Garden Gleanings II

My garden has been producing like gangbusters. I have been very pleased with my harvests this summer.

Sunday May 31, 2009

Sunday June 7, 2009

June 7, 2009
This was my first watermelon harvested. Not so sweet, but juicy and crispy, just how I like watermelon. Dh was disappointed when he first saw the insides because he thought it wasn't ripe. But then I told him it is supposed to be yellow, it's Yellow Pony!
Monday June 8, 2009
I picked the huge tomato today. I thought it was Pruden's Purple when I showed it on my blog first, and it was so colorful I thought it to be Big Rainbow, but now that I read the descriptions of the two again, I think it might be Pruden's Purple.

Friday June 12, 2009
My biggest tomato yield this year. Lots of tomatoes! I got ds1 out into the garden with me to help pick them all! The tiny scalloped squash were not pollinated, but can still be eaten as baby squash.

Friday June 12, 2009
One of my tall and beautiful Black Russian sunflowers.
Saturday June 13, 2009
Probably my last harvest of Swiss Chard. I've rigged up a shaded area for the remaining Swiss Chard plants that did not go to seed. I am hoping to keep them alive over the summer. In this bunch you can see one of my Manyel tomatoes. Here is the description from Pinetree Seeds: "HEIRLOOM Indeterminate. Possibly Native American. This is a true, bright yellow tomato, there are no reddish tones at all. The flavor is great, zingy, citrus-like. A very heavy yielder, Manyel produces slightly oblate, blemish free fruit throughout the summer. Fruit grow in clusters of 3 to 5 and run from 10 ounces to a pound. You begin to get fruit in the early-midseason."
Friday June 19, 2009

I'm trying to work up my energy to plant seeds again as it is almost time to plant something, I just can't remember off the top of my head exactly what. My tomato plants are doing really well, and I hope they thrive until fall when they should begin flowering and producing again. Some of the tomato plants haven't produced even one tomato, so I hope to see them produce in the fall.

Until next time.

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Saturday Surprises

I threatened to tell one of Kev's bosses on him if he didn't come out and help me in the garden yesterday morning. Thanks, Mrs. Merry.

While out there, he asked me why I like gardening. I was explaining that one of the reasons I like it is because I like being surprised. At this time of the year there are lots of surprises, like the watermelon I found on Friday. Here are some of the fun surprises I found.


First of all, this HUGE tomato!! I was tucking the stems into the tomato cages when I noticed the little tomatoes that can be seen in the upper left part of the photo. I hadn't noticed them before, and THEN I noticed this really giant one. Probably the largest tomato I've ever grown. I am pretty sure it is a Pruden's Purple. But I'm not sure, since I lost the schematic for where I planted which types of tomatoes in my garden. Anyway, you can see by the photo that the tomato fits into the palm of my hand - it is huge!

Then I was looking around the eggplants and found this one that is about one inch long. I planted some light colored eggplant, this one looks like Ravena, which should be a light green colored eggplant.

I told Kev I was just sure a cucumber should have developed by now. So I was looking and looking and found this:

Kev pulled out all of the corn stalks and took them over to the goats. They loved them.



Here's the corn. We also picked all the carrots that were left in the bed. Kev's making me a carrot cake for my birthday.

Here is some of the corn that was inside the husks.

Unfortunately, the ones pictured above were the "cream of the crop", and they weren't too amazing. You can see in the photo below that many of the ears didn't get pollinated properly so didn't fill out.

After Kev pulled out all the corn, he spied this tiny little guy. That's my fingernail! He was tiny! Kev's camera did great getting some good pictures of the tiny little thing.

While we were out working in the garden... Tiger strolled up. He isn't allowed to go outside, but every once in a while he sneaks out. I love this photo that Kevin took of him.

Poor Tiger. It was a little too hot and humid out there for him. He was begging to come inside after about twenty minutes.

Until next time.

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Oooooh, what I found in my garden yesterday morning!

Okay, here's picture A. See if you can find what I saw. :-) You can click on the photo to enlarge it.

Picture B. A little bit closer. Click on this one to enlarge. Or just scroll down to the next photo to see what I found.

Isn't that cute?!

Now here are Picture A and Picture B again, with the baby watermelon circled. I've seen many female flowers on these watermelon vines, but they have never started into actual watermelons. I have never pollinated watermelon. Never really thought about it.


Eggplant flowers are all-in-one. I am pretty sure this one is pollinated and one day soon an eggplant will protrude from the green stem.

These are butternut squash babies!! Of course there were two females one morning, and no male flowers to pollinate! I did cheat and use a male flower from a different variety, just to see if it would work. I am not sure if it will, because butternut is a winter squash and everything else in my garden is summer squash. I do know if the butternut continue to grow, the seeds will be considered a hybrid. I could plant the seeds, but they won't grow up to produce butternut squash. This would be an interesting experiment indeed.

Most tomatoes that you get from the store are hybrids, so you shouldn't plant the seeds as the resulting fruit won't come "true" to what you had originally. Sometimes the parent tomatoes are so good, but the resulting hybrids are delicious.

Here is a Benning's Green Tint scallop squash hiding under a leave.

Here is my harvest for the day.


It was raining in Friday morning. I couldn't stay out in the garden long, because it really started to pour.

This morning it was cloudy, and very humid. The temperature was nice. I found at least two dozen male squash flowers and not even one female flower.

It has been a stressful week. My employer finally agreed to have someone come in (Mrs. Wonder) and instruct me in the use of the electronic accounting system which I've been trying to put together for the past three years. I have been so disgusted that it has taken so long, but it has been like pulling teeth trying to get the data that I need. It has been an uphill battle all the way, because my boss really doesn't want to stop doing the books manually.

Mrs. Wonder was here on Tuesday and Wednesday and there was more than the usual amount of drama. Our IT guy quit (thank goodness) and people set up camp on both sides. Most people didn't like him, but a couple of people had been pulled into his "world" and bought into all his hard luck stories. After the first dozen or so I pulled back real far, afraid it would rub off into my life.

Mrs. Wonder had promised we would have everything pulled together, as I had many of the parts completed. I knew better than to believe that, for how could she know everything that had to be done. We were not able to get everything completed, but for the last two hours she was there I grilled her on all the questions I've had but could never get answers for, and she gave instructions for getting all the current numbers into the system. Because I have some but not all, so I have been very stressed about how to get the numbers in there correctly. It is actually not that difficult, but I just didn't know how to go about doing it.

Mrs. Wonder specifically promised we'd complete our first payroll run, but that didn't happen until the next day, after she'd left. I had to enter quarterly year to date numbers, then April payroll numbers and finally the May payroll that had already been done. Finally I was able to actually print out a real payroll. We now have YEAR TO DATE totals on our check stubs!! I am so happy about that.

One day we'll also know how much vacation and sick time we have available at any given time, but my boss couldn't agree to that until our fiscal year is over.

I'm just trying to take it easy this weekend. I feel very tired and drained, and I have no energy. I am sure it is because of the stress of the last week.

This year the entire United States celebrates with me on my birthday. Monday the 25th. I am not yet sure what I want to do for my birthday. Part of me wants to go to Savers for their 50% off sale, but I don't know if I will have enough energy to want to leave the house at all.

Until next time.

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Squash Harvest

My first squash harvest. One of our church sistren also gave me a zucchini squash from her garden (not shown). Thanks, Lisa Datadyne!

Here are two of my favorite squash recipes:

Zucchini Custard Casserole
Zucchini Soup

Until next time.

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Growing Watermelon Upright Using Hay Twine

FINALLY, I have FINALLY found a use for hay twine!!! Lo, all these seven years of owning goats and wishing there was a use for the hay twine which builds up in piles around the goat yard... I looked through dh's pile of "stuff" and found some rails which were just the right size to put into the garden, insert up into the chicken wire at the top to keep the rails in position, and then push into the ground just a few inches.


Next I tied the hay twine horizontally from one rail to the next. There were six holes in the rails, so I fed the hay twine into the holes and pulled taut at the rail on the other side and tied a knot.

Then I tied twine just around the rail itself, in between those ones actually within a hole.

After I finished all the horizontal pieces, I started at the bottom and going vertically tied a knot into each horizontal piece of twine. All the way up, I tied a knot onto each horizontal piece. I am so excited about this! My great idea to put the watermelon right next to the garden "wall" so it could grow up the chicken wire wasn't working out too good because the watermelon's growing tips kept insisting on feeding itself right out of the garden. If it hadn't been for the sunflower bed in front that is still protected with chicken wire, the growing tips would surely have been eaten by birds or other critters.

After I finished tying everything, I fed the watermelon vines up through the hay twine.

The tallest one was about 2 feet long!

I am so excited about this idea. It took 22 pieces of hay twine to build this one, and that's 7 bales of hay worth of hay twine. Now if I just put together about 10,000 more of these I'll have used up all the hay twine that's lying all over the yard. ;-)

Until next time.

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Sick Tomatoes

Quite by accident, I discovered that some of my tomato plants are sick. I was taking a break from cleaning the house today and I don't even remember why but I went onto Flickr and searched for Arizona garden vegetables. I guess I was curious to see how other gardeners are doing.

Read more about what I found on my Flickr account here: Sick Tomatoes 1.

I'll have to take some time tomorrow afternoon and pull the sick ones out. :-(

Until next time.

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Will The Real Baby Carrots Please Stand Up?

I know you've probably heard the story already about how today's baby carrots aren't really baby carrots, but grown up carrots whittled down into baby carrots. No? Just click on the link and read the story if you're interested.

I was curious about what the "Bunny-Luv" bunny looked like, that Grimmway's wife drew. There she is:


There they are. All those "baby" carrots, all exactly the same length and shape.

I decided last Saturday to harvest all the carrots in the one bed, and a few from the corn bed.

I just love picking carrots. You have to be kind of careful because if the soil isn't moist you'll rip the tops right off. So you have to hold on and steadily and slowly pull. I rarely have to hand dig a carrot due to pulling off the tops. As you pull steadily, the earth starts to give and the carrot slides out. The fun part is when the carrot is out of the ground and you get to see the size of it. Below is a picture of the carrots I harvested.

In this second picture, I bring your attention to a larger carrot, with a very slender top. When you grasp onto such a thin little scraggly top, you imagine a skinny little carrot is on the way out. But not always. It's a total surprise. I love being surprised and it's hard to surprise me. I figured out a couple of years ago why I'm so appalled at the thought of finding out the sex of a baby before he or she is born - I would never want to know, and I realized the reason is because that is the ultimate surprise.

I steamed the carrots to go with dinner on Saturday night. I melted a little butter on top of them and Kev said they were delicious and asked me what I'd sweetened them with - nothing. That is how fresh baby carrots taste. Sweet, tender and delicious.

Until next time.

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Will There Be Corn or Tomatoes?

My corn is beginning to sprout tassels but I don't see any sign of ears of corn within the stalks. I'm worried that something is wrong. I just googled and found that corn needs at least one inch of water per week in order to do well. I am concerned because this corn is supposed to grow to five feet in height and is maybe half that height. I told dh last night, if the corn doesn't grow, at least the goats will like the stalks.

My tomatoes are doing great, with plenty of blossoms. But so far no tomatoes. Only blossom drop. :-( If the blossoms drop off, this means they didn't get fertilized. This can happen is the weather is too hot or too cool. Too hot is likely the problem I'm having.

My eight sunflowers are doing great, and marigolds and zinnias have germinated. The zinnias in the photo below are lighter green, with leaves that are rounder. The marigolds are darker green and the leaves have zig-zagged edges.


The watermelon is growing pretty good, and taking well to the upward training of the fence it was transplanted near. The only problem is it wants to grow through to the other side, but if it does, the birds will be able to peck at it more easily. So I have to keep feeding the growing tip back to the inside.

I put another strip of chicken wire around the corn and cucumber bed. The original chicken wire that was installed under the bed was only 4-6 inches high around the perimeter. I like to make sure the chicken wire is high enough that the gophers can crawl into the garden. I also piled up dirt all around this particular bed as I don't think it is getting enough water. That could be why the corn is still so short.

I discovered that one of my pink Swiss Chard had bolted (in a neighboring bed), so I thought I had better hurry up and harvest all the Swiss Chard. Once one bolts, the others aren't far behind. And in my experience, bolted vegetables are bitter tasting. I also harvested the last of the beets. The Swiss Chard bed looked like this before harvesting:

Here is the huge pile of Swiss Chard I harvested. Some of the leaves including the stem are nearly 18 inches in length.


I harvested the rest of the beets for the same reason - I didn't want to lose out on the delicious beet greens if they bolted. They sure do grow a lot faster at this time of year. When it's cold, they take five months to grow into small beets.


I also found that my carrots are big enough to harvest. And I harvested the Brussels sprouts off of one plant. I didn't take all the carrots, there are probably one to two dozen still in the corn bed, nestled among the corn. The carrots look good and healthy, so maybe the corn bed has been getting enough water and will eventually produce ears of corn. Still it bothers me that the corn stalks are barely 2.5-3 feet tall.

Here is the Swiss Chard bed after harvesting the Swiss Chard and beets:

Here's a side by side comparison:


There are still a few heads of leaf lettuce in the garden, I had better harvest those before they go to seed and turn bitter. I cannot stand to eat bitter lettuce.

I bought some mint on the way home from a farmer's market last Sunday. I haven't decided where to put it since mint can be so invasive it really needs a bed all of its own. I'm thinking about dragging the porcelain kitchen sinks I've seen sitting out in the yard to an area of the garden and maybe plant the mint in one side.

Until next time.

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It's Amazing How Fast Times Flies - Memories from 2004 Part I

I was talking with some of our church sistren today at church about gardening. One of our sistren, Lisa Datadyne, has a garden, and we like to compare notes. Today we were talking about pollinating squash. I remember that I've not had a lot of luck with squash being pollinated by the bees and other pollen spreading insects, so I usually end up doing some pollinating on my own.

The important thing to know is that the female flower can be identified by the squash which will be right behind the bloom. The male flower has just a thin stem. Often when the squash plants are just getting started with blossoming, they will produce either male or female blossoms. The male will look like this inside. Excuse this photo, it's quite blurry. It was taken back in 2002 with the first digital camera I ever had access to, the one owned by my employer.


As you might be able to see, nestled inside the flower petals is the stamen, which is covered in pollen. If you have plenty of bees around, they will busily crawl in and around all the flowers, and hopefully they will crawl inside males first, then female flowers. The female flower has pistils, and the pollen from the stamen needs to get onto the pistils in order for the squash to grow.

Here is another photo I found where I have removed a male flower and am wiping the pollen on the female flower's pistils.


While searching for the squash photos, I came across these others. It is hard to believe five years has passed!! I really loved seeing these zinnias, I have some that are just germinating now and hopefully they won't take too long to start producing flowers.

These are photos from May 2004; I planted zinnias along the porch this year. They look so colorful and pretty!! I am going to have to remember to plant more colorful flowers in the garden during the winter at the end of this year.

Here is my squash and green beans. I didn't remember planting squash in this area before! That is the same area the squash is in this year.


Some of my Garden Art. The cats were quite intrigued.

Stay tuned for more memories from 2004 with Part II of III tomorrow.

Until next time.

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I Just Had Something Delicious

I'm feeling much better today. Since I shrunk my stomach not eating for over a day I'm trying an experiment to see if I can somehow train myself to eat less food. I know I eat too much, food is just too darn delicious.

Last weekend - has it really been a whole week? Anyway, last weekend I decided it was time to get the spinach out of the bed it was in, it is getting warm in the daytime and it was probably ready to bolt any second. I also harvested about a dozen baby beets and some Swiss Chard because it was crowding the cucumbers. The cucumbers were hardly growing due to not getting any sunlight and I think I wasn't getting enough water to them either. You know now that I think about it, I think I might have done that work in the garden on Friday. Well, no matter. I washed up the beets and spinach and put it into grocery bags and popped them into the fridge. Where they have sat all week long, waiting to be eaten. I'm making them for dinner tonight, to go with the chicken breasts I've thawed out.

I've made this twice in the last couple of days, this delicious little lunch idea I came up with. I made 2 cups of rice on Thursday so I would have some to go with my broth [broth - bone broth - bone broth helps tooth remineralization - oh no - dentist appointment this week - anxiety - stress - will the dentist get mad at me if I tell him to leave my tooth alone - should I cancel my appointment - again - should I just go and see what he says - calm down - stop worrying - he's a nice guy - but he might get mad - where was I] when my stomach was not feeling right.

Here's what I made:

Beet Greens and Brown Rice

1 T. butter
12 beet green leaves
2-3 Tablespoons water
1/2 cup cooked rice
Salt, pepper to taste

Cut off the beet if there is one attached to your beet green leaves. (Save for a later meal). Put the tablespoon butter in a cast iron skillet and start heating it up. Chop the stems of the beet greens into inch long pieces and put them into the melted butter. Saute for 2-3 minutes. Add 2-3 tablespoons water. Cut the rest of the greens into larger pieces, about 2 inches wide. When the stems looked a darker red then their original bright fuschia red (another minute or so) put in the rest of the beet greens. Put a tight fitting lid on the skillet and let cook 2-3 minutes. Remove lid, stir, add in one-half cup of cooked brown short grain rice. Stir to heat the rice. Salt and pepper to taste. Beet greens are naturally salty so taste before adding salt.

This was really delicious.

I didn't think I'd feel up to gardening this weekend since being sick, but I seem to have bounced back pretty good. I actually got some work accomplished in the garden this weekend. I pulled weeds that had cropped up in several areas, including some that were fairly big and already gone to seed. The chickens really appreciated those. Some of these were in the gopher's garden bed and I'd been leaving them there for him to eat so he would hopefully leave MY vegetables alone. Some were growing in between the chicken wire of the pallet bed so I had to cut through the wire to get the weeds out. I pulled out a broccoli that was flowering. No sense in trying to save its seeds as it was a hybrid variety (the babies of hybrid's seeds don't grow up to be like the plant you had but often like one parent or the other of the hybrid seed - as me if you want to know more). I found some straw-like hay nearby the goat pen that was totally perfect for using as mulch in the beds. It is getting warmer and I want the soil to have a good covering so the ground stays moist longer. I utilized the straw for the eggplant bed, the tomato bed, and one of the green bean beds. I used this straw-like material in the potato cage also. Let's see. I got the zinnia bed dug out, underlayed with chicken wire, got the bricks around the bed and the seeds planted. I also planted marigolds in the zinnia bed. Eight sunflowers have germinated and are getting their first true leaves. The squash I transplanted a week ago is still alive. The basil is still alive, but not doing too well. I hope it will be able to snap out of it.

I think that's all. I am planning to go out there later this afternoon and harvest some to share with my coworkers. I need to pick Swiss Chard, beets, and kale. It occurred to me that the beets take much less time to mature when the weather is warmer. Even though it is okay to plant them in September through the winter, they grow so slowly. It usually takes them 5 months to produce the root. Also, this is one of the only times I've planted beets in late winter/early spring. So it is interesting to see how well they are doing. Now I just have to be careful about getting them harvested before they bolt. And also I am doing some overhead watering and I have had to deal with blue mold in the past with beets. The overhead watering apparently encourages the blue mold because of the leaves getting wet. It's really bad to water overhead later in the day. Early in the morning is safer, but there is still that danger. Once they have blue mold, the beet leaves taste horrible. You can still eat the beets and they taste fine, but the leaves taste awful if they have blue mold.

Here's the new zinnia/marigold bed. I can't wait to see the colorful flowers blooming here!


Until next time.

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