And it was delicious.
The rest of the garden has now been dismantled — the green beans are hanging in the shed to dry, the tomato cages and bean poles are back in storage in the shed’s loft, the sole remaining blueberry plant is insisting on dropping its few remaining leaves, and the fallen stalks and stems of everything are waiting to be raked up and put in the compost.
This is what I pulled out of the garden a few days ago. This year, I made a nice tall raised row for the carrots and thinned them rather carefully. It seems it does make a difference. I don’t know why some of the carrots split — like that one on the left, split all the way down and wide. I hope these biggies will still taste good — big ones from the grocery store usually don’t.
Tongue in cheek, y’all.
When it is necessary to fight a battle, even if you know in advance you won’t win, it’s never too late to get started.
On Saturday while Mark and Amy were grocery shopping, I dug out and cut up all the acorn squash vines and all but one zucchini vine and one pumpkin vine, to be dumped in the compost. Hopefully it will be hot enough to kill any squash bugs that got dumped with them.
I left the two vines as traps — initially just to keep the bugs from discovering that they could also eat tomatoes, beans, or cantaloupe.
Then today I decided that since the traps work — all the bugs congregate on the one pumpkin and the remaining zucchini stems (I took the leaves off, just leaving long stems), so it’s not hard to scrape or shake a bunch off. I really dislike handling bugs (I shuddered just typing that) so I tried to use gloves. Scooped up handfuls of bugs (and, unavoidably, mulch) and dumped them into a bucket of water, poking the brave ones down with a stick until all was still.
I did this twice — once in the morning after hanging the laundry, once in the evening after taking it down.
It was odd — and a lot like certain recurring dreams I have where I am teasing or poking some kind of animal, sure that it can’t hurt me, and it attacks, so that I have to escalate my attack, and I feel awful because I am not strong enough to kill it quickly and mercifully, and because it’s my fault that I put it in a situation where it needs to be killed anyway.
Anyway — at least I have reduced the numbers of the enemy, and perhaps next year I can retake that ground.
I remember the pastoral staff at West End Presbyterian in Virginia would often talk about this or that kind of righteousness — anything we felt especially accomplished about or proud of, anything that we could point to to show our progress or worth.
One of the things that has been attractive to me about Reformed tradition is this idea that the performance mentality has to go — we can never be good enough, and depending on our performance in any area is idolatry. Not, of course, that it’s okay to just go around sinning and failing and hurting and disappointing without a care in the world. Just that we must repent of putting any trust in our works.
So I’ve been realizing I’ve got homemaker righteousness.
I had so much pride in my little garden when I set it out, and when things were looking good, and when I picked all those beautiful peaches — as if I had anything to do with them, as if leaving them alone was some kind of accomplishment.
So pleased with myself when I roasted delicious beets or made spaghetti sauce or otherwise provided good and tasty food for my family.
And likewise, so dismayed and self-condemning when my first seeds rotted in the ground because I planted too early, or when my plants obviously needed thinning but I didn’t do it, or when I tried cooking something that didn’t turn out well, or when I realized how much I hate greens, even though they’re so good for you.
And now, most of my garden is in a shambles. Powdery mildew all over the zucchini leaves. Obvious vine borer damage at the bases of the stems, which I didn’t recognize before because I never bothered to study about pests — I thought the stems were just broken from the plants leaning over. All those nasty squash bugs. Even the browned and yellowed wilting tomato leaves, which haven’t stopped production but probably make for poorer fruit.
And I’m thinking about how bad a gardener I am, and how I need to work harder and better at it even though I hate working hard in a garden.
And when Mark got home this evening from his school’s convocation, and I mentioned my sense of shame and frustration and concern and dismay about the garden, and what to do about it, he basically gave me permission to hate the garden (like he does) and not myself. (Or at least to not condemn myself about the garden — if the garden doesn’t work, no great loss.) Permission to think about what is easy to grow and what I really want to produce, and limit the next garden to that.
A little grace.
Grace says Mark is right — ultimately what matters is that my name is in the Book of Life, not how well I garden or even how well I make up for my gardening sins.
Tomorrow my friend and her baby and toddler are coming over to help me make salsa and bake acorn squash. (She had me over once to make Turkish food, which was way fun and very tasty.)
Lord, may I experience our time together and let go of homemaking righteousness, and be at peace whether any salsa or squash is successfully made or not.
I am a lazy gardener. I want to do as little work as possible and still get a decent amount of food.
I have had small raised beds before, and no real problems from bugs — just some arguments with a groundhog that I finally won with fencing.
This year, however, in a new place, I’ve got a larger garden, not boxed in, and I’ve planted LOTS of vine crops. I have huge zucchini plants, lots of acorn squash, some cantaloupe, and some pumpkins.
And they are absolutely covered with squash bugs. Way too many to go pick and kill by hand (besides, that would be yucky).
I guess I should have done something when I noticed egg clusters on the undersides of leaves.
Perhaps kept the garden better weeded.
Maybe spaced the plants better.
Maybe cut off and destroyed affected leaves.
I won’t use an insecticide, which is non-organic, can hurt beneficial insects, and can leave residues on the food and in the soil and perhaps eventually in our water supply.
After a little surfing, it looks like my best bets are to a) leave a small portion of one crop after harvest, destroying the rest; the bugs will congregate in the remaining portion where I can try to kill them somehow — and / or b) till everything in, to bury the adults and destroy overwintering sites.
Meanwhile I harvested the acorn squash, which included one nice full one and maybe eight or nine smallish ones and a few that were ruined. I’ll bake, scoop, and freeze it later this week.
And next year either plant no vine crops or do lots of work — row covers, checking the leaves regularly, regular weeding, planting companion plants that might repel the bugs…
First, the nuisance.
Our newish next-door neighbors, whose two dogs are much nicer than the previous neighbors’ two dogs, regularly burn trash.
I haven’t gotten a really good look, but my impression is that it’s right on the ground, perhaps in a shallow pit, rather than in a proper burn barrel. This is illegal.
It smells toxic — I can’t imagine that it’s confined to paper and clean (unpainted, untreated, unstained) wood. This is illegal.
According to brochures and pages I found online, from state government sites, not only is burning trash annoying and illegal, but it’s highly polluting, and particularly likely to pollute our own yard and lungs. Children and the elderly are especially at risk of health problems related to burning trash, including cancer.
I am considering what course of action to take. Any advice?
New things.
I am cultivating some sourdough starter.
I had some in Ithaca, which I got from a church friend, and it made very nice English muffins. I didn’t have much luck making good bread with it — my bread was always undercooked and solid as a rock. And I got tired of feeding it.
But I want to try again. I don’t know anyone around here who uses sourdough starter, so I am following Sally Fallon’s directions in Nourishing Traditions.
Today is day two. Yesterday I combined 1/3 c filtered water and 1/3 c whole wheat flour, covered it with a cloth, and let it sit. Today I added 1/8 c each of water and flour, because the mixture looked too large to keep feeding it with 1/3 c. However, I was just surfing some sourdough sites and was reminded that you can discard some of the starter when first developing or maintaining it, to keep the volume manageable. And that discarding is better than reducing the amount of feed.
Next.
We finally got around to buying an extra freezer.
We got a large Frigidaire upright, manual defrost, and it now lives in the garage.
Inside are several bags of grated zucchini, several bags of roasted beets, several bags of sliced peaches, and several bags of peach scone-like objects, plus various meats and things moved over from the freezer above our fridge.
The scones were my usual recipe, but I’m increasingly disappointed in it. It makes a yummy object, but the texture is a bit odd, and doesn’t say “scone” to me at all. Perhaps oatcake is a better description. Anyway, I used one bag of frozen peach slices, minus the liquid. The peach bits had turned brown, but were fine otherwise. The scone-oatcake-things were tasty, though not very peachy between peach slices. Perhaps next time I would use the juice too, reducing the amount of other baking liquids.
And, on a related note:
We are planning to order a quarter of beef.
This was one of my main motivations for getting a freezer — buying grass-fed, untreated, local meat in bulk is less expensive than buying it by the piece, and with the farm we chose it’s even less expensive than buying supermarket meat. A front quarter, processed, wrapped, and delivered, is $2.25 a pound. Since it’s about 200 pounds of meat, it’s a big expense up front, but I think and hope it will be worth it.
Finally:
The new school year begins.
Mark goes back to work tomorrow, with a week of teacherly stuff, then classes begin next week.
I picked a bag of peaches.
I should have known — don’t pick a peach that doesn’t want to come off the tree; it’s not ready yet. Still, the less ripe ones should still be fine when cooked up in pies and cobblers later.
I cut up and froze 26 cups — took another dozen or two peaches to Indy — and there are still some on the tree.
I am pleased.
That’s the tallest sunflower I’ve ever seen, at least as far as I remember. Any tips on how to harvest the seeds?
Check out the pumpkin in the front. You can see the tomatoes, the pole beans in back (one pole with nothing on it — the plants there never got off the ground…), the zucchini leaves rising above everything…
We have been enjoying the garden.
The sunflower that towers over us is getting a bloom ready. There are a handful of pumpkins, cantaloupes, and many acorn squash slowly growing. A few of the pole bean plants were so chewed up they never got climbing, but the ones that got onto the poles are doing well despite missing their lowest leaves. The zucchini might be done with — the plants are huge, but only a few flowers remain. The tomatoes have not been getting consistent water, and the few that reddened recently were rotten inside. We’ve picked a few yummy carrots, and there are still beets. The lettuce is done. The chard is large. There are several green peppers, still quite small. Oh, and there were three plums on the half-dead plum tree, and the peach tree is loaded and might actually produce some edible fruit.
Here’s a stir fry made with chard stems and leaves, green beans, onions (blegh — white onions; never growing those again), and zucchini, all from the garden, plus some leftover chicken. A strange combination, but not bad — better the next day.
When we invited our friends to share turkey with us, we had to think of things to cook that didn’t need butter or milk, since their son is allergic. I found a recipe for honey roasted beets and carrots and tried it, adding a bit of onion, too. It turned out really nice, although I forgot the foil and it took over an hour to finish — I didn’t get a picture of the result, but here’s the beets getting peeled and diced.
