tomato harvest coming in

[songbird]

went out yesterday morning expecting to pick 6-8 buckets of tomatoes and ended up picking between 11-13 buckets instead. which meant for a busy day of tomato canning. i'm happy for it though as we really enjoy having our own grown and canned tomatoes.

some of the tomatoes were "brain" shaped. very irregular surface and a lot of inclusions. i suspect this is from very hot weather we had during pollination, but i don't know for sure.

another issue was that there was some animal that had chewed on many fruits (probably raccoons). i picked everything that was ripe enough so i can finish up getting things canned for us. don't know how many more will be damaged. i did hear noises from the garden late last night. the garden is fenced but there is no certain way to keep raccoons out with the kind of fence we currently have and i don't have any funds at the moment for replacing any of that anyways. an eventual goal of mine will be to upgrade some fences and to add more but that won't be happening anytime soon.

songbird

[T]

I might be a bit envious. Maybe. I ain't saying.

Did you ever bet over your tomato allergy?

An electric fence perpahs?

[songbird]

yes, i found out it was something else that we commonly added to tomato dishes. since then i've moderated my intake of that spice and things are ok. plain tomatoes don't bother me at all.

...

a decent fence would probably help instead of the one we have but i'm out of time and money this season so i won't be doing anything for a while.

as of the other day i've picked about 50 lbs per plant which is above our normal high of the range amount of 40 lbs. i'm all done canning for the season. we still have some tomatoes out there on the plants that we can pick and eat when needed, but otherwise i'm happy with leaving things be.

busy picking dry beans instead and trying to finish up some projects before winter.

songbird

[T]

YIPPEE !!!!!!!!!!

[songbird]

T wrote: ...

yep. also tired this past week enough that i've enjoyed some days of resting up and not doing too much of anything. when the forecast for some rainy days came along i was quite happy to say ok, bring it on, as i'd finished whatever bean picking i needed to get done.

i can go out there now and do some weeding but i think i'll just enjoy today as it is and shell some more beans later. i'm caught up on all the odd stuff so now i just have these large bags of Purple Dove beans to go through and get shelled out. i can do them any time through this winter, but to have them done now means i have less space taken up in here for later harvesting.

it's a production line and i enjoy it all so that is why i keep on doing it each year. always interesting to see what nature can get up to. :)

songbird

[T]

Have any of those gorgeous bean pictures to post of this years pickin's?

[songbird]

T wrote: ...

i don't always remember to link pictures to this usenet group but you can watch the anthive.com/projects/beans page:

i seem to be just putting them in at the end of chapter-2 so going to the above link and going up should get you at the more recent pictures without having to scroll down. i've no idea if an RSS feed would work for this or not (i've never tried using it or setting it up myself so it is whatever the static website generator produces)...

in most recent findings the latest bean pictures posted were the pink and gray ones which are ending up to dry down looking more like a watermelon seed than a bean, but i now have 25 seeds to work with and know the likely parents so that is good and fun, with the seeds refreshed i can now put them on my future plans tor growing out again sometime in the next few years. there's always more projects than i have space and time for growing. i also found another almost all pink bean that i'm wondering how it will work out since it does have some tan markings on it and i wonder if it will age towards tan like many other pink beans - if it does i probably won't work much with it.

songbird

[T]

Gorgeous!

Since I can not longer eat them (too many carbs) I will have to live vicariously though you!

:-)