In lieu of a memory, and any decent record-keeping, this has GOT to be the most practical, useful, and (dare I hope) powerful way to keep track of what happens out in my garden from year to year. Surely I (we) can do better here than my beat-up pieces of graph paper with fuzzy notations in faded pencil.
So, what's in the garden today? No. 3 Son picked two ice cream buckets of snap beans, both green and yellow, from the bush beans plants I planted in midsummer.
D.T. picked 4 gal. of roma tomatoes and I picked 5 gal. of misc. heirlooms.
The Lazy Housewife pole beans (see above in June), with which I have a special affinity, are still producing, but most of them are going to the chickens because we find them too late. Next year, different location. Their
current look is in the picture
at the top (which I can't get to move!), showing that morning glories were allowed to overshadow these beans. Actually, the picture doesn't show you just how lovely the flowers got, because I've been pulling them down and feeding them to the chickens.
A cup or so of raspberries came out of the garden today, as well as more watermelons. No. 4 Son has harvested many many watermelons and canteloupes this season. We're still eating them.
Last weekend I pulled the last of the beets and made 4 qts. of beet/cabbage/horseradish relish. The beets I planted in midsummer never came up.
Today I canned 9 qts. of tomato sauce from the 10 gal. of fruit that came in last weekend. Tonight the pot is started cooking down the 9 gal. from today. P.S. Those 9 gal. cooked down to 12 quarts of sauce because of the high number of romas. More romas next year.
This will be the first batch to make it into the freezer. All other berries have gone straight from hand to mouth. We'll see if the ice cube tray idea works. Nice colors, though.
I picked about 2 gal. of beans this morning. Although there are many grasshoppers around them, the damage is not bad. Busy spiders are keeping the hoppers down, I hope. And a lovely huge mantis down in the raspberries (picture later).
The Lazy Housewife beans. These are being left to dry for seed. I'm still thinking about how to grow them out on the rows so they hang down over the walkway. Lovely long, straight beans.
