read that when the seeds get planted, it results in only one potato, but if you plant that one potato, it will produce more. I have no idea of it’s true, but I’m willing to experiment!
The last photo is of our largest Crespo squash. It’s no longer a smooth, perfectly round ball. The mature pumpkin is supposed to have a warty texture, and it should be interesting to see how that develops over time. Still hoping to get a long enough growing season for them to fully mature! I know we started them indoors really enough but these plants are really spindly compared to the first year we tried growing them.
Some things still seem to be touch and go, but overall, I’m happy with how the garden is doing this year.
Well, I did get some sleep last night! The kittens did tackle me, but I almost slept through it. I really, really have to watch myself, though. I leaned forward in bed this morning, and something moved. Turned out I had a kitten curled up right against my belly!
My daughter, unfortunately, did not get any sleep at all last night. Big Rig would not leave her alone! So she was up and about early to find Leyendecker for his morning medications. As I was getting up to help her, I realized I was hearing pouring rain over the sound of my fan! We were not supposed to get rain today. That’s why I watered the garden yesterday!
My daughter went on to feed the outside cats while I supervised Leyendecker, trying to get him to eat his new food. The first time my daughter gave it to him, he ate it hungrily. Now, he won’t eat it at all. We’re not sure what’s going on. Even when he’s around the main food bowls, which we now keep empty between feedings, he hasn’t even really been looking for more food. It’s likely the medications are causing him to loose his appetite, but I don’t remember it happening when he was on them before.
Since it was pouring so hard out, I went back to bed. My sense of time is now completely messed up! I went out to do my “morning” rounds a little while ago, but it was about 3pm. It still feels like morning.
Anyhow, here are some of my finds of the day!
When I saw Octomom heading for the kibble house, I checked on her babies. Usually, they’re asleep when she leaves, but not today!
It took me watching this a couple of times, counting and recounting, before I finally spotted the eighth kitten, under the two black ones! 😄
While finishing my rounds, I spotted the kittens in the junk pile with their mama.
Looks like it’s just the 2 of them, and they’re starting to go further afield! I expect we’ll soon be seeing them eating in the bowl under the shrine. 😊
I managed to get a picture of the tuxedo with the messed up eye. This photo is cropped closer, to see it better.
I’m really surprised. That eye is clearing up really well! The inner eyelid is swollen like crazy, but I was sure he was going to lose that eye completely. I am happy to say, it looks like I was wrong!
Meanwhile, I had a first in the (very well watered!) garden today!
Our very first ripe Roma tomato! It picked itself. This was the first tomato to show up, so no surprise it ripened first. I reached out to touch it and it fell off the vine into my hand!
The next picture is of ripening Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes. Now I can see where the “chocolate” part of the name came from!
I didn’t get a picture, but I saw a female Crespo squash in full flower, and I made sure to hand pollinate it. In the photos above, you can see the female African Drum gourd flowers are getting larger. The male flowers have been blooming consistently, so I expect to be able to pollinate those by hand when they finally open.
The last picture is of the G-Star patty pans, and we’ve got a switch on that one! The female flowers are blooming, but the male flowers just buds right now. Which means those lovely looking squash are not going to develop fully. There aren’t even any other summer squash blossoms I could use to pollinate with. I suppose I could try using a winter squash blossom, but I don’t know if they are similar enough for that to work. The G-Star plants are doing very well, though, so I expect we’ll have both male and female flowers blossoming at the same time, fairly soon.
I’m thinking it might be time to harvest the garlic. I want to give the bulbs time to get nice and big – we have so few of them this year – but the stems are drying out, which means they probably won’t get much bigger than they are now. That will free up an entire bed for something else, if we harvest those soon.
In the wattle weave bed, I transplanted 4 different early peppers, just in case we didn’t get a chance to transplant more in the grow bags. When watering last night, it looked like one of them has suddenly died. I could not find a reason why, but it’s wilting away. Nothing else around it is affected. There is no insect damage that I can find. It even looks strong around the stem and roots. I hope it perks up, but I don’t think it will. Everything else in that bed is doing well. Even the chamomile is starting to bloom. That first luffa we planted in there is getting so big, it has started to climb the lilac above it, and clusters of flower buds are starting to appear.
My sense of time is not just messed up about today, where I feel like it’s so much earlier in the day. I also get that sense, in reverse, when tending the garden. “Spring” arrived so early this year, it feels like we’re heading into fall, when we’ve still got half the summer to go. I keep thinking I should be harvesting things from the garden regularly by now. I’ve looked back at photos I took in July over the last two years to get some comparison, and we weren’t harvesting much at all at this time. When we grew melons successfully, 2 years ago, we had baseball sized fruits developing at this time. This year’s melons germinated so late, they’re just starting to bloom right now, and just male flowers so far. Some of the corn was behind what we have now, while others ahead. No surprise the summer squash was ahead compared to this year, since this year we have barely any and did direct sowing instead of transplants. I’m glad I took so many photos. It helps me get a sense of what to expect now, more or less, based on how things did in past years. Taking into account that 2 years ago was a drought year with heat waves (which the melons loved!) and last year a lot of things were lost to flooding in the spring.
I guess I feel better after looking at the photos from previous years. Some things, I can’t quite figure out why there is a significant different between them and this year. Others, it’s pretty obvious!
At least we’re not having to deal with groundhogs eating everything again! They seem to have moved on and are staying away, and I’m quite happy with that!
Now we just have to worry about racoons! Especially when it comes to the corn.
The first Roma VF tomatoes that showed up are now starting to change colour from green to yellowish and now kinda orange.
I still am not sure how we’ll be able to tell when the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue Chocolates are ready to pick. They practically started out at the colours they’re supposed to be, when ripe. I guess it’ll come down to how soft they feel, and how easily they come off the vine. The very first Black Beauty tomato that showed up is getting quite large, so that’s another thing to use as a guide, I guess.
We also have squash and gourds developing – I hope!
The G-Star patty pan squash are looking big and healthy – the slugs don’t seem to like them! Here, the first flower buds are forming, with both male and females forming at the same time! With everything else, we’ve just been seeing male flowers. There is one exception. We have one yellow zucchini plant that the slugs seem to just love, but it’s surviving. There is a single female flower bud, with a bright yellow baby squash under the flower, but the male flower buds are just barely emerging. It’s unlikely the female flower will have any male flowers to pollinate it when it finally opens.
The second photo is of our very first female African Drum gourd flower bud!
I was not expecting it to be fuzzy.
A few other winter squash are also starting to show female flower buds, including the Crespo squash. Hopefully, the buds will actually reach the blooming stage. With the Crespo squash in particular, the only ones that showed up before now, dried up and fell off long before they got big enough to start blooming. They sure have a lot of male flowers, though! More than any other squash that has started blooming.
It was thundering and threatening rain while I was checking the garden beds, but I went ahead and made a first harvest, before heading in.
I dug around and gathered our first Irish Cobbler potatoes. These are from under 2 plants. There were still tiny potatoes among the roots, so I left the plants in the ground to hopefully keep growing.
I just picked enough for one meal. We’ll leave the rest to fully mature before we pick them again; there just aren’t that many plants, so the longer we leave them be, hopefully the better the harvest in the fall. We’ll likely try the Red Thumb potatoes too, but with the Purple Peruvian growing in feed bags, we’ll probably not bother with those. We’ve grown them before, anyhow, so we know what they taste like.
We had quite a lot of rain last night. Enough to refill the barrel by the sunroom to overflowing! With all the thunder I was hearing while checking the garden, I didn’t start any outdoor jobs. Instead, a daughter and I went into town to refill some water jugs and pick up a few things, including kitten kibble. I ran out of that last night. The storm I was hearing passed us by, though, so we should be able to get at least one of those frames done this evening.
For all that our garden ended up much smaller than intended for this year, I’m happy with how things have been turning out.
This morning, I made sure to get a picture of our newest tomatoes.
These are the first Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes forming! We’ve got more Romas forming, too but, so far, no Black Beauties. They are blooming, though.
After I finished my morning rounds, I put the remaining transplants into as few containers as I could fit them, then loaded them into the car. Last night, I made sure to write out labels on Post It notes. When I went to the post office yesterday, and asked the store owner if I could bring my extra transplants, she had indicated a counter to leave them on, but there was no way they’d fit on there. There is a picnic table outside the door, though, so after clearing it with her, that’s where I set them up. She was really surprised to see just how many transplants I had! I told her a bit about the different varieties. I managed to squeeze 22 Romas into two bins, and all the Spoon tomatoes into one tray. Fifteen in total, I think. I didn’t really count as I combined the two trays into one. There were only 7 or 8 Black Beauties left, so they fit into one bin easily enough. The tomatoes are all so tall and really, really need to get into the ground!
I knew which group of peppers were the hot ones, so I had those set aside in a smaller tray. I had the bell peppers in groups by variety, but after taking the labels out when I transplanted half of them, I lost track of which was which! I still stuck labels on the tray with information about each variety.
This general store can get very busy, since it not only has the post office, but also sell liquor and gas. I hope that people will take all the transplants today but, if not, they are sure to be taken tomorrow. Our little hamlet is having it’s annual picnic and parade tomorrow, and the parade goes right past the store. The store itself is closed on Sundays, so having them on the picnic table works out well.
With these gone, I have just a few things left to transplant. The spearmint will go into a pot. Only one oregano survived, and I’m not sure how healthy it is, but I’ll try transplanting it somewhere as well. There are also the second variety of thyme to transplant, and I might just put those in a pot, too. That leaves the last of the onions to transplant. Today, I plan to pull the last of the bolting spinach and will transplant the onions there. If there are any left over, I’ll use them to fill spaces near the peas, where the lettuce and bok choy were choked out by the Chinese elm seeds. Thankfully, the trees are now done dropping seeds for the year. I also plant to re-sow some summer squash. They have a short enough season that there is still time for them to grow.
Once all the surviving transplants are in the ground, I can finally turn my attention to building those trellis beds! If I can get that done fast enough, we might even be able to direct sow a few other things with really short growing seasons, but at least that is no longer an urgent thing.
The Re-Farmer 