Not too bugged

Maybe it is the heat or the humidity or the lack of rain, but I have not seen very many garden pests this year.  Now that the harvest is dying down, I have noticed some evidence of bugs - bites taken from beans, trimmed tomato branch tips, holes in potato leaves - but not the kind of infestations I expected.  I like to think it is because I attract so many birds to my yard, but even they seem to be hunkered down elsewhere these days.  (I just saw a female cardinal in the tulip tree - panting!  That is how hot it is.)

Cabbage whites are another story, however.  I want to plant brassicas next year, but from the plethora of little white butterflies flitting around my yard, I can tell that bringing broccoli and cabbage to maturity will be a challenge.  I'm planning an investment in floating row covers.

This year I discovered one problem with mechanical plant protection, and that is accessing the plants.  My rabbit barrier allowed the bean plants to grow big and healthy, but bending over from the waist to do all the bean picking was not so healthy for my back.  I eventually resorted to climbing inside the fence, so I could also crouch and squat.

I am still battling the rabbits.  I thought I had only one, living under the shed, but while photographing flowers the other day, I found this one in the meadow.

I have been setting the trap every night, but so far I have not been able to lure either of these to a one-way ticket out of the yard.  I also need to perform a border patrol, to make sure the fence has not been breached somewhere.  Maybe this weekend, after it cools off a bit.

Not too many flowers are left, but my new hydrangea has not yet received the memo.

More pink than lime

A little lime

Also, the hostas and rudbekia on the north side are still hanging in there.

Besides the cabbage whites, I have seen a lot more butterflies this year.  I recognize the monarchs and swallowtails, but can't name the others.  For years, I have had milkweed growing in the front yard, but no eggs or caterpillars.  Now I have the milkweed established in the meadow, so I am hoping the monarchs take advantage of that.

Or is it too late already?  I am not up on my entomology, but this site says there should be another generation before their migration.  Let's hope!

My next camera

... is going to have a telephoto lens.

Can you spot the squirrel?

Summer bouquet

The flowers are fading, but a quick trip around the yard yields a few heat-resistant beauties.

Pokeberry

Yarrow

Russian sage

Coneflower

Zinnia

End of summer bouquet

Where ya bean?

I'm starting to get sick of saucing tomatoes and freezing beans, but other than onions and garlic, those have been my two most successful crops this year.  Obviously, I need a more balanced diet.

Wascally wabbits!

Or, I should say, rabbit.  One down, one to go, as far as I can tell.  Once fall comes, I will have to mount a border patrol, to make sure there are no breeches in the ramparts.  Ironic, isn't it?  I am trying to keep the bunnies out of my backyard habitat.

No rabbits were spotted at Lurie Gardens in Chicago during our visit last Saturday, either.  Other than bees, not much wildlife at all.

Like my gardens at home, the ornamental grasses were coming into their own.

Hostas were hanging on for dear life.

The garden is a bright spot in a Garmin-defying valley of high rises.

There was even water (ala the Beverly Hillbillies "cee-ment pond").  It was people friendly - you could sit along side and dangle your feet in the water - but again, no sign of animals.

My own coneflowers are rarely without goldfinch these days, but the only birds we saw downtown Chi-town were raggedy redwing black birds, sparrows, sea gulls, and "sky rats" (pigeons) hanging around "The Bean" and scavenging for dropped hot dog buns and cheeze doodles.  Ah, well.  The Lurie was still a lovely respite to the city streets.

Putting food by

In a previous lifetime, I grew all our vegetables, some of our fruit, and even a chicken or two, filling freezer and pantry with homegrown organic goodness.  I was a full time mom at the time.  Once I started working outside the home, the gardening and home canning/freezing began to dwindle, though.  Now that I am once again in the throes of stocking up, I understand why.  Preserving for one takes a bit of time and effort, let alone for a family of four.

Last Monday, we took another trip to Grabill, where I purchases a replacement gasket for my pressure canner (plan to can some dry beans), a kitchen scale (my little digital one is not up to the job of weighing out the influx of produce), a salsa screen for my Roma Tomato Strainer, and freezer bags (on sale).  As we left the store, we were greeted by the incongruous sight of an Amish girl driving her horse and buggy down the street while talking on a cell phone.

Then we stopped at a new grocery in town, plus a farm stand outside Leo, and then we headed to the opposite side of town, to Huntertown Gardens, where I purchased a lug or a half-bushel or whatever it was of Red Haven peaches.  I have been in peach heaven ever since.  It has been years since I have had a good peach.  Even the ones at the Co-op are not only flavorless but aroma-less.  But these!  I picked one up and took a good sniff and swooned at its peachiness.

I tried putting some of the peaches through the Roma, hoping to get peach puree, but it was more juice than solids.  I froze that in pint jars.  I thought about trying the salsa screen, but decided I lacked the time required for experimentation.  Instead, I peeled (by scalding first) and quartered the peaches, and after a brief soak in a Fresh Fruit solution, froze some on cookie sheets and some in freezer bags.  I'm thinking mid-winter peach cobbler for the former, yogurt parfait for the latter.  And, of course, I have been eating some of them fresh.

Oh, yeah, experimentation.  I think that is something that will have to wait until my retirement.  Every year I have some garden experiments in mind, like taste testing tomatoes, but rarely do they come to fruition.  Instead, all the paste tomatoes get thrown in the hopper together for sauce, and all the non-paste tomatoes for juice, and the green beans?  Well, who the hell can tell the difference between Provider, Empress and Blue Lake Bush?  Not me.

And yields?  Sometimes I remember to weigh the produce before eating/freezing/canning it, and sometimes not.  I need a better system of picking and recording before using.  The new kitchen scale will help, as prior to its purchase, I had to weigh large tomatoes individually on the digital scale and add up all those pounds and ounces.  Not very efficient.

And efficient, workable systems are what gardeners who work outside the home need if they want to keep track of the fruits of their labor.  I'll get right on that, in my spare time.

It is risen

I recently provided the venue and food for a baby shower for my daughter.  The menu included angel food cake, which I had not made in a while.  The recipe on the box said the cake pan had to be at least 4" x 10", and while my angel food cake pan is what I would consider standard, still I measured it.  Yep, 4" x 10" - but just barely.  With trepidation, I watched it rise...

... and rise...

... and rise.

But it never overflowed.  In fact, it shrank back down to a normal height.

Then I tried not to butcher it when cutting it out of the pan.  Not quite successful there, but it was very edible. I've never tried an angel food cake from scratch - I'm daunted by what to do with the left over egg yolks.

With a little rearranging of furniture and a lot of decluttering, the West Wing proved to be a nice place for the gathering.  With the newly laid mulch, the backyard was almost presentable.  If everyone hadn't been focused on the food and the gifts and the mother-to-be, they might have noticed that, while the coneflowers are fading, the goldfinch visit them often to feed on the seed heads.  Their yellow is matched by the brown-eyed Susans and zinnias and the gooseberry tomatoes as well as the swallowtail butterflies, but the marigolds and monarchs are orange.  Then there is the almost-black purple of the pokeberry, the rich purple of the butterfly bush, and the lavender of the Russian sage.

I was hoping my garden would provide most of the food for the repast, but the potatoes aren't quite ready (and I think the experiment of growing potatoes on newspaper under straw is not going to produce a great harvest), it has been too hot for the zucchini and peppers to set blossoms, and I don't grow sweet corn.  A local farm stand helped me out, though, and we enjoyed a summery feast that at least used up some of my tomatoes.

*****

There is something about the light in mid August that whispers, Summer is almost over.  With the help of my SO, I accomplished many of my gardening goals this year.  Now it is time to reap what we've sown, put food by for the winter, and start dreaming of what we hope to achieve next year.

You say "frittata" and I say "frittahtah"

One nice thing (among many!) of occasionally working from home is I can make myself a fresh lunch.  Today's entree was based on a recipe for Baked Zucchini Frittata for One or Two (found here), but really, all you need to do is saute some garden produce, mix it with eggs, milk, and herbs, top with cheese and bake.  I used zucchini, onion (lots!), garlic, sweet pepper, paste tomato, all from the garden, cilantro and cayenne for spices, and sharp cheddar and parmesan for cheese.  Yum!  No pictures - I ate it before I thought of blogging about it.  And, yes, I ate it all by myself, but this recipe could serve two if there were a couple of side dishes.  Like bacon?

Like drinking a vine-ripe tomato

The tomato harvest has begun.  In an effort to clear the decks (i.e. my breakfast bar), I decided to juice the current crop, using my super-duper Roma Food Strainer and Sauce Maker.

Talk about easy peasy!  Put the thing together (like most things, it gets easier after the first time), wash and stem the tomatoes (I cored them a bit, too), fill the hopper, crank the crank, and presto!  Tomato juice!

Seriously, it is that easy.  No peeling, no cooking, no Foley Food Mill to wrestle with.  Ten pounds of tomatoes filled five 1.5-pint jars, which I put in the freezer.

There was a little left over, which I drank.  My first reaction:  this does not taste like tomato juice from the store.  My second reaction: it tastes much better!  Up next:  my own V8.

In other news, my SO and I trimmed the privet - a much easier job than last year - and trucked the trimmings to the biosolids site, returning with our final load of mulch for the year.  It did not quite stretch to cover everything that remained to be mulched, but close enough.

Summer doldrums

I was out of town for a week and my SO did the honors of keeping things watered and somewhat picked.  It was a "safe" time to abandon the garden, though, as not much was happening.  My intention was to pull up the onions and let them "rest" in the sun for a day before I left, but I forgot until late in the day.  I still pulled them up, but my SO - who is allergic to onions - had to transfer them to the shed for me.  There they are curing, in the doodad I use for screening compost.

That should last me all winter.

Before I left, I also picked the first tomato.

Okay, not much to look at, but I still cut off the blossom end rot and ate the rest.  And it was good.

As you may recall, I purchased a paste tomato sampler last spring.  The plants had to be nursed back to health before I could transplant them, and in the process, the varieties got mixed up.  One variety, despite regular watering and an application of calcium, seems susceptible to blossom end rot.  Too bad I don't know which one, so I can avoid it in the future.

After a week of eating food-that-I-am-not-used-to, it was delightful to come home and whip up an omelet with my own onions, peppers, and tomatoes.  Last night's supper included my own potatoes, green beans, and cucumbers.  I'm not being as anal as I need to be re weighing the harvest because I just can't wait to eat it!

Is that safe to eat?

The search for a stoneware crock has a happy ending.  My SO, who also serves as my personal shopper, found said crock at Grabill Hardware, which is a Do It Best that serves the local Amish community.  This crock is made at the same place in Ohio as all the other crocks I have looked at, but costs only $16.99.  I can check that item off my to-do list.

And why do I need a stoneware crock?  Why, so I can try some of the recipes in Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz.

While most of the time, I live in a state of denial, I sometimes vacation in a place called What If.  A side trip to this land goes something like this:  Instead of our seemingly unending and uninterrupted access to electricity, What If there were brown outs or even black outs?  How would we get water and food?  If I grow some of that food myself, how would I preserve it?  Dehydration is one answer, but I could also ferment a wide variety of foods with little or no extra ingredients or fancy equipment.

Some people have a sweet tooth; I prefer salty and sour.  Sauerkraut, brined garlic, sour dough, yogurt all appeal to me.  One of my great disappointments of middle age is losing my tolerance for alcohol, but sometimes I wonder if it is the alcohol or the adulterants added to the alcohol that is the culprit.  Consequently, I am eager to try some hard cider, flower wine, and ginger beer, even kombucha, if I can find a mother.  Recipes for all these and more are in Wild Fermentation. 

Some of the recipes include instructions to skim mold (a.k.a. scum or bloom) off the top of whatever is fermenting.  That idea tends to turn me off.  While Katz believes that the cultures used in fermentation discourage bacteria such as salmonella and he has never heard of anyone getting sick from home fermented foods, he is smart enough to urge the fermenter to trust his/her nose and/or taste (but don't swallow!) to decide whether to chuck the item in question.

Anyway, once the tomato season (which has yet to start) dies down, I hope to try some experiments in fermentation.

It must be summer

Yesterday I ate new potatoes and fresh green beans for lunch, and supper included a stir fry of zucchini, sweet pepper, hot pepper, and onion.  Today for lunch I ate the leftover stir fry, plus burpless cucumbers.  All of that came from my garden.  Ooh, yeah.  Can't wait for the first tomato. 

The unbearable heat continues, sans rain.  That means I spend too much time watering.  Last year (or the year before?) I purchased some irrigation equipment from Lee Valley, but never set it up.  I would look into that, but it is too hot. 

Some time in the past, I also purchased a soil test kit, also never used.  And some plastic edging that I never installed.  And doohickeys for organizing garden tools that never made it out of the box.  And after the construction of the raised bed, there is still more treated lumber that never morphed into the intended backyard project.  Also, two new smoke detectors are still in their packages.  (Don't worry - my old smoke detector is working just fine.)

At least this is done: 

Now,if someone would install the clothesline that has been sitting in its box on the dryer for about 8 months, the new laundry room would be really complete.

IMHO

I think fresh grass clippings make the best mulch for garden beds.  Not only do they create a dense mat that discourages weeds, as the clippings decompose, they heat up enough to kill weed seeds.  Summers have been so dry in recent years that I have not had much grass to mow, but this spring was wet enough to produce a decent amount of mulch.  For this, I am grateful.  Not that my garden is weed-free, mind you, but with grass clippings I have a fighting chance.

All those weeds come in handy, though, because I pull them up and pile them up in my compost bins, and they magically turn into this:

Black gold!

My current dilemma is that I don't seem to have much time to cook.  I am looking forward to using some of this garlic:

It is curing in the shed, soon to be joined by the onions

which are starting to topple.  (Notice the weeds, most of which are growing in the path.  I'm thinking they need to be smothered with cardboard.)

Today I harvested the first handful of green beans, but what I am really looking forward to is zucchini

and cukes.

Planting the beans inside of the pea fence was not the best idea.  They are protected from rabbits, but the peas shaded them enough that they grew quite leggy.  The cukes I planted at either end of the pea fence, so they can grow up instead of sprawling on the ground.  This works quite well.

My SO helped construct a raised bed by the patio.  The wood was leftover from another project that never got off the ground.  Since it is treated with some unknown preservative, we lined the walls with plastic.

The castle block is to help level the thing; I plan to disguise it with potted herbs.  The fill is part dirt from where my neighbor dug a fire pit, part peat, and part grass clippings.  When the potatoes in the grow sacks are done, that soil will be added as well.

The weather has been ridiculously hot and humid lately and is effectively making me a prisoner of my AC.  The to-do list for this year has been whittled down significantly, but where there is a weed, there is a way to make me feel guilty for not doing more.  I hope it rains tomorrow and cools off a bit.

Is it garlic yet?

This is my first time growing garlic.  I planted two varieties last November, and so far, so good.  Unlike onions, garlic needs to be harvested before the tops completely dry down, or so they say.  Some also say it is best to protect garlic from rain a week or so before harvest; how one does that is never explained.  However, we are in a stretch of fair weather right NOW and the Broadleaf Czech looks like this:

And the German Extra Hardy looks like this:

So I dug up one of the Czech bulbs:

Looks like garlic to me.  Let the harvest begin!

The snap peas are dead:

Long live the green beans!  Last year, the rabbits ate my green bean seedlings before they had a chance to do much of anything besides poke their leafy heads out of the ground.  This year, I planted the green beans inside of enclosures, the early ones inside the pea fence, the later ones inside a contraption of my own devising.

By god, we are going to have some beans this year!  But I am also going to finish rabbit-proofing the backyard.  Last year, my SO helped me line the chain link with poultry netting, but we did not do the gates, which - go figure - became bunny super highways.  My only concern has been that I would inadvertently trap the bunnies inside rather than outside, or - worse - separate a momma from her nest of babies.  But last night, while mowing, I found where momma is keeping her current litter:

Doesn't look like much, does it?  This "nest" is in the middle of the front lawn.  I actually mowed over it, but noticed it move as I did so.  I kicked at the dried grass, thinking it disguised a mole hole or something, and much to my surprise, uncovered some squirming bunny babies.  Then I noticed momma watching from the neighbor's yard, so I covered the nest back up and finished my mowing.  Hope she doesn't abandon them.  (I know - I am nothing if not conflicted about rabbits.)  ANYWAY, my neighbor across the street has a humane animal trap, so if any (like the teenager living under the shed) are trapped inside the backyard, I can catch them and punt their cute little asses outside the enclave.

After the construction of the West Wing, my backyard was a mess.  It still is, but I am slowly starting to fill in the gaps.  Toward that end, I populated one corner with a 'Limelight' hydrangea and two 'Big Daddy' hostas.

They don't look like much now, but if they get as big as their plant tags predict, this corner will be full.  Since my electrical and telephone service enter the house in this corner, I called the underground utility people and after they marked where the utilities were, dug holes very, very carefully.

Despite its youth, the hydrangea is blooming nicely, although I think the blossoms look more white than lime.

Maybe the soil needs some amendments?

The primary hosta bed north of the garage is FULL.  My spring to-do list included dividing these, but I did not get a round tuit.  I think they can be divided in the fall, though, so I may try that.

In the lower right is 'Love Pat' which fortunately likes lots of shade.

The newer varieties of hostas are a lot prettier than the old standbys I started with, but I love them all.