Potato Harvest

The main potato harvest is in.  Last year I planted three sixteen foot rows which yielded 50.5 #.  This year I planted two sixteen foot rows, used potatoes from them after I ran out of stored potatoes the end of June, and I still harvested 40#s.  Not bad.

They have been hosed off, dried in the breeze, and sorted by size.  The damaged ones go in my hod so I will use them first.  I had very little wire worm damage this year, and I scraped up three of them while digging.

I still have the three eight foot rows planted late in the new bed.  When I was watering them today I accidentally uncovered some.  They look gorgeous.  Today as I was digging these jewels and tallying my harvest I actually felt bad for people who don't have a chance to grow their own potatoes.

It must be a pretty good year in general for them.  Friends of ours are getting a bumper crop as well.  They had so many they brought them to our neighborhood pot luck wine tasting yesterday.  They cut them into fries, fried them in a turkey fryer, and served them hot in large paper cups.  Just add your own malt vinegar and salt to taste.  I think that has to be the best usage I've ever seen for extra 'taters!

Of Course I Can

Towards the end of the summer I tend to feel like the housewife above.  Armloads of work can be overwhelming at times. Now and then I go back and read my blog "I'm Tired" to remind myself that this year is not as overwhelming as the year I decided to can tomatoes and make sauce all summer.   Thursday evening, as I drove home from a hectic day at the office, all I could think was "I don't want to freeze corn, and I don't want to make Jelly."  Of course corn won't freeze itself and jelly sure as heck won't make itself...  All I really wanted to do was go home, kick off my shoes, and collapse on the bed.  Instead, I was up until 9pm cleaning sticky plum goo and stray corn kernels up from the kitchen.

It has been several years now since we've bought a canned vegetable, store bought pickle, potato or onion.  Now and then I'll buy something fresh, particularly those pretend baby carrots, and Tim loves fresh cauliflower and my horse loves fresh celery in the winter.   Making sure a year's worth of corn and beans and peas and potatoes (and onions and garlic) are "put by" takes a lot of your leisure time.  And then there is my aversion to letting things go to waste.  Like the wild plums.

Once again there was a bounty of them to be picked.  The past two years there wasn't enough to bother with.  This year I noted that there are three distinct varieties in the bush.  The ones above are fairly large, oblong, and dark almost like Damson plums.

My favorite are midsized and very round, the color of Queen Anne sweet cherries.

A brief history on the plums.  I first spotted them while riding my horse along the cornfield in 2010.  A couple of weeks later, my mother and I went back to investigate them.  Mom picked about five pounds of them and declared that due to their varied sizes, they would be perfect for making jelly.  And then she put them in my car!    This led to my first attempt at jelly.  

We don't know where the plums came from.  I've wandered this farm for all of my 40+ years and I'd never seen them.  My mother has wandered the farm for her 60+ and she'd never seen them.  Our best guess is this:  up until about 40 years ago when this half acre lot was turned into a horse paddock, so that my grand mother could watch her horse out the kitchen window, this site had been the farm garden.  Sometime, mid century, either my grandmother, or her mother-in-law before her, or some earlier occupant that we don't know as long as 200 years ago, probably walked out the kitchen door and threw a bunch of plum pits and skins out in the edge of the field on the other side of the garden.  There they hid in the fence row, keeping a low profile, undiscovered and undisturbed and took hold.  Eventually became large enough to produce fruit.  Then one day along came a woman on a horse...

So, back to hard work and my aversion to letting things go to waste.  Last Thursday evening I made a lovely batch of wild plum jelly.  By the next evening I had given away half of them.  This convinced me that I needed to make another batch.  So Saturday morning I was back out in the plum bush picking plums.  It wasn't as easy the second time.  I had to push further into the branches, poking myself in the head and scratching my arms to reach the next layer of plums.  But all those beautiful plums... such abundance and beauty makes me greedy.  I want every last one.  I scoured the grass for the ones that dropped, and I pulled down the branches so I could reach every one of the beautiful "Queen Anne" plums.  When I got out I warned my mother than while there were still plenty to be had they were passing their prime and getting harder to reach.

Later that evening, I got an email from her outlining how she managed the latest victory in her battle to prevent fruit wastage...  it seems my step-father had a cow that was avoiding capture, so Mom headed into Amish country to get reinforcements "who understood cattle".   She returned with Mosey and Irvin and Irvin's two sons Levi and Reuben.  The cow was quickly cornered and penned up.  But Mom now had a willing crew, plucked out of their evening routine, and as usual, ready to get into anything Mom suggests.  Time to pick those plums.  Amish can work circles around most English folks, and they're not afraid of getting dirty, scratched up, and otherwise mauled.  They are expert pickers.   Mom sent them into the plum bush.  They came out with an estimated 40 pounds of plums.  That's about 8 batches of jelly.  Mom sent them home with their share for their wives to process, and the plums have not gone to waste.  Hurrah!

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some beans to blanch...

Web Log Log Jam

I am so behind in blogging I don't even know where to begin.  It has been a busy gardening season.  Currently, it is pouring rain, Tim is wishing he'd taken the cover off the potatoes, and I'm so tired it didn't even cross my mind.  There is a batch of plums for Wild Plum Jelly simmering on the stove, and a batch of beans just cooling in the freezer.  I have photos still on the camera, blogs in half finished stages, and loads of garden thoughts crowding my mind.

Let's start with the potatoes:

The deer were munching on my second batch of potatoes so we used the greenhouse panels to cover them.  This means I have to water them every couple of days... .  But the benefit is, besides thwarting the deer, is that it gives them a few degrees advantage.  This has been a cool summer, so these late potatoes are loving their greenhouse.

And do you remember these very sprouty potatoes I planted this spring?  I was wondering if they were too far gone to do anything....  perhaps the shock of planting them at this late stage would shock them into rot...

Nope.  We're getting record sized potatoes.  I've been stealing from one row since the end of June, and I'm still about a week away from actually digging them and bringing them in to store.

So, pertinent blog catching up:  August is now over.  We had under 3" of rain.  About 2.75" I believe.  It was very cool, and the bugs were awful.  On the up side, powdery mildew has been late and minimal.  Tomatoes are a bit scarce, and I think the bulk of the harvest is over.  

Beans are doing awesome, and the black beans are finally "beaning".  They are thick, luxurious and healthy, but this rain is finally knocking them down.  It will be a race for them to mature and dry before the first frost.  Also, the fall lettuce, both iceberg and leaf is doing well.  The iceberg is huge (started indoors) but is not "berging".  Hmmmm....  It came straight out of an "Iceberg Lettuce" seed packet.  The "Head Lettuce" transplants I planted this spring were very curly and formed heads immediately.

Food Snobs

I was directed to this video by another lovely Garden Blog   This is The Food Snob's Dictionary "Heirloom Tomatoes".  I admit, I am not only a Food Snob but a Garden Snob and definitely an Heirloom Tomato Snob.  I have several blogs started, but I've been very busy scrutinizing, obsessing over and savoring my few heirloom tomatoes which are oh so rare this year due to our bazaar and challenging growing season.  Enjoy!

 

Five..Six..Pick Up Sticks

Seven...Eight... Lay them Straight
Nine... Ten .......... Do it all over again.

Back in July we spent a day clearing most of my apple orchard.  We did about 80% of the two acres, leaving the heavily overgrown back 75 feet or so. We worked until about 4 pm and then we moved on to other work on the land, in particular, cutting up and stacking a huge cherry tree that had been struck by lightening and peeled like a banana making it difficult for the farmer who rents the pasture to mow around.  When my uncle got home that day, he saw what we had accomplished but he asked   "I wonder why they didn't finish the whole orchard."  Well.  Because we were bushed.  So to speak.

This unfinished business has been wearing on Tim.  He wants the rose bushes gone once and for all.  And so, today, we set out to finish what we'd started.  We had a beautiful day to do it.  As we prepared to leave the house Tim said "This is going to be fun."  After all, he's always up for some bull dozing with the promise of some recreational back hoeing in the form of stump plucking.  These are 75 year old mostly dead trees.  This ought to be easy.  Or at least "fun".

When faced with the wall of thorns, he was undaunted.  That is 75 feet of solid rose bush from the apple tree back to the row of evergreens which shelter the orchard from the prevailing west wind.  No Problem.  A person cannot even walk through it.  

After checking with me that there were no ravines or boulders (Nope, just a third of an acre of solid brush with some apple trees buried here and there... have at it) he dozed into the fray.

This was no neat mowing job with islands of rose bushes.  This was a giant undertaking.  My stepfather Richard had already done his part neatly mowing the cleared portion of the orchard which will make picking up apples for cider so much easier.

The above video shows a typical scene.  Imagine that... for eight hours. A less blurry, non-bloggerized version can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHW9Ju7aPB8
 Sometimes all there was to see was a wall of green, a flash or orange and some movement.  Often there was swearing.  Once there was a gleeful report "I see Daylight!"

This is the pile we collected.  It was larger than the last one and Tim was disappointed in the photo.  He says he should have parked his tractor next to it.  Well.  See that apple tree just behind it, sort of in the middle of the horizon?  That's about 25 feet tall.  And there are sections of evergreen trunk over two feet thick perched on the top.

Now the whole apple orchard is all tidy again.  You can even see through to the pasture beyond.  Any tree that had so much as a dozen apples on it was saved.  The rule was "knock all the dead off it and if the trunk is still standing, leave her alone".  We have been trying to map out all the varieties, but before now, some of the trees were completely inaccessible.  Another challenge is that our commercialized pallets are only able to distinguish the more common varieties such as MacIntosh, Cortland, Empire etc.  There are varieties in this orchard we have forgotten the names of.  All the more reason to preserve as many as we can.  Next year I am going to plant half a dozen or so new trees in one area.  I am going to order them from Big Horse Creek Apple Farm so we get to choose from the good old varieties.  

So, let cider season begin!  There are a lot of apples.  They are small but there are plenty of them.  We will gather the fallen ones for cider, and there will be plenty for making apple pies.  Tim has earned them.

The Fruiting Has Begun

The Fruiting is what I call our family's propensity to trade produce.  My grand mother started it.  She would load up on fruit and stop at each of our houses/offices until she had Fruited everyone.  Yesterday I traded 2 egg plants to my father in exchange for two zucchini and a cucumber.

A day's Harvest 2008

Summer Squash 2010

And on a Happier Note: Mid Summer Status Check

OK, enough of the killing... here are the fruits of my labors.  Just how sprouty can your old potatoes be when you plant them?  The potatoes above have been providing up with taters for six weeks now.  The plant on the end of the row I have dug up and replanted three times!  There is always something there to eat.  But I've worked my way about half way down one row now.

The very bottom of the barrel went into the new bed.  I'm not expecting monsters but by frost there ought to be some worth while spuds in there.

It's been a trying year for gardening.  We've had records rains, weeks of dry but overcast, unseasonably cool... you name it, we've had it.  Despite the insect invasions, its easy enough to convince yourself that the garden is doing fine and then you look at photos of lush garden jungles from a couple of years ago and you realize just how badly everything is struggling.  My tomatoes, with the exception of the indomitable Japs, are sluggish and lacking in growth.  I pulled out the Sungold because it had not put out any new growth in a month.  The two plants closest to it are sluggish as well.  One might thing there had been some anti-growth compound sprayed on the garden.  I've even begun to question the potency of my compost.  But the photo above shows the potato and tomato volunteers which are growing like gangbusters in the shady back corner of the Poop Deck.  I've forbidden Tim to disturb them.  They may be the best hope we have!

The later planting of cucumbers is looking awesome!  I've always had good luck with this particular bed.  It gets a little more sun than any of the others.  And I admit there is a lot to be said for companion planting.  The Cukes and Bush Beans love each other and are planning on taking the world by storm!

This is the stage of the cucumbers.  In a week we will be picking from this bed.

Also thriving is the Black Beans also planted after the peas.

These were planted with the Dibble Board that Tim constructed for me.

What an easy way to make a couple hundred holes!!!

The Lettuce is planted for fall.  I started these in the basement on top of the upright freezer a couple of weeks ago.  They're hardened off and off and running!

And what's that?  A tinge of color in the tomatoes?  This plant was started from seed in the cold frame May 1st and it will be the first to ripen.