The Garden in September
My husband just told me the sad news that he isn't going to be able to get away from work this week-end. That means that I'll be canning tomatoes this week-end. I just mixed up a batch of roast tomato sauce and filled the oven racks with it.
I'm picking tomatoes by the bucket right now. That icon above is from prior years, but it conveys the sense of what my counter looked like this afternoon. I had a client stop by today to leave me a bag of zucchinis and tomatoes. No kidding, this is September.
The green beans have been destroyed by some leaf-eating bug, and the critter is after the edamame, too. I just sent Small Boy and the Neighbor Child Who Is Always Here out to squash the bugs. We treat bugs in our garden the same way we treat lice in children's heads: we seek them out and destroy them one by one by hand. Brute force labor. It works way better than chemicals, and is cheap, too, if you have marginal unpaid time. As Small Boy does.
There are volunteer butternut squash ripening all over the yard. There are a few volunteer pumpkins, too. The butternut squash vines won't allow us to mow over in that corner of the yard and it's starting to look quite wild. I ought to be watering more, but there's a big media narrative about Hurricane Earl hitting us today and I'm hoping the few sprinkles I felt wasn't all that meant. We've had a very dry summer.
The honey is ready to harvest, but the bees are hot and unhappy so I'm not going near the hive today. Maybe this week-end.
The peaches are in and they are the best we've ever gotten: delicious and firm yet juicy. Quite a lot of them had already volunteered to pick themselves and we gathered this windfall (literally) up and I washed and trimmed and sliced them and put them in the dehydrator and made peach leathers out of them. The other half are decent table peaches. I slice them up and serve them with breakfast and lunch.
We got a few cantelope and they were sweet and delicious. I slice those up and serve them around at dinner time like hors d'oeuvres or dessert. The swiss chard is ready and I really should harvest it, but I've got greens coming out my ears. Yesterday I fried some bacon and then fried up two large bunches of kale in the bacon grease, put the fried kale in a pie crust and covered it up with bacon and swiss cheese to disguise from the boys that I was feeding them kale quiche.
I have a crapload of cucumbers to deal with, too. I'm thinking of mixing up some balsamic vinegar, sour cream, sugar and slicing cucumbers into this dressing. That's what my grandmother always used to do.
The hot peppers are demanding to be made into chili, but I haven't been able to imagine cooking over the stove in my 87 degree kitchen. Bad enough that I'm running the oven, I at least leave the room. But if we stay home this week-end and the heat wave breaks I might start making batches of chili for the freezer.
We didn't get an apple crop this year. I think we really screwed up two winters ago when B. put the ash bucket from the wood stove around the roots of the apple trees. I keep meaning to go out there and water in some sulfer. Apple trees like an acid environment. I suspect that fixing the pH will improve our crop next year.
Remember when I scored a water chestnut for the muddy gash? Two weeks ago I was preparing to go up to Maine for the next 10 days and I went around my yard watering and weeding and it was doing fine. In the car ride up there B. mentioned that there was some annoying plant in the bottom of the muddy gash so he pulled it out and left it to die on a pile of dirt. o.O
Whatever possessed him to start weeding, and to weed the muddy gash of all places, is beyond me. I call him a herbicidal maniac and he mostly stays away from my plants. But once in a while he does something like that and I just have to live with it because... because. So, anyway: no water chestnut.
I'm picking tomatoes by the bucket right now. That icon above is from prior years, but it conveys the sense of what my counter looked like this afternoon. I had a client stop by today to leave me a bag of zucchinis and tomatoes. No kidding, this is September.
The green beans have been destroyed by some leaf-eating bug, and the critter is after the edamame, too. I just sent Small Boy and the Neighbor Child Who Is Always Here out to squash the bugs. We treat bugs in our garden the same way we treat lice in children's heads: we seek them out and destroy them one by one by hand. Brute force labor. It works way better than chemicals, and is cheap, too, if you have marginal unpaid time. As Small Boy does.
There are volunteer butternut squash ripening all over the yard. There are a few volunteer pumpkins, too. The butternut squash vines won't allow us to mow over in that corner of the yard and it's starting to look quite wild. I ought to be watering more, but there's a big media narrative about Hurricane Earl hitting us today and I'm hoping the few sprinkles I felt wasn't all that meant. We've had a very dry summer.
The honey is ready to harvest, but the bees are hot and unhappy so I'm not going near the hive today. Maybe this week-end.
The peaches are in and they are the best we've ever gotten: delicious and firm yet juicy. Quite a lot of them had already volunteered to pick themselves and we gathered this windfall (literally) up and I washed and trimmed and sliced them and put them in the dehydrator and made peach leathers out of them. The other half are decent table peaches. I slice them up and serve them with breakfast and lunch.
We got a few cantelope and they were sweet and delicious. I slice those up and serve them around at dinner time like hors d'oeuvres or dessert. The swiss chard is ready and I really should harvest it, but I've got greens coming out my ears. Yesterday I fried some bacon and then fried up two large bunches of kale in the bacon grease, put the fried kale in a pie crust and covered it up with bacon and swiss cheese to disguise from the boys that I was feeding them kale quiche.
I have a crapload of cucumbers to deal with, too. I'm thinking of mixing up some balsamic vinegar, sour cream, sugar and slicing cucumbers into this dressing. That's what my grandmother always used to do.
The hot peppers are demanding to be made into chili, but I haven't been able to imagine cooking over the stove in my 87 degree kitchen. Bad enough that I'm running the oven, I at least leave the room. But if we stay home this week-end and the heat wave breaks I might start making batches of chili for the freezer.
We didn't get an apple crop this year. I think we really screwed up two winters ago when B. put the ash bucket from the wood stove around the roots of the apple trees. I keep meaning to go out there and water in some sulfer. Apple trees like an acid environment. I suspect that fixing the pH will improve our crop next year.
Remember when I scored a water chestnut for the muddy gash? Two weeks ago I was preparing to go up to Maine for the next 10 days and I went around my yard watering and weeding and it was doing fine. In the car ride up there B. mentioned that there was some annoying plant in the bottom of the muddy gash so he pulled it out and left it to die on a pile of dirt. o.O
Whatever possessed him to start weeding, and to weed the muddy gash of all places, is beyond me. I call him a herbicidal maniac and he mostly stays away from my plants. But once in a while he does something like that and I just have to live with it because... because. So, anyway: no water chestnut.