it sure has been one of those years... :)
i'll go in reverse from last night where we went through several buckets of beefsteak tomatoes to get them peeled and cored and chunked up so they would fit in the canning jars. 20 quarts plus a pint in the jars. which is not bad for a first picking off 9 plants.
the other harvests i have coming in now are the peppers and the green peppers are pretty much done for now but if we get another month without a hard frost we can get another harvest of some kind off them. the hot peppers i grow are called Beaver Dam and they have done well for me every year i have grown them. they have a similar heat level to the jalapeno peppers (which have not been reliable for me in the several times i've grown them). i have a lot of plants out there and about a half dozen peppers per plant or more so i've already put some in the freezer and used some for making chili but also given away a few dozen and still have a few buckets of peppers out there.
the dry bean harvest is also starting to come in and that will be on-going up until we get hard frosts and the later beans are finishing up. in the meantime i can pick dry pods off plants that have already finished. my bean season has not been normal either as it has had root rot troubles in every garden and not limited to only certain varieties (i plant 50-70 varieties each season). i also know that it is not due to planting during cold weather because i planted later than normal and it was pretty warm and also i didn't change my planting method either as it has usually been good. so i really don't know exactly what happened there so it could just be down to our most normal garden soil that has a lot of clay and is somewhat compacted but i do loosen it up when planting and my germination rates are close to
100%.
the onion harvest was good, we didn't grow any of the normal sweet and mild onions that Mom likes the best as the greenhouse said they didn't get their order that they requested but we did grow a nice crop of large yellow onions and those will get used up or given away in the next few months. the garlic harvest also looks pretty good considering.
i have gardens to weed and the lawn to mow so there is never a shortage of things do it.
in the middle of this all we had a long dry spell where we had about 3 inches of rain most of the past three months and then we finally had about six inches of rains recently when i'd really have liked things to be drier.
we also had the smokey season that was pretty brutal but gladly there we could be ok by staying inside.
my back also had some trouble for a few months and i am happy that it is resolving ok without any major followup needed other than my normal routine. all because of a sneeze and an ancient injury. training my body to sneeze different is not easy and when some sneezes come on i have almost no warning at all.
i didn't grow any strawberries this season as last year i turned under the strawberry patch as it was full of weeds and the critters were eating what few berries i could get growing in there. i had to spend a week during planting season to get the whole garden cleared of thistles that were going to flower and in our subsoil clay those roots were getting down several feet. yeah, i needed that like i needed a hole in the head but it did get done. i need to weed it again a little today to get some grasses out before they drop seeds. the goal was to get the garden covered for this season so i didn't have to keep weeding it but that hasn't happened yet. always too many other things coming up and the back injury really sidelined me a lot this season.
one other project i did for the fun of it and to do something different to help keep weeds down in a small garden was to plant my mix of cosmo seeds (mostly yellow, orange and some reddish tints on the ends of some of the flowers). last summer when harvesting i was trying to get the seeds from only the yellow flowers and those were what i planted but there are still a good amount of orange flowers that would come up from the seeds that were dropped in that garden. as soon as i saw any orange i would remove that plant so most of what i have harvested for seeds now should be yellows. Mom doesn't really like orange so this was just a fun thing to do and i'll plant these seeds next year and continue the selecting of the yellows and leave a few tinted edge flowers in the mix too since they are interesting. the other day i picked about a quart of seeds and those plants can get pretty big so i easily have enough seeds to do an acre or more if i wanted to (i don't). i'll give away the seeds to anyone who wants them as they are great later summer flowering plant for the bees and i enjoy harvesting seeds and weeding out the orange plants that show up even if the patch is full of bees on the flowers, they won't bother me as long as the bees don't get trapped in my clothes or i don't grab a bee by accident.
another project i did finally get going was to transplant some more creeping low growing thyme along an edge of one garden to get it established. it is much easier to weed the thyme (and more enjoyable too) than to have to weed the same space repeatedly (which i've done probably fifty times over the years). the thyme does suppress a lot of other weeds from growing and it looks nice and keeps the soil covered - i wouldn't really mind if it took over the entire area and i can just poke in whatever plants i want to grow in there. i wouldn't even mind if it took over all of the remaining areas of grass and whatever that i mow. i hate mowing and would rather weed thyme. it looks great when it flowers and it smells wonderful when i'm sitting there on my ground pillow weeding - it certainly smells better than the lawn mower and is more peaceful too...
life goes on... :)
songbird