I don't have weekends off, but I seem to have Friday's off. So.. my report from my week end.. I made 2 different batches of pickles, now I had to use cukes from the farmer's market.. but most of the spices, including garlic, dill, fennel and coriander seeds were from my yard. Wonderful pickles from that recipe book I bought.

Then tonight I managed to make 3 1/2 quarts of veggie soup from my own pickings.. cabbage, tomatoes, green beans, garlic, etc.. plus I had enough Roma tomatoes to make salsa with all the peppers from my gardens. So I put up pickles, vegetable soup, and salsa. So I feel rather good about that kind of a harvest over the past 3-4 days.

I've been digging potatoes, had enough green beans to give to my newest friend at Penney's.

I may have to plant 25-30lbs of potaotes next year as potatoes seem to be very easy to grow, plus the deer don't eat them and bugs are only a small problem on the varieties I grow.

That soup will be good on a cold night this Winter. I put up 3 quarts of soup in the freezer and 4 quarts of tomatoes in the freezer the other day. Not much, but every little bit helps.

I planted 26 feet of sugar snaps for my first attempt at growing them for a fall harvest. DW and I made pesto for the first time this season tonight. Our genovese basil and purple hardneck garlic. Very good on french bread with smoked trout and salmon.

I put down some compost under the pineapple guava tree, which has even more small fruits than usual. Should be a great harvest. And more compost under several roses. The tumbler is a great, easy way to make compost.

Thinking back to my poor tomatoes, it became obvious that they were diseased. Stunted, with dead and dying leaves. They seemed healthy when planted.

Not a lot "shaking" here as of late. Been so dry and I decieded not to use the soaker hose's but a few times this season. Guess like most "wacky" garden nutz..LOL..I've been planing my fall & next spring garden. Getting a few tomatoes but nothing like in past years..skins so tough & lots of blossom end rot (guess I need to lime this fall). Had planted some Tenderette green beans three weeks ago and their only about 3-4 inches tall. Did get my seed order from Johnny's Seeds and will start them Monday. Two types of red cabbage, a colliflower, carrots and three types of chard. Got to find some beet seeds & maybe a big bag of dryed beans from the local grocery for cover crop..LOL. I am a cheapie when it comes to some things. Take care guys & good gardening.

I was out in the garden with my mom yesterday, it was so nice. ALL of the kids (except newborn) were gone, so it was pretty quiet.

I joked with my Mom that I should take pictures of my garden and do a "Biggest garden failure" contest here on OG, since I know I would win.

I weeded a 4 foot long area of my raised vegetable bed and planted some of my not yet dead perennial flowers that came before the baby was born. (Still have more to plant *sign*)

Then my Mom said a service berry had disappeared. We looked at where it should be. We checked to see if it had been eaten (but no stump was found), we checked to see if it had been stepped on (but no bent over plant was found). We looked and looked then gave up. We walked 3 feet away, were looking at something else, turned back around, AND THERE IT WAS, EXACTLY where we had been looking!!! If I didn't know better, I wold have said that someone had played a trick on us. Sheesh.

One of the 50 peas that I planted IN THE SPRING is now up to almost 2 feet and has blossoms. I think I was able to find 6 other pea plants, none as big as the first one.

On a more successful note, the potatoes look good, ALL of the transplanted raspberries look wonderful(I think 25 plants). My new lilies look good and I think that some of them will bloom this year.

Also, all of the new poultry look good, none have died (well, 2 died as tiny chicks, but those don't count).

Tomatoes did good to poor again this year. I'll probably plant less than a dozen next year. Cherrys did well.
Picked two patty pan squash today, will plant more of that in 09.
Got hundreds of small thai peppers on plants in the potted garden, hot!
Rained 1/2 inch saturday, so I turned over two raised beds and put in the fall greens. Mustards, turnips, kale, lettuce, chard.

Alaskan, the serviceberry was probably visiting the single socks from the drier for a while. We once had a "shoe that belonged to no one" appear in the middle of the dining room table. This is why they invented that Twilight zone music.

The hail damage from the other night is becoming more evident as bruises show up on most of the tomatoes. So far it caused the total loss of one squash plant and numerous recently planted bush beans. Several peppers were also ruined.
The skunks have been in my compost (one less than before--(bang).
The spuds are doing great, and have been getting ears on all three types of corn. No bees to pollinate the cukes so I have few of them.
It's late enough in the season that I'm already thinking about next year's expansion of the garden.
What has done well this year? Homesteader peas, provider and royal purple bush beans, spaghetti and butternut squash, perpetual spinach chard, banana peppers, tomatoes (minus the hail damage), romaine lettuce and spinach, carrots, radishes, parsley, strawberries, and fennel.
Besides the weather, the biggest struggle has been hordes of grasshoppers and the lack of bees.
The beds are doing great, it's the field that's struggling and, as I continue to say, it's all about the soil, not the plants. Everything in the beds did fantastic.

I hosted a party for my just-turned-one year old this afternoon. I served black bean salsa and pasta salad, and used my own tomatoes, cukes and bell peppers for them. Had a big basket of grape tomatoes to munch on, and jars of pickled asparagus and pickled jalapenos. (The asparagus grows wild here in the spring, we pick 10 pounds a day, easily.) It was great fun to serve my own veggies to my guests, and they were impressed.

My roma tomatoes haven't even produced many blossoms, and not one single fruit. The big beef tomatoes are finally ripening, and I'm getting a cup or so of grape tomatoes each day off two plants. Bell peppers are finally coming on, got five last week and a few more today - planted six plants total, lost one to a neighbor's cat digging in my garden. Out of 25 stalks of corn, I have ONE ear. But the pole beans are happily taking over. Hail a couple nights ago pretty much destroyed the 35 bush beans I had that were just starting to flower.

I've mixed in 10 bags of compost (we're new at this, have no compost bin yet, don't hate me!) into un-used beds. I plan on planting lettuce and spinach tomorrow evening if the weather holds out, and then planting a cover crop in the other un-used beds.

This gardening stuff is fun. I'm new, and it's all experimental, but I sure am enjoying it. I tried it last year a little bit, but being ginormously pregnant in the dead of summer, I wasn't much for being outside at all. This year is much better. )

I just can't say much good about the garden this year. Here it is August and we should be well over 100º by now but today was only 68º and it seemed to have a hint of fall feel or smell to it also.

But I did get the deer fence put up. I have a few short sections of chain-link fencing 4-feet tall that I tie to stakes around my tomatoes and sweet peppers to keep the deer out. I have found that if I fence a small area, about 3 or 4 feet wide and 8 to 10 feet long the deer will not jump into it because they fear that they will get trapped inside of there. If I need more fenced space for more crops then I just make a series of these small fenced in areas.

It looks odd having all these tiny fenced in areas but as long as the deer stay out of them who cares what it looks like.

I also noticed that there were lots of tiny little green tomatoes on some of the plants. The bad news is that so far not one bell pepper has set any fruit yet. I also didn't see any fruit set on the pumpkins or the Zukes either. It looks like there is going to be slim pickings this year.