How's Your Garden Doin'?

[Claire]

I swore I was not going to preserve tomatoes this year! But now I have three huge bowls of tomatoes. I'm going to start dropping them off at various neighbor's houses.

 

[babetoo]

still have carrots, tomatoes, and basil and that's it. the heat got some and bugs got the rests. will do with a drip to water them next year. i am 71 and most of yard is rock, is a hazard to go out and water.

 

[bethzaring]

for the unusual conditions, enough crops did well that we will eat this winter...we will have broccoli, cabbage (sauerkraut), carrots, kale, potatoes, lots of potatoes, celery, onions, garlic

sweet potatoes remain to be seen, won't know until October how they did

didn't grow enough corn to put by, have not touched 2008's frozen sweet corn yet

no tomatoes, still getting used to that, maybe I will use up the canned tomatoes in stock....will buy a case of paste to make sauces this winter, have mostly juice in stock

oh, forgot the beans....bush beans are the size of match sticks and the black eyed peas are forming...hope to dry all the black eyed peas

 

[Constance]

Something I learned from a dear older friend who taught me a lot about canning for sustenance...if you have an overflow of, for instance, tomatoes one year, you should can extra, because you may not have any next year.

 

[JMediger]

...I'm going to start dropping them off at various neighbor's houses.

Claire, it's amazing how many veggies my neighbors take, especially when I drop them off when they're at work.

Our garden this year is terrible. We've been gone for 3 weeks and expected to come back and have things ready to pick. Carrots and beets are great and I'm actually going to try another round of beets tomorrow. Peppers are alright and onions are coming ( I think ). Tomatoes ... I have lots of green, hope to get some warm weather to redden them up. Squash ... one balls are ready to pick, have a few zuchinni, no yellow crook neck, no butternut. We tried a modified melon for our area and have lots of blooms but no fruit. Cucumbers ... have a few on. Beans are a bust. I really could cry. Oh well. We'll start planning for next year.

 

[blissful]

My tomatoes are behind, lots of green ones, tomatillas too, nothing red or ripe yet.
Cucumbers are okay, we've had a few, would like a lot more. Zucchini is okay, not too much yet, hopefully more so we can shred them for zucchini bread in the winter.
Pea pods, steady, blanched and frozen.
Green peppers are still stunted, same with basil, we keep fertilizing them and watering them.
Bush beans and pole beans, producing for a month now, canned and pickled a bit so far. The japanese beetles we are picking at a rate of 50 per day to keep them at bay. I'm hoping for another full month of the garden producing.
I wish I had planted a bigger garden, it really did well this year, and I wish I'd have planted more herbs and some pablano peppers.

 

[babetoo]

i couldn't believe it , i have two eggplants. i thought the plants was squash and that it was dieing. go figure. lots green tomatoes still. have been eating ripe for quite a while. i am tired of watering. lol

 

[bethzaring]

yesterday I unloaded some sweet corn and green beans onto a friend, and he is supposed to be bringing over a boat load of tomatoes from his sons' garden today

 

[Claire]

Our problem this year was that it was too cold. I swear if you put every day together you couldn't come up with a week over 80 degrees all year AND we had a lot of rain. I still had enough tomatoes to give away a lot of them, but the season will be short and the tomatoes are relatively small. The "crop" that suffered the most was the peppers. Didn't get a single eggplant. I've decided in future years all I am growing is poblano peppers (for my cousin's New Mexico green chile), "Super Cayennes" (for drying) and Early Girl tomatoes (because I have tomatoes earlier than any of my friends; many are just now harvesting their first ones and I've been giving them away for two months).

 

[Uncle Bob]

Cow Horns

Cow Horn Cayenne Pepper

HOT!!!!!!!!!!!


​

 

[Alix]

I could use a few of those to go with all the tomatoes that are going nuts here. I have more tomatoes than you can believe! Say it with my now...SALSA SALSA SALSA!

UB, together we could make beautiful salsa.

 

[Claire]

Uncle Bob, I bought a cow horn plant for the first time this year (this is the first time I've ever even seen one) and it may edge out my usual super cayennes if I can find them next year (I live in a short season place, more so than usual this year, and want something that can produce in that time). Question I have for you; have you dried them? We only had the one plant this year, and I have great luck drying my super cayennes. If I can't dry them, there's no point in growing more than one plant. SOmetimes peppers I grow rot or mildew before I can get the dry enough to put in a jar or food processor for chile flakes.

 

[Uncle Bob]

Miss Claire...

I've never dried Cow Horns...Just eat them fresh out of hand, make pepper sauce, and occasionally in a salsa....To dry I leave the regular Cayenne on the plant as long as possible...I thread them with a needle and thread and hang them in an out building away from insects to dry...I always lose a few to mildew, rot, etc.....May try to dry some Cow Horns this year just to see....

 

[larry_stewart]

Ive been away from home the past 10 days or so. Im afraid to see what my garden looks like. Everytime i go away, when i get back, the weeds have completely taken over,and i just give up at this point since it is close to the end already. Im also curious to see how much damage the chickens created while i was gone. They've already found there way to the cucumbers and tomatoes. They are lucky im a vegetarian, or they'd wind up in the pot with the vegetables !!

 

[Wyogal]

First it was cold, now it's too hot. And we've been plagued by grasshoppers. I don't grow food, but one of my small russian Olive trees has been stripped bare by the hoppers.

 

[Claire]

In that case, Bob, I will let you know how they do as a dried pepper. I, too, grow cayennes for drying and string them as you've described. I grow poblanos to roast. Our season here has been way too cool and rainy for a good crop, but my husband (the roaster and stringer, I'm the grower) has roasted enough poblanos and cow horns for a batch of My Cousin Joanna's New Mexico Green Chile. Husband is disappointed with our cayenne yield this year, but whenever he complains I shake a mason jar that still has an inch or so of chile flakes we ground LAST YEAR in it. It's like tomatoes. He complains that we don't have as much this year, but I still have a quart of sauce in the freezer from LAST YEAR. Ditto pesto. Seriously, we don't have a separate freezer and I get tired of plowing through this stuff!

 

[Claire]

Larry, we used to head to visit my folks in Florida in the spring, but the two weeks away at the start of the season just made my entire yard go out of control and I'd never catch up. This year we decided to head down in the late autumn, after we've put the veggie plots to bed, so to speak.

Which is what we're starting to do now. I've torn out one tomato plant that had nothing that would ripen before our first frost (it has been so cool that the tomatoes take forever to ripen). The other three plants will go before the week's over, I think. I was hoping to head south with some fresh tomatoes (Florida's tomatoes leave a lot to be desired) but a cool, wet summer killed that thought. I always hate gardening this time of year, the clearing of dead plants.

 

[larry_stewart]

All I have left are my chard ( which I ate yesterday, but there are still some useable plants out there) ,some herbs and a few leeks. Everything else has been pulled out. Ill plant garlic in a month or so for next year.

 

[latspafli]

Larry, we used to head to visit my folks in Florida in the spring, but the two weeks away at the start of the season just made my entire yard go out of control and I'd never catch up. This year we decided to head down in the late autumn, after we've put the veggie plots to bed, so to speak.

Which is what we're starting to do now. I've torn out one tomato plant that had nothing that would ripen before our first frost (it has been so cool that the tomatoes take forever to ripen). The other three plants will go before the week's over, I think. I was hoping to head south with some fresh tomatoes (Florida's tomatoes leave a lot to be desired) but a cool, wet summer killed that thought. I always hate gardening this time of year, the clearing of dead plants.

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[texherp]

I tried onions for the first time this season, but didn't have much success. Apparently there are two types of onions, long day and short day. Down South, we plant long day onions so they growth through fall and winter and form their bulbs when days get longer in spring. But they only sell short day bulbs at the big box stores (didn't know until now) so my onions tried to grow through the hot, dry summer and would have formed their bulbs when the days got short again in the fall, had they not gone dormant from the heat and rot in the ground. Oh well, that's how you learn!

I've planted my fall crop now: bush beans, tomatoes, and pretty soon beets, collards, and long day onions.