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Posted on 09/09/2011 5:02:47 AM PDT by Red_Devil 232
Good morning gardeners. It has been beautiful weather here in East Central Mississippi. We received about 3 inches of rain out of TS Lee on Monday and the daytime highs have been in the mid to high 80s with overnight lows in the 50s. It is 50 right now. This is quite cool for this time of year for us. My garden is basically done for the year. I bottled my first batch of beer yesterday, 30 quarts. Now it is wait for two weeks and maybe up to a couple of months, while it conditions, until it is ready to drink.
If you are a gardener or you are just starting out and are in need of advice or just encouragement please feel free to join in and enjoy the friendly discussion. Our Freeper community is full of gardeners, each with varying interests and skill levels from Master Gardener to novice.
I hope all your gardens are flourishing.
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You do have quite a variety of veggies. Some I have never seen. Is that Old Time Tennessee melon like a cantaloupe?
Yeah, similar to the heavily ribbed types they often bring up here from southern Illinois or Missouri. I’ve had good luck with it. Sweet, productive, reliable.
We are finally getting a few tomatoes and peppers to harvest here in NE Missouri. There are still many more green tomatoes, my Romas are loaded, but very green. It’s been in the upper 60s/low 70s for the highs this week, so not warm enough. It should warm up again this weekend. I hope so!
I got enough green beans and gold potatoes to make beans and taters to go with dinner last night. We had BLTs, with garden tomatoes. It was wonderful to put home grown food on the table. I sure hope I get to can my Romas. Not enough Blue Lake plants this year, unfortunately. I have never grown enough beans to put up. :(
Our Brussels sprouts look like they are trying to make little sprouts, finally! And the broccoli is attempting to make heads as well. Here’s hoping. Next year I will not be planting an heirloom broccoli, I need something more reliable.
Does anybody have favorite broccoli/Brussels/cauliflower/cabbage cultivars?
Sadly; it doesn’t appear that Nate will be stopping by...the East Coast better keep an eye on Maria...
Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage is my favorite. Cone heads, not too big, very sweet. Have had good luck with Green Goliath broccoli and White Vienna kohlrabi.
Forgot where I got the seed, Baker Creek and Southern Exposure sell it though.
OMG. How’d you break your foot?
I’ve got lots of tomatoes and a few small watermelons yet to harvest. Lots of herbs still out there, but I’m just about ready to tear everything out for the winter. A couple more weeks.
My squash weren’t too successful this year. Ad the cucumbers were a bust.
Wow, I hope your foot heals soon! If you need to you can borrow my old wheelchair, I’m not using it anymore.
Our tomatoes are so stunted we’ve only gotten 2 cherry tomatoes so far out of the 10 tomatoes I planted, I’d be glad to come over and help pick some of yours this weekend.
Texas has been a great place for businesses, but we are close to having water shortages. We were hoping for Nate to hit us, but none of the projected tracks look good for now.
“My zucchini has had many flowers, but no fruit...I have two baby yellow bell peppers, lots of flowers on the green pepper with no fruit.”
Do you have bees visiting your zucchini? Zucchini are insect-pollinated, since they have separate male and female flowers. If you don’t have bees, you can hand pollinate them by clipping a male flower, carefully pulling away the petals to leave the stamen exposed, and then “painting” the pollen inside the female flowers. You need to do this early in the morning while the flowers are open.
With the peppers the problem could be temperature, since some peppers don’t set as well when it’s really hot. Also, have the winds been calm? Peppers and tomatoes are self-pollinating, but need a little wind to shake the pollen from the male part of the flower to the female part. If the wind is not doing the trick, you can try hand-pollinating your peppers by vibrating the flowers with an electric toothbrush or electric shaver.
There are lots of videos on YouTube showing how to hand pollinate - just search for squash pollination or pepper pollination. Good luck!
Earlier this week I sprinkled bone meal throughout my garden, hopefully that will help balance out the nutrients. My watermelons are starting to turn golden so they should be ready to pick soon. (They’re Golden Midget melons)
I picked 2 pints of raspberries yesterday and froze half so they wouldn’t spoil before I could do something with them. I also picked a few green beans but those are going to seed now, I couldn’t get out and pick for a few days and most of the pods are too mature for green beans, so I’m just letting them ripen. My zucchinis seem to be recovering from whatever it was that hit them, there are baby zucchinis all over the vines now. There was one that was hidden until it got too big, so I’m letting that ripen for seed. It’s hanging on the trellis with one end touching the ground, and if i sit next to it it’s almost as tall as me!
My cucumbers did something weird just a day or two before i spread the bone meal. The leaves that were on the trellis all died, all at the same time, but the vines themselves are still alive. The vines are starting to sprout new leaves, and i picked all the developing cukes I could find so the vines will focus on regrowing, but I can’t figure out why all the leaves would die at once like that. They weren’t even wilting and then suddenly they died. And it happened before the cold snap recently, so I don’t think it was temperature related.
I’ve borrowed some books on grafting from the library. This summer I’ve found black cherries, crabapples, and grapes growing wild on my land, and I want to try grafting some sweeter varieties onto them next spring. It’s going to be a long winter with all the dreams I can’t wait to start on next spring.
Kudzo
I received some Datil pepper seed in the mail the other day, 25 to be exact. Decided to try germinating 5 of them and save the rest for next spring. I put them in soil then placed them in the oven with the light on overnight then outside during the day while it was warm and sunny. I now have 2 sprouts to coddle over the winter with perhaps a couple more on the way. They germinated much faster than I thought they would.
Getting lots of zucchini and yellow squash. Some banana peppers and jalapenos. So far the tomatoes have lots of flowers, but not a single tomato so far. About time to dig up potatoes. It got down as low as 33F this week.
I’d go ahead and cook the damaged butternuts/acorns. Once they’ve lost their structural integrity you have to assume that microbes are present. I wash mine, cut them open & scoop out seeds/stringy stuff (set that aside) and put them face down in a big glass baking dish with 1/2” of water. Tent the whole thing with foil and bake them. Scoop them out into those little square freezer containers (bespak?) and freeze. The rest should store fine. I usually cook mine along, I don’t have room to store all the cooked squashes we have this year in my freezer. JADB does more ‘adventurous’ stuff with her squashes so I’m sure she has more ideas. I’m limited in ideas by picky kid appetites.
Now, put the seedy portion in a seive and pick out the seeds. Rinse them really thoroughly and put them on a paper towel to dry. Really dry. Store them in a glass jar in a cool dark spot for next year. If this was the only variety of c. moschata you grew (butternuts and acorns don’t cross with each other w/o some effort, if at all) they should come true. Not sure about the acorns though. They might cross with something a neighbor grew (but it will still be squash) And, besides, even *if* they did cross they’ll still grow out to be winter squash. (not sure about the acorns) I’m not the only one on this board that grows ‘squashkins’ that are mysteries. I had a whole compost pile (and they ran into my yard wholesale!) full of ‘mystery squashkins’ this year. We’ve harvested nearly 400lbs of them so far. All sizes, all shapes. All great tasting winter squash. As my dad says ‘it’ll all eat’. He grew up poor and country. If things get really bad you’ll have a nice little cache of seeds you can share with neighbors and fellow church members next spring. They don’t take up much room and hungry people won’t care if they’re a perfect replica of butternut or not. We usually try to keep a stash of winter squash, sweet pepper, hot pepper and tomato seeds that might be best described as ‘mysterious but tasty!’. Just in case. You can always throw them out when you get next years crop.
I have earned the right to whine!
This is the first time I’ve been confined to quarters since that ‘misunderstanding’ with The General back when I was in the Army, LOL!
Ok, those melons are gorgeous, we’ll have to try some of those at my house next summer. Do the fire ants love your sorghum like they loooooove mine? I can’t get close to mine w/o getting an ant or two. Fire ants should have been denied entry to the ark IMHO. ! Squash vine borers too.
‘Life’ broke my foot! It was a stress fracture that had been building and finally fractured. No bone chips; just a clean break, so no surgery - just rest. Grrrr! I’ve been on the fly at work since February because we were short-handed, so my body is finally saying, “ENOUGH, ALREADY!”
I take heart in the fact that it’s the 5th metatarsal of the right foot; the exact same break that Ballerinas get, LOL!
GORGEOUS!! :)
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