Garden Thread

It's been almost unimaginably beautiful here the last two days, just in time for me to lose my patience with the overgrown cucumber bed in the garden.  I was so happy yesterday after work to have a combination of urgent garden chore with the kind of weather you don't want to waste by being inside.  After much ruthless hacking, I got the excessively exuberant vines cut back (so they are no longer entangling the tomatillo in the next bed over, and I can walk along the path next to them to do silly things like harvest the actual cucumbers) and got to make the day even more lovely by perfuming the air with all the overgrown mint that got pulled out by the desperate tendrils of the cukes.  It was heavenly!  Of course, I expected there to be a ton of cucumbers to pick once I was done pruning, but... nada.  Now I'm afraid I shouldn't have cut them back, and I won't have enough pickles going into the winter.  It's never easy being a gardener!  

(I will note that I don't think I'm going to get enough of the Parisian Pickling Cucumber gherkins to make a batch of sweet pickles.  They're not really prolific enough to be yielding a lot at one time.  It's kind of a steady trickle of two or three gherkins a day, which doesn't add up fast enough for the first-picked ones to be fresh enough for pickling when there's finally enough of them.)

I planted some this year based on the stories of your butterbeans, and I'm so excited!  They're starting to be covered in pods.  Lots and lots and lots of pods.  I, um, didn't thin the beans when I planted them, so I think finding time for shelling them is going to be a problem for me too.

It was another productive weekend in the garden -- I did a massive amount of weeding on Saturday, cleaned out and topped off the beds that had held the garlic (which is all curing inside now), and planted the next wave of fall stuff.  I direct-sowed kale, carrots, beets, broccoli and kohlrabi, all of which we get buckets of from our farmshare as the season winds to its close, but I'm thinking of our fall garden as being more ornamental than functional.  Do I need more of any of these things?  Nope.  Am I likely to have much success with any of them because I'm terrible at tending to delicate seedlings during hot weather?  No, not expecting any success at all.  But will even moderate success mean we'll have pretty stuff to look at in the garden?  You betcha!

My first wave of fall plantings -- leeks and two types of cauliflower -- has so far yielded exactly two cauliflower sprouts.  I'm not very optimistic about these guys.  

Man, it's crazy how quickly summer's flying by.  It's already time to think about taking the cucumber out -- I think it's fully played-out.  I'm sure if I hadn't pruned it so aggressively it would have had a bit more production in it, but we don't need that many pickles.  

Somehow the plants in the squash rows got switched up, so a couple days ago I found a zucchini where I wasn't looking about as big around as my arm.

Just because I bothered taking the camera outside earlier this week, here are some more pictures from stately Dick n Hisses Manor Farm & Orchard.

The Damson plums are ready for harvest!  This is the first time the tree's yielded anything, so other than infusing gin, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with Damson plums.



A Northern Spy apple, still a ways off from ripening (it'll end up mostly red), with some background Rome Beauty apples looking a lot redder already (they'll ripen to the kinds of apples little moppets bring for their teachers).



Just a casual sweep of the garden requires bringing a pretty big bowl to hold all the tomatoes (and tomatillos!) now.



And these are the tomatoes we grew this year; from left to right we've got Black Cherry, Lemon Drop, Peace Vine, and Ping Pong.  They're all technically cherry, but Ping Pong clearly has delusions of grandeur.  There's also a volunteer of some kind of mutant Juliet-style grape tomato, but I forgot to include it in the picture.

Dinner before my vacation: my one spaghetti squash with tomato sauce made from my own tomatoes.

Nothing is left of the garden now except the butterbeans working on their second make. I picked them pretty close today, along with probably the last two okra, so they ought to be okay for two weeks.

Having achieved spectacular results with 115 daffodils planted along my fence line in Spring, I'm doubling down on Fall bulb planting. Just got some tulips straight from Holland to plant with irises in my front flowerbed. And though technically I believe it's a rhizome, my begonias have finally filled out and are looking pretty regal in their Fall planters:

You know, I don't think I've ever eaten a butterbean. We just germinated them in elementary school science class. Are they easy to grow?

Daffodils (aka Narcissus) are rising in my flower rankings because they're so easy to grow and there are so many cool varieties. I planted about a dozen different varieties to break up the monotony. My favorite flower is the hydrangea, followed by roses. The star of my garden is a "Double Delight" rose bush planted by the previous homeowner. It does not get better than this:

Oh man, my beans were the greatest source of shame and frustration for me in this year's garden.  They were technically a lima bean, Sieva, but that's pretty much the same as a butterbean, right?  Anyway, we had a really mild summer with occasional oven blasts of heat to go with an overriding dryness.  And the first big oven blast happened right when the beans were ripening up.  So they went from "Oooh, I think they'll be ready to be harvested tomorrow," to "fuck, they're all desiccated and starchy and dried out now" literally overnight.  I picked what few I could salvage, left the rest on the vines, and then had a whole bunch of other shit come up and never got around to shelling the ones I picked.  [/sad trombone]  I'm hoping they'll be usable dried, because we got gazillions of them.  They're an early pole variety, and were rigorous, gorgeous, and wildly prolific.  In more forgiving weather I think they would have been delightful, and I'm pleased to see a small second wave is coming in now.  So all may not be lost.  

This variety is a tiny little lima bean, and they were light green.  Lovely little things, and the few I got to in time were creamy and delicious.  Oh well!  That's what next year is for, right?  

Our homemade pepper vinegar is what finally brought me around on collard greens.

Moussaka, probably the best thing I have ever cooked.  Ten at once, you say?  Lots of moussaka.  Stuffed eggplant too.

🐍 cahusserole 🐍 Boil white vinegar. Pack a glass jar with hot peppers, then fill with boiled vinegar until peppers are submerged. For added heat you can make a small slit in some or all of the peppers beforehand. You can also add other things to compliment the flavor; our pepper sauce also has a few thin slices of garlic in it. The longer the glass sits, the more the color will fade and the hotter the sauce will get.