September Update: Basil Pesto, Parades and Turkey-Leg Babies

Finally, finally, I'm through the cherry tomatoes.

Though our crop of heirloom tomatoes (slicers, beefsteaks, pastes and more) was a crushing blow, the remaining three cherry tomato plants were pleasantly prolific. I picked one last small handful, yesterday, and in the last month I've made enough sun-dried (well, dehydrator-dried) tomatoes to last a year or two. So, that's nice.

Herbs! That's what's on today's docket.
I clipped copious amounts of Rosemary, yesterday, and set it to dry.
It's my very favorite herb, and I know I'll have run out by February.
It's nice to have a stock of home-grown stuff to enjoy, for a while.

Oregano, thyme and bushes of basil demand attention.
I'm making as much Basil Pesto as possible, and will freeze the leftover leaves in oil cubes.

Garden-Fresh Basil Pesto with Sunflower Seeds
5-6 cloves garlic
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup grated parmesean cheese
2 1/2 cups basil leaves, blanched and dried (So tedious, I know!)
3/4 cup olive oil
salt to taste

Using a food processor, roughly chop the garlic cloves.
Add the sunflower seeds, pulse a few times to chop and mix.
Add cheese, keep on pulsing!
Add basil, mix until well processed.
SLOWLY Add olive oil while mixing, until pesto is well-blended.
Makes 1 1/2 - 2 cups of pesto - a meal requires about 1/2 cup, so freeze the rest!

With the promise of beautiful fall weather, the fall garden is taking off! I'm harvesting broccoli, brussels sprouts, kale, swiss chard, peppers, more swiss chard, romaine and red lettuces, green beans (which I'm letting dry), and the aforementioned herbs. A little crop of carrots is growing well, along with more lettuce, kale, spinach, radishes, ... and parsnips, if I ever get the seeds in the ground.

I've had a lot of trouble growing spinach, in the past month. It seems I got a bum packet of Winter Giant Spinach from Annie's Heirloom Seeds. After waiting for it to germinate for weeks, I contacted the company. Great customer service! They quickly sent me a new package, and I'm pleased to announce that I have spinach seedlings popping up through the soil. Success!

Outside of the garden, life is good. MSU Football is back, and the husband scored a sweet gig that gets him into the games for free, so he's happy. And, he's busy! This Friday is the MSU Homecoming Parade. He was invited to once again LEAD THE PARADE -- so that's neat! I'll share some photos of his alter-ego, Spartan Recycling Man, as he rides in the bucket of the MSU Recycling Center's biggest (and noisiest) truck.

Spartan Recycling Man!

We're in the final stretch of pregnancy, and I wish I could write a delivery date on the calendar. I'm a planner, to say the least. All our ducks are in a row, though. The official due-date for Little Miss Barton is September 29th, but with my luck, I'm guessing she'll be an October baby.

The waiting has resulted in numerous Etsy purchases.
Here's the latest acquisition:

From PoshPipsqueak
https://www.etsy.com/shop/PoshPipsqueak

So. Cute.
Adorable baby clothes have affected me is ways I never expected.
Suddenly, doing laundry is more enjoyable. We'll see how long THAT lasts, though.
Etsy is a hell of a drug. So many lovely toys, cute little baby things, and wonderful gifts. I can only imagine what desperate measures I'll resort to in the coming weeks...

August Homestead Update

Our tomato season began and ended with cherry tomatoes.
Blight took the rest of our plants.
I'll spare you photos of the carnage.

We're disappointed, but the loss was a powerful and lasting lesson in organic gardening.
Pre-treating is the trick, and we just didn't know enough about it.
Now, we do!

We lost about 40 heirloom tomato plants in the span of three days.
I had hoped to fill our chest freezer with the tasty red globes, and turn them into sauce throughout the winter. The blight left us with about a dozen Black Krim tomatoes and a few pounds of cherry tomatoes.
I was truly devastated. Being 8 months pregnant and suffering from a bad cold didn't help.
I spent a few days sobbing over the loss and feeling sorry for myself, and am now greatly recovered.

This weekend I'm busy dehydrating the cherry tomatoes,
planting the fall garden, and cursing the little rodent who
keeps eating my late-summer strawberries.
I'm harvesting delicious zucchini, yellow squash and Ronde de Nice zucchini.
Our experimental cucumbers did well, and we'll do a serious planting next year.
The peppers are starting to plump.
Lazy Housewife Green Beans have been surprisingly productive.
Kale is still coming in.
The pumpkins vines aren't as productive as I'd expected.
The melons were a total flop!
The brasscias are growing tall.
My new crops of lettuce, Swiss Chard, and spinach are popping up.
Time to get some radishes in the ground, I think...

Seed catalogs are starting to arrive, and I can't help but plan for next year's garden.
More flowers! More pumpkins! More tomatoes!

Still lots to do before winter, though.
I found myself swimming in new strawberry plants.
We're scrambling to find protected places to plant them.
I'm tempted to just use them as ground-cover on the hillside, and let the rabbits ravage them.

There's been a good amount of online chatter about a looming polar vortex.
It could bury us in snow in the next 30 days!
Hard to imagine, but worrying.
I'd welcome an early winter (though I'll kick myself for saying this).
It'll hide the wreckage of my tomato beds and speed the healing process.
At the first signs of frost we'll erect our trusty mini-hoops over the salad beds and hope for the best.

Sean has been showing off his carpentry skills in the nursery.
His ingeniously designed changing table is nearly complete, and he has big plans for the closet renovation. We have all sorts of baby-related projects to wrap up in the coming weeks!

Mystery Plant Plagues Property Owners

Update: It's thistle. Enormous, monstrous thistle.

I found about 6 of these plants on my property, and photos are from this morning.

The plants are 4 - 9 feet tall, growing in a wet prairie setting.

Of course, my first thought was "Oh no! Giant Hogweed!"

After some research, I'm not so sure.

It hasn't bloomed and finished developing, yet.
When compared to Giant Hogweed it seems these leaves are different, and the stems don't have those telling purple splotches.

What do you guys think?

And yes, I've already sent photos to the MDARD requesting identification help.

 

Harvested our first Kakai pumpkin (way, way early in the season).
Cat for scale.

Common Gardening Misconceptions and a July Photo Update

Common Misconception #1:

A garden that big must take a LOT of work!
(Actually, it REALLY doesn't.)

This statement is usually followed by something along the lines of
"I'd never want to..."
"I could never deal with..."
"I'll never have time to..."
 
You're right. 
You never will.

BUT! That's because you're limiting yourself, future gardener! If you've already closed off your imagination to the possibility of gardening, then you'll never actually do it. Don't sell yourself short! The possibility of success beings with deciding that it CAN be done.

Our garden truly doesn't take much time or effort, these days...

Time Spent Weeding: 20 minutes/week (if that)
Raised beds full of fluffy soil mean that the few weeds that pop up in some unclaimed spot can be plucked from the dirt without digging or back pain. It can even be done without getting your hands dirty!

Time Spent Watering: 5-10 minutes/day (if that)
Drip irrigation is pretty much the best thing ever. A garden this size could easily take me 2 hours to water. Now, all I do is turn on the spigot. There are still a few flower pots and special plants that need hand-watering, but that's no big deal.
It's been a cooler, wet summer in Mid-Michigan. I've gone whole weeks without watering!

Time Spent on General Maintenance: 10 minutes/day
Sometimes a pea plant or cucumber vine needs to be redirected onto its trellis, or a slug needs to be removed from a squash blossom (Yuck! I recommend old kitchen tongs). Planting can take a few hours, if it's time to put tomato plants in the ground. A few hours spent on this turns into a month or two of watching and waiting, and then months of feasting. It's worth it.

Bugs and Pests: Meh.
It's not so bad. Granted, a plague of locusts could descend at any moment... but so far, so good.

I've removed a half-dozen slugs from the squash plants (again, I use tongs), and Sean removed one nasty squash borer. He's the garden's official bug-squasher, and also deals with all orchard pests. The asparagus bed had a number of hungry beetles, also removed by hand. The kale crop is doing much better this year, though there are a few little green worms munching away. Our population of frogs and toads helps to keep bugs in check, and the garter snake keeps them from becoming a plague of their own.

The birds haven't been destructive at all, as far as I can tell. It helps that we've kept an all-you-can-eat bird seed buffet about 20 feet away from the garden. Beautiful butterflies are everywhere, as are the dragonflies. Honeybees and bumblebees do most of the pollinating work, and I haven't seen a wasp in weeks.

A good fence that cannot be dug beneath is worth the time and effort of installation. I've lost a few plants to squirrels, but most every gardener accepts the fact that nature will reclaim at least 10% of what your harvest. It is only 4 feet tall, but somehow it has kept our garden deer-free, as well.

Edit: I'm no distressing damsel, and have squished countless bugs! Good gloves make me feel invincible. Guess I oughta give myself more credit.

The Hardest Part: EATING ALL OF IT
I harvest continually, from April until Thanksgiving. It begins with radishes, lettuce and spinach, then swiss chard and kale get tossed into the salad. Peas start coming in, then strawberries. Then, the parade of currants, raspberries, blueberries and other yummy things. 

By the time the tomato plants are waist-high, the summer squash is ready to eat. Cucumbers, melons, broccoli, cauliflower, TOMATOES, peppers, and eggplant ripen in quick succession. Keep in mind, there's still salad to be eaten! Carrots, brussel sprouts, parsnips, apples, pumpkins and squash round out the year, sometimes with a new flush of snap peas as a bonus. And always, the salads.

In the bleak days of winter, some root crops can be dug up (Sunchokes, Carrots, Parsnips, Potatoes, etc). Add that to the store of squash, pumpkins, and whatever is in the freezer or canned, and we're enjoying garden-fresh, organic food all year round.
I think I'll try my hand at garlic, this year. It goes into the ground in late October, when everything else dies off. It'll be ready in the spring, just before the space it takes up is needed for tomatoes. It's as if it was planned that way, eh?

We've just completed our first year at this house, so our apple trees and berry bushes are not yet mature. We're supplementing with bulk produce from local growers.

Preserving the harvest does take time, but it's well worth it. 

This year we're drying and freezing most everything, as we're lucky enough to have acquired a giant freezer chest. It's already home to more strawberries than you'd think necessary. We'll add corn, fresh herbs (in ice cubes -- they keep really well!), broccoli, cauliflower, blueberries, green beans, summer squash, raspberries and peas (if we can manage to stop eating all the fresh ones and put some aside...). We'll top off the freezer with tomatoes, as they ripen, and use them to make pasta sauce this winter.

Of course, we'll use some fresh ones for canning our World Famous (well, family-famous) salsa. By the end of the season we'll have canned batches of dill pickles and relish, plenty of jams, and whatever else comes along.

Dehydrating can be more time consuming than canning, but having an unending supply of apple chips and chewy dried blueberries is life-changing. I'm looking forward to "sun"-dried cherry tomatoes, too.

The Point: It's not that much work, and the benefits are immeasurable. 

If it were really that time consuming, there's no way we could be renovating and maintaining our house, enjoying weekend get-aways, working our day jobs and relaxing. I wouldn't spend so much time on the internet, either. ;)


Here's how the garden looks, this morning.
Viewing Tip: Clicking on the image will enlarge it, providing you with a much better look!

HUGE Lazy Housewife Pole Bean.
They're usually harvested and eaten when they're MUCH smaller.
I'm allowing a few to grow big and dry, so we can save some seeds and replant next year.

Grape tomatoes (can't think of the variety right now).
I want to eat them!
Need some hot weather to turn them red.

Beefsteak tomatoes, plumping up.

Two rows of abundant green tomatoes (4 rows total, 10-12 feet long).
The left side is at least 6 feet tall, and growing.
I figure I'll have to lop off their tops before too long.
Next Year: Bigger Trellis!

I suspect this is a tiny Butternut Squash. Yippee!

Cucumber vine (and a poppy), with a promising number of yellow flowers.

Our fantastically productive squash mound,
growing in the Hugelkultur bed I keep meaning to explain to you guys...

Pretty squash flowers!

A few Kakai pumpkins, Sean's favorite variety.
Their green and white stripes are very Spartan,
and their hull-less seeds are the BEST for eating.

A baby Cinderella pumpkin, hiding in the grass.
The Cinderella variety is beautiful, and makes great pies.

Marigolds I grew from seed (after much trouble and dissatisfaction).
With every batch of new blossoms, I'm surprised with a different color combination! The first ones were huge and mostly orange, followed by this pretty scarlet flower.
Looks like it'll be back to big orange beasts in a few more days.

Very determined strawberry plants, striking out for new territory to conquer.
I love it, because these new little "suckers" will replace our 4-year-old plants as their production dwindles.
Sustainable, eh?

Baby Update:
Yup! I'm still pregnant -- about 6.5 months, or 30 weeks.
It's been an embarrassingly easy pregnancy, with no morning sickness or complications. Let's hope that continues. We're looking forward to meeting our daughter in late September.Want to know what we're eating, making and doing?
You can find short, sporadic updates on the Barton Gardens Facebook Page.

Tomatoes Headed to Market! - Garden Update

I'm a nervous plant mamma this morning, as I prepare to send my tomato plants to market. I started far too many seeds this spring! We've planted about 30 tomatoes in the garden (a dozen varieties - all heirloom organic), which left me with 2 dozen extra plants in need of good homes.

The first dozen went fast, as did my extra egg plants and some peppers. These tomato remainders are headed to the South Lansing Farmers Market, and will be sold by our friend at the Clover Row Gardens booth (along with delicious homemade breads and herbs). I'm nervous! I hope these little plants find good homes. I'm sending along a nice tablecloth, in hopes that they'll stand out.

 

I'm also sending along a few extra Crimson Rambler Morning Glory plants, which Sean said I'm ABSOLUTELY NOT allowed to plant in the garden. Spoilsport!

Quick Garden Update:
 - The Hugelkultur bed is a success! Our summer squashes, pumpkins, melons and radishes are growing well, and loving this hot and rainy weather. A Hugelkultur tutorial post is forthcoming.
 - All new apple trees seem to have survived their planting, and are thriving. We have 9 trees, but the "official" definition of an orchard is 10 trees. So, what do we have, a "planned grouping" of apple trees? This seems like reason enough to get just one more...
 - Peas everywhere! Daily, I find myself glaring at the pea trellises. They're trying to strangle one another, and doing a damn good job of it.
 - Last weekend we installed DRIP IRRIGATION. It's pretty fabulous.
 - At long last, I've created a Facebook page to showcase the fruits of our labors. You can find photos of what we're doing, what we're making and what's growing at www.facebook.com/BartonGardens.
 - IT'S TOO HOT! This spring became summer too quickly, and our salads suffer for it. The spinach is bolting and slightly bitter. The radishes are sending up shoots, eating up their own tasty roots in the process. The lettuce stands strong, thus far, but I suspect it will go to seed, soon. This weekend I'm planting an interesting, hot-weather spinach variety. Wish me luck!