A little this and that.

 Blessings Darlings!

We got heavy rain yesterday!  I fear that most of it ran off the lawn, but I will go out soon and start digging the hole for the elderberry.  At least the ground shouldn't be rock hard, right? 

I'm still being buried in tomatoes and Swiss Chard.  Drying the tomatoes is well underway.  Zucchini should start over producing soon.  Peppers are about perfect right now.

No homes yet for the 7 kittens we are currently fostering.  And the damn barn cat just had more kittens two days ago.  MY spawn has finally heard back and has plans for getting the fuzzy assholes spayed at reasonable cost. 

Music for the start of the day:  Flogging Molly, as backdrop for Sinead O'Connor's funeral.

Frondly, Fern

Planting by days off, not by the moon

 Blessings Darlings!

It was a day off of my 'paying' job today, so it was all about resting and garden work.  By 'garden work' I mean I planted more sprouting seeds in real soil and started hardening the plants off.  I can't work in the actual garden because we have a drought going on here at this time, and if I want to do anything with the garden I'll have to water it before I can work the earth.

While I never like to pump up groundwater for the garden, right now all the water I have is softened water.  When our pump died a couple of months ago, the plumbers removed the tap on the well head that was our only non-softened access to water.  Any water from the house taps has tons of softener salt in it, and kills plants.

Yes, there is a way to route water around the softener - but only for the entire house.  Tomorrow I am likely to do that.  Then I'll still have to first dump lots of softened water from the pipes on to the gravel driveway to the house/barn before I can get water that is free from the salt/etc.  It will waste a crap load of water plus electricity to pump it.  So I'll only water the parts of the garden that I'm likely to actually work on tomorrow.  And I'll have to do it after I wash and hang clothes so I have softened water for that (Local water is HARD HARD HARD in this schist rock area.) 

But I'll have to do it so I can prepare beds to plant.  And planting and eating what we grow is important to me.

Here's hoping that the rain that forecasters promise for this weekend actually arrives.  Forecasts have been wrong about that for the past 6 weeks.  This time they are promising a full inch of rain on Saturday afternoon.

That said, almost all my seeds are sprouting well, other than the usual lazy pepper seeds.  I lost the first round of Cherokee Purple tomatoes and shishito peppers when I went to the Sacred Space/Between the Worlds conference (I hadn't explicitly told the family about water and 'take them in if there is a freeze') so I'm trying to make up for lost time.  I found 11 shishito seeds I hadn't planted, so I'm hoping to get at least 3 producing plants from them.  I bought more Purple Cherokee seeds, and found I had some old Roma and Rutgers seeds, too.  Alas, no Brandywine seeds around the house. 

If I can work the ground tomorrow, planting (late, as always) beets, radishes, neeps, and swedes will commence.

And just maybe, the Chubby Hubby will get the rain barrel ready for Saturday's rain.

Frondly, Fern

Garden Centers are WAY too tempting.

 Blessings, Darlings!

I bought some vegetable plants today. Yes, I started more veggie seeds yesterday, too, but I'm really worried about the food supply, and I do better with bought plants, so I'm doing both.

 

You should have seen me going thru' all the potted tomatoes/peppers/etc at the store, looking for pots where they had screwed up and had TWO plants in the pot!

 

I've planted the four heritage tomato plants in the rolling tomato 'raised garden' planters already. When (if) the basil sprouts, I'll put a basil or two in each of them as well.

 

We ARE due to have some cold nights in the next week, but I have clotches I can put over them those nights. And by 'clotches' I mean empty coffee cans.

 

Frondly, Fern

Morning in the Garden with Fern

Blessings Darlings!

It's a lovely cool sunny morning here today.  I've already been out mashing bug eggs and thinning the Swiss Chard.  No one told me that the Swiss Chard produced two plants for every seed!  Once the seeds I planted in pots are bigger, I'll add a lot of them to the garden bed of chard.  I'm also hoping to keep some going over the winter in a cold frame, for fresh winter greens.  Along with the sweet potato vines that will be going inside the house. 

My parsley isn't doing much of anything.  Just sort of maintaining it's 'barely beyond seedling' status.  That's frustrating.  The Mystery Squash has not started blooming yet.  Not even the male flowers.  Eventually it will become clear what it is.  This week is not that week.  The tomatoes are coming along, especially the larger volunteer plant.  I had to do more bondage on all of them yesterday.

Tomorrow, weather willing, I need to plant more green beans, and work on the sweet potato vines.  I'm beginning to suspect that the unknown squash is going to turn out to be a yellow crookneck, but that's just a guess based on the leaves.

Now that it's 3 in the afternoon, the day has turned cloudy and humid.  We might get rain.  Then again, we might not.  It's been totally spotty lately.
It is now pouring at the south end of the field, where they hayed the other day.  Nothing going on here yet.  Lots of wind, tho'.
Ah, now it's raining pretty well here.  And now it's done.  About 8 minutes of rain.

That's the Sunday that Was.

Frondly, Fern

What's Up In YOUR Land Base?

Blessings Darlings!

 

Here in my land base, the fireflies are long gone. Night are LOUD now, with cicadas and crickets having meet and greets. I can count on seeing some shooting stars every night that is clear enough ... but I can also count on late day thunderstorms often enough that at least half the nights aren't clear enough.

And it is so very much butterfly and moth season! Monarch and swallowtail, lovely moths I don't know the name of, and the ubiquitous cabbage moths are everywhere.   Night features other moths, plus visiting bats (I'm guessing that they share barn space with the barn swallows).

The local peaches are ripe - and a local church is having their Peach Festival tomorrow.  My tomatoes are nowhere near ripe since I planted them late, but the cucs and peppers and occasional zucchini (I only started one plant) are producing.

The rivers are high due to all the rain over the past month.  Water practically pours out of cracks in the cliffs of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  The humidity is high.  Every day the forecast is "Today will be much cooler than yesterday was," but that's just wishful thinking.  The temperature has been pretty constant.  

This is when county fairs should be.  Before school starts, in the gap between when farmers harvest stuff.  Everyone should be eating funnel cakes with diced fresh peaches and powdered sugar.

Frondly, Fern

Cool, damp summer

Blessings Darlings!

While we DID have a dry month early this summer, on the whole this summer has been coolish and dry.  There have been less days over 90 degrees than usual, and rain levels have been more than usual since the early hot dry spell.

So now I have issues from those factors in my garden!  I've only lost a couple of zucchinis to end rot from the rain, but on top of those losses some of the zukes haven't been well pollenated - they grow right the first few inches then sudden narrow and don't develop the rest of the way down the fruit.  Others, while properly pollenated have seemed to started to hibernate instead of finishing growing.  And my tomatoes are not just waiting for a few hot days to suddenly have hundreds of them suddenly ripen all at once - the indetermanent ones that ARE coming ripe one at a time all have big cracks at the stem end, the standard sign of too much water. 

I'm concerned I won't get any of the sweet potatoes, as they need rather a lot of days over 90 degrees to move from forming vines to forming tubers.

By the way, the DE didn't do squat for any of the bugs on the beans.  I don't think I'll be getting even enough beans for a dinner side dish, let alone freeze or can any.  The leaves of the beans look like delicate lace.  And the daily rain means that anything I use on the plants gets promptly washed off.

To paraphrase the folk saying:  humanity proposes, nature disposes.

Frondly, Fern

 

Frakkin' Stinkbugs

Blessings, Darlings!

The garden is going great guns right now.  I've lots of green beans in the fridge to get thru' the next week or 10 days 'till my next bean patch starts producing.  I've lots of zucchini.  The tomatoes are still behind, and I noticed a very wasp-larva-encrusted tomato horn worm on them.  I have no clue if the sweet potatoes are doing anything but producing incredible amounts of vines.  Tasty-leaved vines, to be sure.  

But I've had to remove two of the 3 zucchini hills due to wilt.  Or maybe because of stink bugs sucking the life out of them and killing them.  I really don't know which. 

So I'm putting out a stink bug trap that I saw online.  I do NOT know if it will work effectively, but it has the advantage of being cheap.  I took an empty 2 liter soda bottle.  I cut the funnel top off.  I turned on a small battery powered LED light and put it inside.  I inverted the funnel top back on.  I put it in the garden at dusk.

Tomorrow morning I'll see if it worked.  Or if we'll get rain and if that will kill the light (and maybe take a few bugs with it?)

Stay tuned ....

Frondly, Fern the killer

Can It.

Blessings, Darlings!

It's canning season again!  I've been doing fruit so far, but tomatoes (okay, technically a berry) and corn and beans are going to be canned soon.

It's hot and time consuming work, but not exactly intellectually demanding.  Which means I have time to do magic and to ponder things.  I'll talk about the magic in this post.

Back in the day, when I was a kid, one of the stories we were told about Benjamin Franklin was that he and his father were putting up barrels of pork (no doubt layered with salt).  Ben, who was NOT impressed by the long time spent at each meal saying grace, reported said something along the lines of "Dude, why don't we do the grace thing now, over the whole barrel, and get it over with?  We'd get our eat on faster at dinner..."

Well, I'm not taking quite that approach to the canning, but I AM invoking the blessings of the Gods on each batch I can.  Working for health. For wholeness.  For it to feed us body and soul. 

I layer flavors in my cooking (even the peaches I just canned had added cinnamon), it's time I started layering blessings in all I do.

Frondly, Fern

Tomatoes

Blessings, Darlings!

My tomato seedlings are up and growing! This year I'm only growing one type, Rutgers. They are a home-canner-friendly tomato: 2.5-3 inches around, nice flavor, lots of fruit and determinate. For those of you new to growing tomatoes, determinate tomatoes have fruit that ripens pretty much all at once - great for harvesting all at once and canning. Indeterminate tomatoes have fruit that ripen one or two at a time, over a longer period of time.

Rutgers are also a heirloom tomato, and not a hybrid. It was developed during the depression at Rutgers University. The credit, of course, goes to the professor in charge, and his work was funded by Campbell's (of soup fame). I expect that the WORK was done by poor grad students, spending their days playing bee/cupid to the tomatoes, moving pollen from one of the parent varieties to the other, then between all the offspring of the parent varieties.

I'm not saying that Rutgers is the most flavorful variety of tomato I could grow - as you might have guessed by who funded its creation and my point about canning, it's a great tomato to PROCESS. A PRACTICAL tomato. That's what I'm all about in the garden this year, practicality. I'll blog on my favorite tomatoes for flavor some other time.

Right now I'm thinking I'll put in 6 to 8 plants, and that I'll sink the plastic jugs from gallons of milk between every few plants. I can then use the jugs to water the tomatoes deeply, reducing evaporation and being more efficient with water use. I'll also have to heavily mulch the tomato beds, because my area used to grow tobacco.

Which brings up an interesting point - it's REALLY useful to know the history of the land you live on/grow your food on. I grew up in the midwest - the land was lovely sand loam, you almost had to TRY to fail at growing anything. On the whole nothing nasty had built up in the soil - not even nematodes. Here in Marlboro Country, the soil is clay and acidic, and had been mostly horse breeding stables or tobacco farms. Tobacco farms have left the soil full of tobacco mosaic virus, and that can really mess up your tomato plants. Many varieties are RESISTANT to the virus, but it's still good practice to mulch so that during rain no virus is splashed up from the earth onto the plant leaves. At the organic CSA farm I volunteer on they grow their tomatoes under a shelter and have underground lines for irrigation to avoid the virus problems.

Catch you later!