Weekly Gardening Thread
Posted on 09/11/2009 3:59:51 AM PDT by Red_Devil 232
Much was given, many were lost on this day,
A man of terror tried to take our spirit away.
Do not let our new found spirit and unity fade,
As you look on this flag, remember this day ...
9-11-01
Weekly Gardening Thread
Ping to the Weekly Gardening Ping List.
I hope all of you will stop by.
This is typically a low volume ping list. Once a week for the thread and every once in a while for other FR threads posted that might be of interest.
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Good morning RD.
Good morning, and thank you for the ping.
I am in green bean heaven or .ell depending on how one looks at it. I picked 3, 3 gallon buckets of KY pole beans yesterday afternoon. And one 3 gallon bucket of purple beans after spending the day making a cooker full of spaghetti sauce and preparing a cooker full of French green beans. I am salsa(ed) out as well at 50 pints.
Want some beans? I am about gardened out and looks as though I will have beans of three varieties until frost. Still have sweet potatoes to be dug, leeks in the ground, and new radishes, beets to work up, and still a few tomatoes of 4 different varieties.
Parts of me are ready for frost even though I hate cold weather.
Good morning all.
It has yet to stop raining on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
The current 2 month (Aug 1 - Sept 30) record rainfall total is 21 inches. With 19 days to go in September we are sitting at 19.5 inches.
The ground is fully saturated and there are flooding problems throughout the county. The amount of rain since yesterday afternoon, coupled with this morning’s tides have equaled flooded fields for me, as the creek breached its bank.
Still solarizing till the new moon. Hope those pesky nematodes about gone. 10 weeks of plastic, heat and water is supposed to do the trick.
Will plant pole beans more tomatoes and a variety of fall crops. In Florida you really have enough heat through November to grow almost anything. Can't wait to grow winter onions, spinach and beets during our cool days of winter.
Until then. Hope your Irish Setters are well and spouse too ;D!
I will probably plant my fall garden and aerate the yard this weekend. I planted shallots last weekend. Potatoes are just coming up.
Freedom has never been free.
Mornin’ all!
Sad and mad all at the same time. Saw several people putting flags up and then lowering to half mast on the way into work. :(
Was going to plant fall stuff Labor Day weekend. Glad I didn’t. We got 8-10 inches of rain Sun night thru Mon aft., depending on where in the county you live. Good thing my chickens are on a “hill” or they’d be ducks.
I am watching the Fox News replay of 9-11 with tears in my eyes!
See the following, if you haven’t already.
HR2749 The Food and Safety Enhancement Act coming up for VOTE in SENATE. BEWARE THE RESULTS!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2331751/posts
The page behind the following link shows who voted in favor of that bill in the House (including Bachmann).
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2306275/posts?q=1&;page=51
...article and explanation.
HR 2749: WELCOME TO THE GLOBAL PLANTATION
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hannes/doreen100.htm
Ok I am done. Back to gardening.
Like you I am just about tired of picking tomatoes and peppers and trying to figure out what to do with them.
Anyone have a ketchup recipe?
I am over run with canned tomatoes and tomato Purée. Pickled and dried peppers.
I love eggplant but will only plant one maybe two next year!
I planted six jalapeno plants this year! Next year I will only do two! I have ziploc bags full of dried Tabasco and cayanne peppers. Beautiful plants but I won't need any next year. Oh, and no Habanero next year either!
I had three basil plants I have basil frozen as whole leaves, dried a lot and made a lot of pesto and then froze. I finally just let the plants go to flower.
I am planning next years garden.
Amazing what a small area - tilled and cared for can produce!
Good Morning!
Well, I’ve got the Late Blight, so today I am scavanging what is left of the tomatoes and that’ll be that.
The basil is coming out and more fall lettuce is going in.
We’re going to have a small heat-wave this week, then who knows what’s around the corner? We sure could use some rain, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
The 700 acres of sweet corn are just about ready to be harvested, so I’ll be helping myself to some of that over the next few days, too.
It’s always somethin’!
Never forget!
I am green with envy....truly! You must live in my beloved Midwest (I’m stuck on the W.Coast)
Reporting from beautiful, well, L.A.
My fellow gardener (adult daughter) and I have most of our winter vege seed in. Beets, broccoli, chard, etc. We pulled carrots last weekend (delicious!) and still have lots of eggplant producing (also delicious). Her Hubby tok the last giant zuccini to his restaurant and chef created a fried zuccini appetizer that the customers loved. Now we are watching three pumpkins grow and hoping they get really big in time for Halloween (carved son-in-law’s name on one; he’s an adorable big kid). Told them that when the grandkids arrive they have to have names that two letter initials will suffice...
The Setters are doing fine. They still think 3am is the time to wake up!
My wife is a manager at Wal-Mart. She just got transfered to another store that is about 35 miles away. 45 to 50 min. drive. Her hours are 7:30am to 8:00pm. Long long hours when you count in the prep time in the morning and round trip drive! She works 3 days on and then has 3 days off.
If I could afford the cost of overnight shipping I would gladly ship them to you.
I plan to dry what excess tomatoes I continue to get.
I forgot about my loaded pepper plants. Thinking I will stuff and freeze them for a side dish come December. All I planted this year was the Bell variety. And dehydrate some for adding to chili and soups.
Today though after picking all those beans I feel like I hit the proverbial wall. And I am about out of empty jars and want to save what is left to put away some sweet potatoes.
I have not tried it but I have seen a "Mrs.Wages" ketchup mix. I use "Mrs.Wages" salsa mix and yesterday tried for the first time a spaghetti mix and it tasted almost as good as my own everything fresh mix. I do not have a recipe for spaghetti sauce I just start throwing in until it taste good.
I have new onions come up from seed I spread from some of last year's onions that survived the winter I let go to seed. I am going to mulch them so I will have green onions until they get frozen out. And I am tooo tired to list the herbs I am drying.
I am very thankful that I have been able to reap a great harvest from my seed planting. Just need to get to the finish line. Next year I will be prepared for a war against the corn ravaging raccoons.
We need a lot of recipes and ideas for everything we grow in our gardens!
We shouldn’t foreget. What a horrible day.
Yes, I live in fly over country. But not that far from one of those liberalville cities where some spend night and day figuring out how redistribute others peoples wealth. I was raised on a farm and if we did not grow it we did not eat it. So gardening has always been in my blood and while the eating might be considered plain and basic, it does allow an allowance for things like internet. After election 2008 there was to me more of an urgency to put away enough food for a bit of time. Never know if or when the UNIONS might decide to strike.
I have been freezing my bell peppers. I just cut into strips and place on a big cookie sheet and freez so they are not sticking together then put them into ziploc bags. Works well. I should try drying just incase we lose electric for a week or two (it has happened - Katrina).
I’ll ask for it from my son-in-law this weekend and then post it next Friday. Stand by.
Glad to hear you finally got some relief!
I actually got a crop of tomatoes. I sprayed them with copper sulfate and the weather cleared up and warmed up so the blight was held at bay.
I’ve already canned 9 pints of stewed tomatoes and am hoping for two canner loads today, after I go and see what is out there that’s ripe.
I bought some pears and canned those up and will have to see how they came out.
I have a couple of pear trees and they produced some fruit this year but for some reason they just were not any good. This was the first year for them to have fruit and I am kind of wondering if that had anything to do with the quality of the fruit?
I did everything by the book for those nematodes. The soil temp has been up to 120 F on a few of those dog days of July and August. It has been raining lately so it cools down in the afternoon.
I found this commercial product called Ditera Nematicide that I can get in 10 lb containers used commercially. Supposed to be as good as the old product they banned. I'm gonna try this in the spring before planting next year. Pass it on to your ping list if they haven't heard of it. It is a little hard to find but probably not in your neck of the woods.
Nice to hear from you. Florida FReeper
Do you know what kind of pears that they are? Hard pears(sand pears) are NOT good for eating. But they are suitable for cooking. I got started canning by making pears preserves from sand pears. This could be the problem, but maybe not. Am not a pear expert.
I have no idea how to handle these pear trees. They are all in their second year after being planted. I was really surprized to see two of them flowering very early this past spring. I have pictures of them on my home page.
I can't remember what she called them.
I am glad to finally see some rain. We are 32” [annual average rainfall for our area] short for the past 23 months, so that is like missing an entire year of rain.
I don’t know a thing about pear trees, except my sister used to have one and she never sprayed and always got a crop, even though the quality wasn’t the best.
My experience with fruit in general is that the first year of producing doesn’t usually do too well. It takes a couple years to get established.
Yeah, that is why was surprized to see fruit on two of them this year. I just don’t know enough about gardening and probably never will. That is why I like posting this thread every week - I get to read all the good info and advice!
Anyone on this thread freeze tomatoes for later use? (Salsa, sauce, etc.)
There a quite a few who have said they do the freeze thing on tomatoes. They say they are basicly only good for sauces and once thawed and the skins just slip off. I have not done it.
Yes I have. The first time I didn’t process them first, just froze them whole. That worked and they were even easy to skin as the thawing skins simply peeled off. However, they had a ‘taste’. The next year I peeled them, cut them up, cooked them a few minutes and froze them in plastic vacuum sealed containers. Much better taste but more work.
Sounds similar to the method I was considering...the hot water/cold water bit to remove the skins; then vacuum sealing the innards. I am up to my hindquarters in tomatoes (blight spared me for some reason, but many others were wiped out), but my hot peppers are lagging a bit. Ergo; I am trying to keep tomatoes around until my peppers are ready.
I had ther exact opposite this year. A plethora of hot peppers, but just as the tomatoes started to come on good, the blight and hornworms showed up and killed ‘em. Too bad we don’t have a barter board here!
I heard the quality isn’t so great when tomatoes are frozen.
The up side of canning them, besides better keeping power, is that if the power goes out, you don’t lose them as you would with freezing them and you can keep them for years, as opposed to months with a freezer taste.
Canning is more work, but I think that in the long run, for tomatoes, it’s way more worth it.
Considering the ice storms around here; power loss is certainly something we were worried about...still trying to make up our minds. We just don't want to lose our tomatoes.
Many people in our area (even our neighborhood) lost their tomatoes to blight. I grow mine in outdoor containers, but I can’t see why that would make a difference.
I am also glad to read you’ve gotten some relief.
Alas I have the opposite problem. We’ve had so much rain the water no longer has any place to go.
High tide on the Bay must have been around 10 this morning because when a friend picked me up to go shopping (my car committed Fordicide 2 weeks ago)at about 11, we had serious trouble with flooding on the roads, including having to detour around closed roads and even the highway was seriously flooded. Much of the road flooding had receded by the time we got back at 12:30, but the fields, creeks, and ditches were still full of water.
Well, we have been waiting for some time. I just got this breaking news in my email.
About 10 inches of rain have fallen in that area since last night, according to the National Weather Service.
10 inches of (much needed, I know) rain in such a short period of time is not a good thing, no matter how desperately the rain is needed.
One canner full of stewed tomatoes put up this week, when they finally started to ripen-—just in time for cool weather to slow them down again. I was only able to count two branches of one bush, and got to 39 before I quit. Plenty there, just not much red among all that green yet.
Still waiting for the pimientos to start showing color, though the Alma paprikas are almost ready; the first two have already come inside, as have several Anaheims, yellow banana, and a few bells. One eggplant picked so far, with another half dozen on the only plant.
Summer type quashes have mercifully slowed way down, though still bearing; the winter squash are & pumpkins are ripening nicely.
a few cantaloupe have ripened, with more coming. Just in case, I looked for recipes using unripe cantaloupe. Good thing we like pickled melon, as that was about all I could find.
Last of the beets will come inside in a few days.
The Hickory King corn may or may not ripen enough to roast a few ears before frost.
Apples are ready to pick.
Garden & apples should be finished just in time to clean out the kitchen and start processing deer, antelope, and wild turkey.
I'm certain of the deer & turkey; the ranch is crawling with them; antelope is more problematical, despite having tags and possibly a decent place to hunt.
At least the freezer has a full quota of peas, corn, beans, squash, and beats.
Have three varieties of beans producing like crazy (kentucky blue pole beans, Aetna and Topaz bush beans). Pulled up three turnips and two rutabagas. They have done very good! The largest turnip was 15 oz and the largest rutabaga was 2.4 lbs. I have a cool, dark room to store turnips, rutabagas and potatos. Am also getting lots of summer squash. As soon as the beans get frozen back I will be preparing that area for four types of garlic I will be planting this fall. Lots of green tomatos, but they are not in a hurry to get ripe.
I talked to a cousin living in the Jarrell area and they don’t know how much rain actually fell. All the gages have run over. They had a five gallon plastic bucket in the yard, and it was almost full. The local news said that area got 15 inches of rain.
They had to pen the cattle in the barnyard since the runoff had torn down the fences by the road. One road had the pavement washed off and many roads were closed for high water.
We had two inches when I got home yesterday, and another 3/4 inch during the night. I sure hope we get some heavier rain for runoff here, since Lake Travis is 50’ low.
OMG...instead of freezing tomatoes today; my wife decided to try her hand at roasting vegetables. She just made a roasted tomato, pepper and garlic salsa that we were going to try to freeze, but it isn’t going to make it to the freezer. I wish I could share this with everyone on the garden thread...
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