The Potato Piles

Way back in July, we had these little piles with some vines sticking out:

[caption id="attachment_1615" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Potatoes - getting ready to get buried again."][/caption]

August brought blossoms:



The potato piles continued to grow.  We stacked them a total of three tires high and let them go.  This week HandyMan dug them up and filled a table with spuds!

I wish I could tell you what kind of potatoes we planted - but it was HandyMan's gig and I don't remember - and that gardening notebook bit- lasted about three weeks.  Oops.

Anyway, I think I smell some Garlic Cheddar Smashed Potatoes and some [Green] Potato Soup in my future.  I also want to experiment with these Potato Crescent Rolls.  What are your favorite fresh potato dishes?  Leave me a link - I can always use more ideas!!

This post is linked up at An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party

Jack Frost Ended My Garden Season

This week, Jack Frost has brought an official end to my growing season.  My thriving green beans and slow growing peppers probably would have had a chance to continue into the fall had I paid attention to the weather and given them a sheet of protection.  But alas, life has been too hectic and good ol' Jack had his bite and they've wilted into a sad state of green limpness.  I still have a couple pumpkins that I'm hoping will ripen up.   I'll add them to the pumpkin I pureed yesterday for pies and breads.  Yummy!

I've had a busy summer and fall and I'm thankful for the produce that I was able to coax from our land and it really does taste better!  We're working on breaking down our garden for winter.  Yesterday HandyMan disassembled our tomato trough.  We decided that remnants of last year's blight must have been in the wood since those tomatoes did so horribly.  We'll explore options for reconstruction in the spring.

GBaby's cast comes off next week which will make outside time a little more fun for all of us.  I'm hoping to get a good dose of garden clean up done then.  For this week, it's candle pouring and baking!

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Ending the Garden Season

As much as I hate to admit it, I fear that this growing season is just about over, however there is still a lot of work to do in my garden before winter.  Here are some of the projects that are coming in the next few weeks in my garden:

1.  Clear out all beds that are done for the year of all weeds & debris

2.  Empty tomato trough & buckets

3.  Remove tires & harvest potatoes

4.  Weed, fertilize & straw to the strawberry bed

5. Pick remaining pumpkins and butternut squash and clear squash beds

6.  Cut back and fertilize asparagus bed

7.  Cut back perennials

8.  Protect peppers as long as possible so that they can hopefully grow bigger before it gets too cold

9.  Harvest remaining basil to store as Frugal Pesto.

I'm sure there's more, but this will be enough to get me started next week if the sun decides to come out!

This post is linked up at An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party.

Garden's Hanging On

Today is another rainy day in Central NY - with the potential for some great storms according to the national weather service.  They've issued a tornado watch - hmmm.  It's something to keep things interesting.

My garden still chugs along, with prolific green beans, determined tomatoes and patient pumpkins.  Does anyone know if a pumpkin that has fallen off the vine will ripen?  My peppers have perked up and decided to finally fruit and I have a dozen or so small bells that I'm hoping will "grow up" before the frosts come.  My little tomatoes are hanging on and ripening on the sad, brown vines that have given up for this year.  It looks like I should have another dozen small tomatoes pretty soon.

A friend told us this weekend that after their asparagus had bolted to bush after the first harvest, they cut it back the beginning of August and got a great second harvest through September.  I'm intrigued and certainly going to give that a try next year!

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This post is linked up at An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party

Garden Neglected

In the craziness that has become my September, my garden has become sorely neglected.  Life has moved into fall activities of craft fairs, soccer, and "school year" activities like library groups.  Gardening has taken the back seat - the very back seat.

Nonetheless, my garden continues to produce.  After a couple days away for the weekend, I came back to find my green beans falling over themselves-loaded with fresh green beans!  I also had more pumpkins, butternut squashes, a few stray tomatoes, peppers and zucchini - and my first yellow squash of the year!



How is your gardening season wrapping up?

This post is linked up at An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party

Tuesday Garden Party - Winter Squashes

I've begun picking my first round of winter squashes - the pumpkins and the butternut squashes.  Last year, I let the pumpkins hang out on the vines until the vines were all but dead.  Unfortunately some little worms decided that they were going to have a go at my pumpkins and I didn't get any of them.  See, I can be taught! This year, the pumpkins are coming in as soon as they are all orange!  Their destination will be pies, breads and muffins after I process them up.  No canned pumpkin in this house!

I am also still getting green beans and a smattering of tomatoes.  Although, I only have two tomato plants that are hanging on-all the rest have given up on this season.



The garden shed has windows.  The final steps will be a door and trim work.  Given that HandyMan is in the throes of coaching soccer, I'm in the middle of my the busy part of my craft show season, and GBaby is needing a little extra TLC (see the cast in above photo- it goes to the top of her thigh), I'm not sure that this project will be finished before spring.



This post is linked up to An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party

Garden Shed & Photos

Note: If you are scrolling through my main blog page, you may be seeing the roasted red pepper photos duplicated, below.  Simply click on this blog header to go to the full entry with correct photos.

We've made significant progress on the garden shed (and that's the universal "we" - as in HandyMan has done most of the work).  Once the windows go in (selvaged from replacing the windows in the house), the roofing asphalt goes on, and the door is framed out, it will be ready for storage!  I'm sure HandyMan has a few more steps in there, but thats the nutshell.

This week  I'm going to let the veggie photos and captions speak for themselves.[gallery columns="2" orderby="title"]

This post is linked up at An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party.

Garden Party: The Shed

We have had two and a half days of rain.  So much rain, that it filled the kiddie pool for us.  The grass has also grown, and the weeds have taken a further hold in my garden. I feel the end of season coming, but know that it's still a ways off.  Especially since my tomatoes are just getting started.  They loved the rain and I was happy to see a bunch of green tomatoes out there!  A few days of sun and they'll ripen right up.   My second planting of green beans are blossoming and some of my pumpkins are well on their way to orange.  I've pulled up some fresh carrots that have already been devoured and a bit of rosemary that will go in grilled potatoes tonight.

What is showing the most signs of progress is the Garden Shed!  We decided that it would be more convenient (and free up more space in the garage) if we put up a shed that would house the lawn and garden equipment.  HandyMan has been busy on his staycation this past week and a half.  We have floor done, walls framed out and part of the roofing rafters in.   We've had some great help and also have wonderful friends coming to help us out on it this afternoon and evening so we'll see how far we get tonight.  Hopefully by next week it will be even closer to, if not, done.[gallery columns="2" orderby="title"]

This post is linked up at An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party

Tomatoes!

I love the fact that my garden has been taking care of itself the last week.  With the bits of rain we've gotten, I haven't had to water.  I pull a few hands full of weeds when I'm out there - barely putting a dent into the overgrowth of native grasses.  But more or less, my garden is at a pretty independent stage.

All those bold tomatoes that have been sporting their hints of orange for weeks are finally turning red!



This little butternut is getting close too:



Shades of orange are beginning to show on my little pie pumpkins:



My green beans are doing well and I have lots of blossoms on my first planting again and my second planting are looking good- probably another week or so away from beans.

My white hostas are in bloom in my flower bed and I've gotten a couple stems of gladiolas back.  I didn't dig up my bulbs at the end of last season as I should have, but apparently the peach glads are a hearty bunch!



This post is linked up at An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party

Garden Update: Bush Beans for Dummies

I’m a bush bean dummy.  Remember, my bush beans were planted by accident, and I haven't had much time to research.  So, silly me didn’t realize that they will blossom and produce multiple crops.  Imagine my delight and surprise when I started seeing another wave of blossoms on the little bushes that were part of the first planting.  My second planting is beginning to show signs of blossoms to come.  There is hope of loading my freezer of one of GBaby’s favorite veggies after all!

In other news, my tomatoes are getting close!  I think I may have ripe tomatoes to report next week.  My butternut squash and pumpkins are beginning to show tints of peach and orange, but still have a ways to go.  I’m down to one living acorn squash bush/vine, I’m holding out hope for at least one gourd to make it!

(Sorry, no pictures this week as I have run out of daylight hours again today!  I'll have more next week.)

*Linked up to An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party

Sick Plants

I have a few plants in my garden that are doing great.  My pumpkins are taking over like they're on drugs - I counted at least 8 little guys out there this morning.



My green peppers look beautiful, although I only have one little pepper to show for it:

My poor acorn squash were looking all wimpy and when I inspected further, I found that the main stem is hollowed out and it killed the plant.  Could this be the work of cut worms?  Any other guesses?

Finally, my tomatoes are a little less bushy than I would like and while I'm used to the leaves curling a little bit because of the hanging style of planting, all the yellow leaves are not so good.  I gave them some plant food this morning and I'm hoping they'll perk up and be happy and grow lots of tomatoes in the next couple weeks.

How are your gardens?

Linked at An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party

While the Gardener's Away

I've been gone for four days.  It seems that it must have rained quite a bit as my garden and lawn were saturated -as was the carpet in my office :( .   That may be a post for another day!

Last week I planted my second round of green beans (on Thursday I think).  Today when I got home, I found that they were off and running!



I also have lots of green tomatoes:



I picked a basket of green beans, lettuce and my first zucchini before we left.  When I came home I found even more green beans and some cucumbers:



This post is linked up at An Oregon Cottage's Garden Party - check it out for more gardening ideas from around the country!  I also link up at $5 Dinner's Grow. Eat. $ave. updates!

Garden Party!

It has been a party in my garden this week.  My mom is visiting and has been helping with all the gardening, kid chasing, freezing and cooking around here - it's such a great help to have extra hands!  G-Baby has taken to eating the green beans straight from the garden.



The pumpkins, acorn squash and butternut squashes are well on their way to taking over the world.



I'm starting to get little zucchinis:



My basil that I moved around last week is SO much happier now and has even gotten new layers of leaves on it. Caprese and Bruschetta here we come!

This morning we picked this basket full from the garden before we took off to get that last batch of blueberries from our local u-pick!

My green beans are coming on strong and I decided to plant a second round in the areas vacated by broccoli and spinach.  I'm hoping to load the freezer and we'll eat them all winter! We are also still picking broccoli and lettuce and the cukes are storming their way to overtake the crisper drawer!

How's your garden?

This post is linked up to An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party.  Check it out for fun adventures of other gardeners.

Stories of Basil, Beans and Berries

This week, my gardening has brought about some relocation and identity changes.  My poor basil was not growing and the square it was in kept getting overgrown by grass.  Since I'm starting to see baby tomatoes last week, I decided that if garden bruschetta was going to be on my August menu, my basil needed and intervention.

I very carefully dug it up from it's overgrown home, separated each plant and moved them into squares vacated by spinach.  Now they have their own, weed free space to live and each plant has a little bit more room to grow.

[caption id="attachment_1650" align="alignnone" width="180" caption="Overcrowded Basil"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1651" align="alignnone" width="180" caption="Spaced Out Basil"][/caption]

My poor green beans are another story.  I planted them while  tending GBaby (15 months old at the time).  I thought I was doing fine until the row of beans came up and there was a  2-foot gap in the seedlings poking through the ground.  I thought that maybe I had just planted them a bit deeper.  Now, my theory is that I was chasing a toddler and lost track of where I had  planted!  So, my green beans came up.  My citronella chunks were protecting them from the Garden Beast all seemed right in Green Bean Row.  I saw blossoms  - even better.  Then I started to see tiny baby green beans.  This is great, but are they supposed to start climbing the trellis before they make green beans?  I went back to the packet to find that it was non-specific as to which type of green beans it contained: pole beans or bush beans. We had  picked up the packet at the local farm stand and we were assured they were pole beans.  So I went to google.  Google says: bush beans.

If you're familiar with square foot gardening, you know that bush beans and pole beans require rather different planting patterns.  So far my bush beans that have been planted very densely, seem to be doing ok.  I'm not sure if I want to try to move some of the plants to thin it out or just leave them.  Any thoughts?

Also in the yard, blueberries are getting ripe, wild red and black-cap raspberries are sprouting out around our property and cucumbers are on the way!

I'm also experimenting with some natural weed killing solutions to deal with the grass in some of my beds. I'll let you all know how it works out in a couple weeks :)

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This post is linked at An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party.

Tuesday Garden Party

I'm wading back into the web-world after a three day hiatus from most things internet.  What a busy weekend: it was filled with family, friends and work.

In order to get in gear for today's Garden Party I had to take a minute to see what was really going on in my garden.  I'm seeing many summer veggie blossoms (cucumbers and squashes).  We're still picking some of our spring veggies (lettuce, spinach, peas and broccoli) but I think those are going to be toast after the heat wave we're getting this week.  My strawberries are just about finished and my potatoes are stretching past the first layer of tires.  Once they get just a bit higher, we'll fill the tire in with dirt and add another tire layer.  We let the potatoes grow up about three layers high.

My basil is taking it's sweet time - I've put it on notice that it has to be prolifically thriving when the tomatoes start coming in!  Hostas, Day lilies and Easter lilies are also blooming.

Hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July weekend!  Here are some pictures of my yard and  garden:

[caption id="attachment_1619" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Hostas Blooming"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1618" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Easter Lilies in Bloom"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1610" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Day Lilies in Bloom"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1613" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Itty-Bitty Baby Tomato"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1615" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Potatoes - getting ready to get buried again."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1612" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Still Reaping Peas"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1617" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Cucumber Blossoms"][/caption]

Garden Gathering Steam

As the temperatures are heating up, my garden is taking off - and everything in it.  The garden has taken a turn for the lush side, shall we say. (Read: full of weeds that I can't keep up with!)

All of my heat loving crops - tomatoes, green beans and squashes - are flourishing.  My strawberries are still producing and The Beast is leaving them alone for the most part.  My green beans and cucumbers are getting ready to make their trek up the trellises and my broccoli is still shooting off small florets.  If my basil grew as fast as the grass around it, it would rival Jack's beanstalk by now, but alas - it seems to be a slow grower this year! In the front yard (not pictured) my blueberries are starting to blush!

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The Other Kind of Garden Critter

Stories are told of a 1-year-old me cleaning out the strawberry bed.  Like mother like daughter.  She reached in the bucket of picked berries, pulled out the biggest one in the bucket and chomped in.  I'm glad we're finally getting some berries.   I think the Beast has finally had it's fill.  :-)

(And like father like daughter-celebrating World Cup by not going anywhere without the soccer ball)

Hanging Tomatoes

There are many items out on the market now that aid in the growing of tomatoes upside down.   Three years ago when we set up our garden, they were few and far between and expensive!  So we did what we are good at: we improvised.  We were among the first in our area to experiment with this new technique in gardening.  As I've mentioned before, we live in a rural, agricultural area of the country.  I was amused the first couple of years that we grew tomatoes upside down as we had folks that had been gardening for more years than we've been alive, that would drive by our garden just to see how our tomatoes were doing.  They were keeping tabs to see if this "grow tomatoes upside down" project was going to work for those crazy kids.  Well it did work for us and we've stuck to it.  (Minus horrible blight that hit our whole area last year).  We even had someone stop when we were out in the garden this spring and asked if we were going to do it again this year.  Ah, small town community - makes me chuckle!

For our tomatoes, we started with four "tomato trees".  Large poles with a 2"x4" perpendicular structure on the top.  We hang a bucket off of each arm and the plants will skirt along the bottom of the bucket and then begin to grow downwards once they reach the edge.

After a minor setback the first year when one of the "trees" collapsed we modified two of the trees into a trough.  There are holes drilled in the board that that is the bottom and the plants grow out of there.



From our experience we found that cleaning out and reusing large buckets from laundry detergent  is better than the buckets sold at big-box home improvement stores as the reused buckets are intended to carry the necessary weight.  We had handles fail on the others which lead to the collapse of one of the "trees".

I love that there is no weeding, no staking of plants, tying up vines or trying to keep fruit off the ground. On the rare occasion that a tomato  is ripe enough to drop, it usually lands safely in unmowed grass as we will stop mowing under the plants once they get closer to the ground.

I've written more about growing upside down tomatoes here.  Check it out!  If you're new to ThrivingMama, you can click the 2010 Garden category below to see what else has been going on in my veggie garden this year.

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Farewell Corn.

I went out to water my garden today and found my corn bed has been completely chomped!  All that The Beast left behind are tiny holes and little discarded leaves.

I'm now remembering that this has happened in the past and the only way we got corn stalks last year was to start them under bird netting.  I wish I would have remembered that two weeks ago!

Anyone have a good idea for a crop that can go into a 10 x 4 bed this late in the gardening game?  Maybe we'll pile our potatoes in that bed... hmmm.  Click Here to read more of the garden stories from this week :)

Linked Up:

This post is linked to An Oregon Cottage Tuesday Garden Party

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A Sad Story of a Special Strawberry

In one corner of my strawberry bed, dangling near the chicken wire was a strawberry.  A special berry: it was the first in my garden to begin blushing red.  I’ve been watching it for about four days.  Yesterday I didn’t make it out because it was rainy and gross.  So today, I went out expectantly looking for the vibrant red fruit and my first strawberry of the season.  What did I find?  The stem.



I swear, I have some of the best fed Wildlife. Ugh!

That’s ok, I’ve got a lot more berries that will be ripe soon enough.



I also took a walk around and pushed all the berries that were dangling near the edge, tempting the Wildlife, farther into the bed so that they’ll have a chance to be picked by me!

Some Beast also had a go at our corn sprouts.  :(

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