Fall Crops are Falling!

Falling prey to caterpillars!  They are everywhere and the Bt I have been spraying just makes them stronger.  I got some spinosad in the form of Captain Jack's Dead Bug Brew but we've had rain every evening so I haven't been able to spray.  The rain is gone today and the forecast is clear for the next week so I will spray tonight in one last ditch effort to save what's left of the butternuts and cocozelles.  The spaghetti squash and pumpkins are done.  One pumpkin and no squash on a dozen plants and the one pumpkin was attacked last night and has holes all over.  All but one butternut was attacked, too.  The butternut holes are tiny so I'm hoping I can still save them and just cut the wormy part out.  They won't store, but I could cube and freeze.

The biggest butternut, not looking too good.

Spaghetti squash covered in powdery mildew and chewed by caterpillars which have made their way into the vines.

The last cantaloupe.  Starting to see a theme?  Yup, the caterpillars feasted last night!

 

The good news is that only a few of the cucumbers have been hit with bugs and no powdery mildew yet so I get to keep those for a few more weeks, or so.  Also, all the winter veggies like broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, etc. are doing great.  The caterpillars only seem to like the cucurbits.  If I pull them now, I free up a lot of space to plant onions, garlic, leeks, carrots and greens, among other things.  I am somewhat sacrificing the cucumbers because, once everything else is gone, they will be the feast of choice.  Hoping to keep spraying and keep them from moving onto winter crops.

The sweet potatoes are curing nicely, and I cooked with the ones I harvested early, about a month ago.  I made scalloped potatoes at gratin.  They started out as scalloped potatoes, but them I covered the top with cheese so, technically, they are au gratin.   I think.  Never was really sure of the difference.  Whatever the name, they were the best sweet potatoes I've ever eaten.  Ever. In my life.  Even my daughter loved them and ate two helpings.  I didn't follow a recipe, just sautéed an onion and garlic in butter, added salt, pepper and crushed cayenne pepper and wondra flour and made a paste.  Then I poured in some heavy cream and added chopped chives and the sauce was done.  I mixed in the potatoes and poured it all into a baking dish, covered it with grated asiago and baked at 400 till potatoes were soft and the top was brown which took about 30-35 mins.  Everything but the flour and dairy came from the garden-love that!  I didn't get a picture because they were gone before I even thought of it.  

We had the potatoes with a salad and a crock pot roast.  I even made an apple slab pie for dessert.  Used this recipe from King Arthur Flour.  I had a store bought crust and was short on time but it worked great.  I will attempt to make the crust from scratch next time.  Oh my, it was a great dinner.  I will have to run a few extra miles today, but it was sooooo worth it.  

One last thing, but it's not garden related.  Hope no one minds.  Here's a somewhat grainy (pulled it from a video on my phone) of my son riding his bike for the first time without training wheels!  

So proud of him.  Go Little Man, go!

Thanks for reading,

Jen

Farmer's Market Finds

I brought my husband to the weekly Farmer's market yesterday.  Usually, I only look at edibles and plants and bypass the flea market junk, but there was some kind of event inside the fairgrounds (that may, or may not, be the fall fair) so all the vendors were in the parking lot and they were not in their usual spots.  We ended up going through all the aisles looking for the plant guy (never found him) and, low and behold, I ended up bringing home some of the flea market junk.

First, I got this cool looking level.  The guy wanted $5 and my husband offered $3.  The guy said no so we walked away.  I couldn't stop thinking about it, it just spoke to me, so I went back and offered $4 with a very nice "Please?".  That worked and now I have a wood and metal level that is currently sitting on my fireplace mantel.  Not your usual formal living room mantel decor, but I love it.

Next to the level guy, was a true junk table.  It had Coke glasses and assorted "antiques".  It also had this window.

It's not antique, but for another few bucks, I knew it would be perfect in my future garden shed.  In this case, the glass and plastic frame construction will work great out in the elements.

The last thing we picked up was this tool box/carrier.

Doesn't it look adorable holding some herbs and gardening supplies?  I pointed it out to my husband as we walked past the vendor's table and he loved it and said I should get it and use it in the garden.  It was the most expensive thing we bought at $15 and it pushed the total over my $20 budget.  The guy who sold it to us made us promise not to paint it and ruin the charm.  Not a problem.  I love it just the way it is.   I wonder what it says about me when I go shopping and come home with a level, window and tool box?  I'm definitely my father's daughter!  He builds clocks in his retirement and is a wonderfully gifted carpenter.  The smell of freshly sawn wood is one of my favorites.  

We actually did get some produce - a bag of red pears.  In all of my 42 years, I've only eaten a handful of pears and never had a red one.  I am not sure why I don't eat them more often.  They were delicious!  Very sweet and crisp and juicy.  My husband and I ate a couple while we walked around.  When my daughter and her friend came home from school, we made them each try some slices.  Neither one had eaten a pear, ever.  I love introducing people to produce they normally wouldn't pick.   It was funny because, the day before, my daughter said she wanted to try a pear since she loves apples so much.  She said it was good, but didn't finish the portion given.  I guess she's more of an apple girl, after all. 

Thanks for reading,

Jen

The Final Sweet Potato Harvest

I harvested the last bed of sweet potatoes today.  This bed was the first one I planted back in early May.  It was one of a few new ones installed in late spring and I didn't realize that it only got partial sun in the afternoon.  Sweet potatoes like it hot and these slips got a slow start.  Ironically, the bed produced almost as many as the others (in full sun) and the size and shape were much better than the crazy twisted, giant ones I harvested yesterday.

I harvested 12lbs which brought my total to 45lbs!  Not bad for my first time.  We definitely have enough for our family to eat all winter and spring until the regular potatoes are harvested.  I will also get to bring a big dish of them to the family Thanksgiving dinner!

I upgraded my phone and I now have a cool panoramic feature so I played around a little with it this evening.  I need to perfect my technique.  Evidently I cannot follow a straight line so it looks a little wonky but I like being able to see so much at once.

The mini pumpkins, spaghetti squash and Christmas Lima beans are to the right of center and I just planted broccoli, cabbage and Brussels sprouts in the beds in the middle.  The empty bed near the flag may become a perennial onion/leek bed.  All the way to the right are the four new beds I added a few weeks ago.  They still need soil and at least one will be for garlic/shallots.  I think the others will hold sugar snap peas (climbing up the trellis) and shelling peas.  I'm training the spaghetti squash to climb the other side of the trellis.

The Tabasco peppers (on the left) are, officially, over six feet tall!  My butternuts were coaxed up the trellis on the right of the bed this morning and a few vines reached the top.  My fall planting of Kentucky Blue pole beans are too shaded behind the peppers so they aren't filling in the back trellis much but they are starting to flower and may give me a few pods.  If they aren't producing much, I'll pull them and plant peas in their place.  I'm still debating on overwintering the Tabasco peppers.  There are two plants and I may leave the front one (the biggest and more prolific) and prune and pot the back one to take in on cold nights and see how it does in the spring.

I finally got a chance to turn the compost from one bin to the other.  I also sprayed everything down with a generous dose of neem.  I have some aphids and, just today, found the start of powdery mildew on every single squash and pumpkin plant, ugh!  All the humidity really takes a toll on the fall garden.  Hopefully, I can harvest a good crop before I have to pull everything. 

Have a great night!

Thanks for reading,

Jen

Harvest Monday-September 30, 2013

Another harvest Monday!  As usual, I had an assortment of peppers:  Tabasco, serrano, fajita bell and Yummy Snacking.  Tabasco and Yummy Snacking peppers are really loaded with fruit and have grown over five feet tall!  The others are starting to wind down for the season, I believe.

 

 

 

I also dug up two of three sweet potato beds.  One bed was filled with Beauregards and the other with Vardamon.  The Vardemons are a bush variety and I did notice that the vines, although they looked the same, were not nearly as long as the Beauregards.  What was so different, was that the Vardemon sweet potatoes dug deep down into the soil.  Most were found at least six inches down and quite a few had made it through the landscape fabric that lines the raised beds and were growing underneath.  Although I only weighed the total crop and not by type (yet), I would say they were, roughly, equal.  All in all, today I harvested 33 pounds of sweet potatoes.  Some were tiny and some were...

 

not so tiny!

 

 

Most were average in size, but odd in shape.

 

 

 

I found this little guy hanging out in the shade of the leaves. I moved him to another bed to

continue with his bug destroying work.

Hope everyone else had a great harvest and thanks to Daphne's Dandelions for hosting Harvest Monday every week!

Thanks for reading,
Jen

Butternut Blues

This is what I'm finding on my butternuts.  About half the little squash are rotting and I suspect blossom end rot or blossom blight.  I grow in raised beds filled with a mixture of compost, peat and vermiculite (Mels mix).  I've never had this happen before, but I've never had my soil tested, either.  This just started showing up on new fruit following heavy rains over the last few weeks.  I plan to give the plants a dose of calcium (blossom end rot spray for tomatoes) and see if that helps the next round of squash.  I also just got a bag of worm castings and want to give it a try.  I put in a couple of inches of compost before planting this bed, but haven't given them any fertilizer since planting.  I need to get better with fertilizing and using preventative organic sprays.  This time of year, it isn't a case of if bugs or disease invade the garden, but when.  This keeps many Florida gardeners from planting a fall garden.  Some just feel it isn't worth the effort.  I disagree.  You just have to be diligent and organized.  I'm working on the organized part. 

The plants, in general, look great and are growing like crazy with all this rain.  I have several healthy looking squash on the vines.  Hope to keep them.  This is my first attempt at butternuts and first successful attempt at winter squash.  Last year's August planted winter squash got powdery mildew and squash borers and died before giving me any usable fruit.  

In the front is a cocozelle (zucchini) squash and the early butternuts are climbing up the trellis in the corner, behind the cocozelles.  They are planted pretty close together, so I think they will benefit from a mid season feeding.  I'm using the zucchini plant to shade some broccoli seedlings and a basil plant while I prepare their planting areas.  At the far left is a glimpse of kohlrabi.  My first time planting those. They were requested by my five year old who saw the photos on the seedling tag and thought they looked cool.  How could I say no?  After looking up the plants on my phone and reading they are a brassica from Germany, I grabbed two packs of nine-a purple and a white/green.  I've never met a brassica I didn't like and my maiden name is about as German as you can get so I'm excited about these odd looking little veggies.

Well, it's time for me to say "gute Nacht!"

Thanks for reading,

Jen

An Apple A Day

Although our local farmers' market was a bust this week due to the rain, I did run across a big apple sale and grabbed a bushel.  I've never canned applesauce before, but it is one of the very few things everyone in the family likes.  

I have to say, applesauce was way easier to make and can than the tomatoes I did in the spring.  Basically, the apples were quartered, (with bad spots removed), heated up on the stove till soft and crushed.  I used my KitchenAid grinder with the strainer attachment and it was smooth sailing!  I fed in the hot pieces and the machine churned out beautiful applesauce with no seeds or skins.  The sauce was very sweet and I added a little citric acid to keep the color and it gave it just the right amount of tanginess for my taste.  I added cinnamon to half and canned it all.  I ended up with 14 quarts of sauce and just over a half gallon of juice (and a burned hand-applesauce explodes out of the pan as it gets hot).  Because I cooked the apples with the skins on, the juice is a light pink color and delicious.  I am planning to boil down some of the juice to make a syrup.  Not sure what I will use it on, but I'm picturing it poured over vanilla ice cream, yum!

Since I had the canner going, I decided to finish up the salsa and pizza sauce I had been planning to make all summer long and then picked enough hot peppers to pickle a few pints.  I also chopped and froze a few bags of sweet peppers.  All in all, not a bad day's work.

In garden news, I have decided the bugs on my Tabasco pepper are not beneficials, but dreaded stink bugs.  I was able to remove all visible ones and will keep checking to make sure I got them all.  

My butternuts and cucumbers are dropping tiny fruit.  The larger butternuts (over a few inches) look fine, but many of the tiny ones are turning yellow, then dark on the end and the flower rots so I'm guess blossom end rot.  I didn't test my soil this fall, but the weather the last two weeks has been wet, wet, wet.  It had rained every day for the last week and we just came off of a three day flood watch.  I have some blossom end rot spray I got for tomatoes but never needed it so I'm wondering if I can use it on the squash and cukes or is it too late to correct the deficiency?  I need to get a little better with the preventative stuff so I'm not trying to put out fires.  An ounce of prevention, and all that.

The mailman brought me a package today and I now have something new to plant.  I just love deliveries for the garden!  I think I've said, at least a dozen times this year, that I am not adding anything new to the garden.  Well, I can't resist a good deal and, perennial veggies are a great deal.  Plant once and harvest over and over.  I am now the proud owner of 25 sets of Egyptian Walking Onions.  I read about them, and other perennial/wild aliums, in a book on vegetable gardening in Florida.  When I was younger, we had wild onion or wild garlic in our yard and I loved eating it.  My friends always thought that was so strange.  "She's eating the grass again!"  I was so happy to find the walking onions online along with wild onion (I was unable to find perennial leeks, everyone was sold out for the season).    

I'll have to figure out a place for them-that's quickly becoming the story of my life-but I have a few ideas.  I should have some space in the garden opening up this fall.  I was given the ok by my husband to move my potatoes, garlic and annual onions to a piece of land we own in the neighboring town.  I'm very excited about this and am hoping it will also become home to other "larger" crops like corn or grains.  Looks like I need to get out the garden plan and start working.  My kinda fun on a Saturday night!  Oh boy, I'm pretty sure I'm too young to say stuff like that, but its true.

Hope you enjoy your Saturday night!

Thanks for reading,

Jen

Name This Bug...Please!

I'm pretty sure they are stink bugs of some sort and, therefore, not a beneficial.  I've looked through so many bug pics but cannot find an exact match.  

These have been on my pepper plants lately.   Only on the peppers, not on anything else.  They are always grouped like this.  The plants they are on are starting to get some yellow leaves but nothing major and the fruit seems to be fine, though some of the neighboring peppers have dropped most leaves and slowed or stopped fruiting so I pulled them this morning.  I have seen aphids and carpenter ants on these plants, too.  Today I found one dark red lady bug.  I think that's what it was.  Didn't get a great look as it started raining hard and I ran for cover on the porch.

It looks like they start off orange then turn more green/gray as they get bigger.  I crushed one and smelled a smell but it wasn't horrible and I thought stink bugs really stink, hence the name.  My hand does smell a little, even after washing.  

Maybe I'm in denial, lol.  I really want this to be a parasitic bug that is cleaning up all the plants like a death vacuum!  I've got cabbage loopers on the squash so I sprayed everything with Bt last week and planned to do a round of neem this week.  Just waiting for a rain free forecast.  Today, there is a flood warning, and 80% chance of rain tomorrow, so looks like Thursday might be a spray day.  I'd hate to accidentally kill good bugs, though, so I try not to spray too much.  I always use organic methods, when needed, and find that Aug-Sept are the "bug months" in my garden.  

Last fall, I lost quite a few plants this time of year due to bugs and disease, and I don't want it to happen again.  Im determined to have a four season vegetable garden.  Even with the presence of some bugs, all of the plants look very healthy, which I take as a good sign.  Ironically, I didn't see a single bug (other than the ever present snails) in the garden all spring/summer.  Guess they were just biding their time and waiting for the perfect storm of heat, humidity and rain.  

Wish me luck, and thanks for reading,

Jen