Garden clean-up

I finally got around to cleaning up the main part of the garden this week. The peas finally gave up after nights in the teens and a whole week of snow flurries, so I pulled them up and removed the trellises. I hacked the weeds out of the two remaining garden squares that hadn't been cleaned up, threw some fertilizer and pea vines over them and covered everything with hay:

Walnuts, again

So, the black walnuts have been sitting around drying for almost 2 months, and I decided it was time to start the final stage of processing.

Step 1: smash the shell with a small sledgehammer. No, normal nutcrackers can't break the ultra-thick, super hard, spiky black walnut shells.


Step 2: sort into empty shell pieces, nut pieces, and chunks of shell with nut pieces still in them.




Step 3: try to get the remaining nut pieces out of the shell with more smashing or by pulling them out with a dental pick.

I got about 1.5-2 cups from maybe 100 walnuts? I'm still not sure I really like black walnuts! They taste sort of cheesy-fruity, bitter, and smoky all at once.

Thanksgiving pie

The jack o'lantern from Halloween turned into a pumpkin pie:

I used the standard pumpkin pie recipe, and added the walnut topping from this recipe.
It successfully tasted like pumpkin pie, and the walnut-brown sugar chunks tasted good, although some of them sank into the pie instead of staying on top.

Four cups of frozen pumpkin puree turned into 2 cups of pumpkin paste after defrosting and letting the excess water drip out through a towel for an hour or two. It's definitely necessary to extract that extra water- I think the pie would have been a soup otherwise.

Happy Halloween!

This picture is from earlier this month, but is appropriately creepy:


Sushi posing next to my home-grown pumpkin:


The inside guts of the pumpkin were much drier and spongier than the jack o' lantern pumpkins you get at the store:


Cleaned out and ready to carve:

I'm cooking the pumpkin seeds with a butter, salt, and Worcester sauce coating.

Angry vampire? Or goofy cross-eyed creature? The white spots are hail pits.


Sitting in the front window:

Final produce tally

Here are some nerdy graphs of my cumulative tomato, zucchini, and cucumber counts for this summer:

From garden pictures

From garden pictures

I hope this will help me plan the garden next year. I accidentally staggered tomato plantings for the sweet 100's this year, which gave a good crop of the little tomatoes until the first frost despite tornadoes, hail, and an unusually wet and cool summer. So, maybe next year I will intentionally make several tomato plantings to hedge my bets in a more systematic way.

Pass the sushi, peas

This is the first time I've made sushi using peas. They are a decent substitute for cucumber.

Yum!

First frost

The first frost was on Oct 18. Here's the tomato plant before it thawed and died:


A marigold covered in frost:

Last tomatoes

Here's the last harvest of tomatoes before the first frost a couple of weeks ago:



Some tasty dried cherry tomatoes:



I got more than 6 cups of dried tomatoes out of the last few weeks of cherry tomato production- not bad!

Leaves are starting to turn.. and random scenery

You can see the leaves starting to turn at higher elevation on Linden's knob:


We've been having cool nights with some fog in the morning. The dew on the weeds in the field is blindingly reflective as the sun comes up over the hills:


Sushi enjoying the morning? Sniffing the air? Trying to avoid getting her feet wet?


At the other end of the day, an excellent sunset:


Which bathed everything in pink and orange light for a few minutes:

Peas!

Hooray, the snow peas are producing pods.


I made stir-fry with the first batch. They are very tasty, and it is exciting to get peas this year after my spring attempt was killed off by a heat wave while I was in Ireland.

Some pictures of black walnuts

Here's what the walnuts look like with their husks on. Ripe ones are yellowish and can be indented with your (glove-covered!) finger. Once they sit around on the ground or the hulls get smashed, they turn brown:


I smash the hulls off by grinding them into the gravel driveway with my boots, or running over them with the car. Sushi cat for scale:

As you may be able to see in this picture, the hull juices stain everything, including the plastic bucket and gloves. These are heavy-duty gloves. I made the mistake of wearing flimsy dishwashing gloves earlier, and ended up with stained hands for a week.

The walnuts dry outside for a while, then they sit on a window screen to "cure" for several weeks.


Right now the nut meats are kinda rubbery. I tasted one and was blown away by its bitterness and fruity, almost apple-like, flavor. They say the flavor develops as the nuts cure. We'll see.

Black walnuts making a big mess

Last week, I started picking up ripe black walnuts from 5 producing trees on the property. Black walnuts have a different, stronger flavor than "normal" English walnuts, and sell for $14 a pound in local stores.
Here's a blog site with pictures of the walnuts and the process to extract the nutmeat:
http://www.bigredcouch.com/journal/archives/2007/10/black_walnuts.html

The reason they're so expensive is because it is a BIG PAIN to process them. The outside hull stains your hands, shoes, floor, everything else. The shells are super thick, and at least for my trees, painfully spiky in some places.

I have about 200 nuts drying on an old window screen right now. We will see how many I end up trying to process. I've been gone for several days so they may have all fallen from the trees and started to rot by now.

Drying tomatoes

I think I am going to try drying some of my cherry tomatoes. Here's a nice post on how to dry tomatoes:
http://straightfromthefarm.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/squirreling-it-away/

A view restored

Last week, the corn across the street was harvested:

It's nice to have a clear view of the other side of the valley again. The field itself looks a little.. dead now. I've seen deer picking over the leftover husks and stalks almost every evening.

Mid-Sept garden update

The garden is still producing tomatoes and zucchini at a good rate, but over the last few days as nighttime temperatures have dropped to 50 or below, things have started to droop a little. The cucumber, cantaloupe, and the oldest zucchini vines have shriveled up due to a combination of temperature and powdery mildew (the mildew problem started after the hail storm in August that shredded the leaves). I had a crazy crop of zucchini from the "throwaway" plants in the back plot:


I walked into the garden this morning and found that someone had clawed and chewed a chunk out of my biggest of two cantaloupes:

It seemed fairly ripe inside- the taste was very mild and basically like one from the supermarket.


The pea plants are coming along fairly nicely. Someone is biting the tops and tender tendrils off of some of the plants, but because I planted so many seeds, loss of a few here and there to nibblers isn't a big deal.

I had to start over with the cabbage and broccoli. Last Sunday was brutally hot and the little seedlings fried under the hot sun and the black mulch sheet.

Visit to Monticello

I went to Monticello this weekend. The flower and vegetable gardens were still growing in full force. Here's a picture of the 2 acre kitchen garden. It's on a terrace created along the side of the little mountain:


Here's a way to make my garden more authentically old-school Virginia- make a teepee-type structure by leaning poles against each other and binding them together at the top:

Lots of the beans were growing on this type of structure.

Smooshy pickles

Opened a can of pickles today. They tasted like pickles, but were quite smooshy. Why?
From http://www.mrswages.com/faq.asp#10:

What causes soft or shriveled pickles?
A number of things, including:

* Holding cucumbers too long after harvesting. They must be processed within one day of picking.
* Growing conditions ... either too wet or too dry.
* Overprocessing. Begin your pickling immediately ... don't leave cucumbers sitting in water.
* Cucumber varieties not suitable for pickling. Those varieties include burpless and slicing cucumbers.
* Using cucumbers from poorly nourished or diseased plants.

Perhaps a combo of 1, 2, and 5 lead to the demise of my pickles.

Mysterious eggs

Someone has been laying their (tiny) eggs on the fence netting surrounding the garden.


The random pea supports are up. Various unused metal cages, some twine, and stakes.


I've put down ground cover on one of the garden sections. I'm going to try to grow cabbage and broccoli in a covered environment. Sure didn't work without cover this spring.

Early September

Finally... some sunflowers. I planted them really late, but a lot of them also got eaten by various critters.


The marigolds are going strong- sort of taking over the tomatoes in some places. here's a fancy frilly one. I have four types of blossoms- dark red, two kinds of yellow starburst, and this type:


The pumpkin is still looking as good as it can with all of the hail pits:


There's a second canteloupe that's coming along pretty well.

Visitors to the garden

Oh no! The groundhog is back. The medium-large bunny is also regularly visiting the garden. And...

Zorak from Space Ghost Coast to Coast now resides in my tomatoes:

Late August

Ok, I'm finally caught up with posts for August. Here's some progress:
The pumpkin is maybe looking more like a Cinderella pumpkin (compare to earlier post)


I think I'm about to be completely swamped with zucchini. I now have three big plants flowering like crazy. Can't even leave them alone for 12 hours- the zukes will grow to enormous, inedible zeppelins if they are left unattended for a day.


The cantaloupe is coming along. Today I found two more hidden under vines.


The "extra" tomato plants I planted behind the second shed are making lots of green tomatoes. One of them seems to have mutated and is producing something that looks more like beefsteak or radiator tomatoes instead of the roma-esque Amish paste tomatoes:


And finally... in the spirit of the cool, overcast, damp weather we've been having this week, the peas have started coming up:

I decided I would try to get some fall peas, because the spring peas died while I was in Ireland.

Catnip anyone?

Sushi cat and the tasty catnip:


I have a few cukes still growing on the struggling, shredded cucumber plants.
Here's a tasty cucumber sandwich:


The view from a nearby hill. My house is in the center of the picture (one story, brick). The neighborhood looked very different from up there.