Chris & Joy's Critterweb » Gardening

Harvest.

Chris — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:19:34 +0000

Today is the autumnal equinox: the day the hours of light and dark are once again in balance before descending into increasing darkness. I’ve felt the change coming, and as usual it makes me unsettled and a bit melancholy. Typically I don’t do well with this time of year; it’s a beautiful time, the light has this crisp, high contrast quality to it, and the turning leaves are so pretty, but I hate to see everything dying off, and I know that winter is coming. I don’t deal well with either change or death, and autumn is all about both.

A sampling of the bounty our garden has produced this year

It’s been almost a month since the above photo was taken and the harvest has mostly tapered off. The peppers are just now in full swing but it’s tough getting to them before the crickets do – they chew holes in them and then crawl inside…yuck. The tomatoes are still trying valiantly to produce, but we’ve had some cool wet weather and the big ones are tending to rot before they can ripen. The leaves have some sort of ick on them and there are whiteflies and caterpillars moving in on the weakened plants. I prune away the bad stuff as I pick the tomatoes — I just can’t bring myself to chop down all the vines that are full of flowers and ripening fruit — but I suspect there is a balance that is reached where the amount of viable produce vs. the amount of work and mess is no longer worthwhile, and I wonder if allowing the plants to continue is possibly even counterproductive; am I letting disease and pests get a good foothold so that I’ll have to fight them twice as early next year?

I hate being in the position of deciding who dies and when… for that reason I’ve always coped better with crops where I am harvesting fruits and vegetables the plants produce rather than the plants themselves, and have shied away from growing things like cabbage or radishes. While I perfectly understand, on an intellectual level, that my overly sentimental attitude is counterproductive, I can’t help it… though I imagine that if I ever did have to live off the land, I’d have to toughen up quick – or starve.

The one thing that fall has going for it this year is that I am really worn out with tending the garden. Some crops did very well this year, (that beastly cherry tomato vine!) others had issues, but produced decently (the squash, the peppers) and a few were a complete bust (we got exactly three strawberries and a chipmunk stole the best one, the cantaloupe plants never fruited) but it’s been a lot of daily work making sure that as much of the harvest as possible is not wasted. I’ve got a half dozen assorted winter squash sitting in the bottom of the pantry, three bags of frozen butternut gnocchi, two loaves of frozen zucchini bread, and lots of frozen tomatoes, tomato sauce, and pizza sauce. I even canned six jars of jalapeno jelly. There have been a lot of days where I came home from work and then spent all of my hours until bedtime picking, cleaning, processing, or cooking; it will be a relief to have this time back for other pursuits.

Not following the script

Chris — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:16:41 +0000

The rose in our front yard, after losing all of its leaves for some reason earlier in the summer, has rallied and graced our yard with another round of pretty yellow flowers…

…and something else.

This is the second ‘not yellow’ flower it’s produced… beautiful and unexpected. I don’t know enough about roses to know how or why this is possible, but it’s a nice surprise.

The tomato plant that ate Hendersonville

Chris — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 20:15:25 +0000

Two months ago, we planted four tomato plants in our raised beds

…and now we have THIS.

Seriously, you could hide a mid-size sedan in this mess. In fact, if you look close, you will see someone has.

There is a purple Cherokee, a Costoluto Genovese, and a pineapple, but most of what you are looking at is the devil beast known as Matt’s Wild Cherry. I calculated today that it’s covering about a hundred square feet at this point.

It has engulfed the other three tomatoes, the mugwort, and the wormwood. It’s heading for the highway…

… and it’s over my head.

I have to crawl through a jungle of vines to get the tomatoes, which it produces at a very fast rate:

But wow! These are the best tasting little tomatoes, ever. We will definitely grow this variety again – but not near anything else.

The 2011 garden final list (I swear I am not bringing anything else home!)

Chris — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:25:13 +0000

Keep in mind that all this is in addition to our various perennials that came back up from last year, like the rosemary, oregano, daisies, roses, blueberries, etc. I need to get some good pictures of the garden, it seems to rain every time I try – NOT that I am going to complain about rain!

Tomatoes

purple Cherokee
Matt’s wild cherry
Pineapple
Costoluto Genovese
Italian tree tomato (a friend grew this from seed, it’s actually 2 plants growing too close together to separate)

Okra

2 Clemson Spineless
2 burgundy (planted these because first two aren’t thriving)

Herbs

winter savory
french tarragon
dill
3 sweet basil
1 curly basil
parsley
chives
2 more thyme plants (in addition to last year’s two)
wormwood
rue
mugwort
holy basil/tulsi
3 calendula
cuban oregano

Peppers

Golden Marconi
Jupiter
Jalapeno
‘Fooled You’(mild jalapeno)
Pimento
Orange Bell
Poblano (2 because first one isn’t growing well so we bought a second)

Other Veggies and Fruits

2 black zucchinis
1 Waltham butternut squash
2 cantaloupes from seed
1 ‘mystery’ squash or melon that had sprouted in our compost bin, as yet unidentified
rainbow chard from seed
leaf lettuce
arugula
4 nasturtiums (this is an edible flower)
2 strawberries
rabbiteye blueberry (for helping pollinate the existing two plants)

Flowers

8 giant zinnias
2 violet queen cleomes
2 gardenia bushes
Assorted daffodills, tulips, narcissus, and hyacynths
1 tasmanian violet (viola) *we brought this in as a houseplant
3 pots of wildflower mix from seed
1 giant Russian sunflower

Bertha became salsa

Chris — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:39 +0000

…and what a tasty, tasty, 1.75 lb tomato that was!

Plenty more where that came from

and now the bell peppers are finally ripening.

I roasted some little squashes and a mutant pumpkin today, Joy made salsa and curry zucchini muffins with walnuts, and we’re going to take a stab at cream of tomato soup with basil in the next few days.

End of July

Chris — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:59:15 +0000

A few updated garden pictures as one hot summer month comes to an end…

The tomato forest – if you look out the bedroom window now, all you see is tomato plant… and the one to the right is working it’s way toward the gutter above now.

Mishmash of tomatoes, peppers, elephant ear plant, pumpkins, okra and squash. Next time we’ll space things out a bit more, it’s almost impossible to walk through here now.

One of the roses rallied for a second wave of blooms. It came from florida, so maybe it’s used to this much heat?

The feral melon patch. There are now a few plants that look like tomatoes coming up as well. Why can’t things grow this easily when I try planting them on purpose?

Okra bloom

The other side of the porch is also threatening to become engulfed in tomato vine as well.

What the heck are we supposed to do with this?

Chris — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:42:23 +0000

The day has finally come… big Bertha was ready to pick. Not sure what to do with her, but we had some fun doing comparative size studies…

Human head vs. mutant tomato

Mutant tomato menacing Paddy

The one on the left is actually smarter.

Simon meets Bertha

Bertha and one of her siblings

Bertha and one of the pink tomato cubes. I’ll bet it’s afraid for its life.

More volunteers (or, “why not to use the compost before it’s ‘cooked’”)

Chris — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 23:23:41 +0000

So I took that random 6′ privacy fence panel we’d had replaced and cut it up a few weeks back, with the help of some power tools we found at a thrift store (total cost under $25 including new blades)…

Then I made a couple of small raised beds for next year out of the pieces:

Last week I lined them with cardboard, and added several layers of newspaper, then last year’s barrel of compost to the bigger one. It didn’t really fill it, so I just dumped this year’s bin in as well.

Then, when Joy’s mom was here yesterday and we were showing her the garden, we found a bit of a ‘surprise’. I have no idea what they are. We had a cantaloupe a few weeks ago, some watermelon before that. I think I tossed some okra that was too woody to eat recently, so there were lots of seeds in that mess. There are several dozen of these buggers. Guess we wait and see what they turn into.

In other garden news, the squash and okra are flourishing, as well as the tomatoes, peppers, and the elephant ear:

This was supposed to be a pie pumpkin? there were several seedlings – some are making pumpkins, and then there’s this. Can we eat it? How do we tell when it’s ready? Are we going to step outside one day and hear a voice boom “Feed me, Seymore!”?

The Mr. Stripey (hybrids) have crested the 8′ stakes and are making a break for the porch.

This is a Cherokee purple monster. That mass in the middle that looks like two tomatoes is one big ugly goon. It must weigh at least two pounds and it hasn’t turned.

pruning the brandywine bush…

… which is also making monsters.

What Mr. Stripey lacked in size (it was supposed to be a beefsteak variety) it makes up for in volume, and they are tasty little devils!

A big weed we pulled out of the garden

Flower power

Chris — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 19:02:11 +0000

Last year when we were still waiting on the closing for the house, I drove Joy nuts bringing home plants in anticipation of our own garden. One of them was this sad, bedraggled castoff stargazer lily that was sitting in a shopping cart marked down to $2 at Ingles. Last year, we couldn’t even be sure it was still alive. It didn’t flower. This year it grew slow, but was clearly going to bloom…

Yesterday afternoon we were greeted by this – I swear I did not photoshop the color on it It has two more buds getting ready to bloom.

We’ve also got some ‘volunteer’ sunflowers under the bird feeder. (look close and you’ll see the flower has a visitor)

The dill bloomed, and we’ve left the flowers since the bees seem to love them. Apparently, ants as well.

Even the hostas are blooming.

We’ve got a never ending bounty of marigolds, and the other unidentified but pretty flowers, as well.

I love this time of year.

Sasquash!

Chris — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:34:10 +0000

Our ‘grape’ tomato is showing no characteristics of what we previously have had for that type – that is, instead of a tall vining plant with large clusters of very small fruit, we have a small, sturdy, bushy-type plant with small clusters of what are already much larger than a grape tomato, still growing and a long way from ripening. So we got hosed on that purchase, and I think the yellow squash probably came from the same vendor….

Some of the smaller forming baby squashes look like they couldn’t decide what color to be

and the others grew, within a couple of days, into striped monsters. I don’t think yellow squash is supposed to have stripes?

We picked the larger one already…

…though I am not sure what the heck we are supposed to do with it.

Our best guess is the plant we bought was grown from seeds hybridized with some sort of gourd. Squourds?