Jenny - Pepper Harvest

Yesterday my husband picked a huge harvest of peppers! There was danger of a frost overnight, so he ran out to the garden to salvage what he could. It's typical of us to have multiple pepper harvests out here. Our plants often last well into autumn. We'll be shipping some out to my parents on the east coast. Here's a pic, and these are not even all of them!

Jenny - What I'm Up To

The weather has been absolutely gorgeous out, and my garden beds are calling to me. Well, crying more like. So many things have been going on that I've fallen behind on my weeding something terrible. So the children and I are embarking on a fall cleanup project. We'll be weeding, straightening out and trimming back any plants that have misbehaved themselves out of shape.
Oh, that reminds me. Always check your plant resource (online, book, whatever you prefer) before trimming a plant back, especially if you intend to do a hard trim, where large portions of the plant are cut away (clematis comes to mind). As a general rule, waiting until just before or just after winter is best.
Once we're done we'll be moving on to the plants inside the house, so hopefully you'll get some posts from me on keeping your house plants happy. In the meantime....

Happy Gardening!

A quick update

OK, this may not be an informative post, but I've just checked on the garden and am now all excited, and I'm sharing the news with you. We have cucumbers! There, I said it. Now let me yell it - WE HAVE CUCUMBERS! They are six or seven inches long and not much thicker than a pencil right now, but they seem to be growing fast. The vines look great and are full of blossoms. I can't wait until next week when we get to eat them. I believe these are the Armenians but the English cucumber vines look good too.

Oh, and by the way, I opened up a jar of the spicy dill pickle spears I made a couple of months ago and they are very tasty. My son ate half the jar for lunch the other day and I'm working on the other half.  Here's a picture of those tasty things:

And since I've got you reading this anyway... I also picked a tomato, two green peppers and two chili peppers off of the plants left from our spring garden today. What a blast!

Cucumbers

Hello again everyone. We've enjoyed a good growing season this year and I'm happy to say that our fall garden has been started. There are still many things to be planted, but the cucumbers are in and looking good.

My children and I all love cucumbers, so it's natural for us to plant them each spring in the garden. I have been looking for the best cucumber to suit our needs for quite some time, and have finally come up with a winner. For our house, we love the Armenian cucumber. It is also known as the yard long cucumber, and it's name speaks for itself. It is said that these do not make very good pickling cucumbers because they tend to lose their crunch. I made quite a few jars of pickles with our spares this year and will report in a month or two what I think of this. In the meantime tough, it must be said that we have never had a bitter one. I had a lot of trouble a few years back with bitterness in our cukes. Some research suggested that this can be due to heat and low water. I'm not very good at watering the garden and prefer plants that will forgive me for this. 'Regular' or pickling cucumbers can get very bitter. English cucumbers don't tend to get bitter, but they do like a lot of water in order to produce a good volume of fruit (or should I say veggies). Armenians seem to flourish with very little attention. That means it is right for us.

I don't know how they will do in the cooler climate of a fall garden, but I'm determined to find out. Ever one to try new things, our garden is now sporting some Armenian seedlings, as well as some English cucumber seedlings. It may turn out that the English variety does better in the fall garden around here. I'll let you know if a couple of months!

There are a lot of web sites devoted to the various cucumbers, their pros and cons and preferred growing conditions. It may take a little research, but with some effort and experimentation, you should be able to find one just right for you.

Until then, happy gardening.

Jenny - September Veg Gardening Duties

Hi, y'all. Sorry for the long absence. I wanted to chime in to talk about gardening in September. In some areas of the country, it's time to plant bulbs and shut down the veg gardens for the winter. Not so in Texoma. We have the blessing of a long growing season and can now prepare for what's sometimes called the short season. You can also often get away with the cooler weather crops that most of us don't dream about earlier in the year, crops like peas, beans, and lettuces. I know that's hard to believe while it's still so blazing hot outside, but it's true.
If you have tomatoes, you may have noticed that they're still producing. Great! This happens to me all the time, and I'll often have tomatoes all the way until the first hard frost. Keep them watered and happy, and see what happens. Our pepper plants are also going strong. We've been harvesting steadily all summer. We have so many, we've had to give them away! We'll be keeping them happy for as long as possible also, as well as harvesting seeds from the tastier ones.
So go ahead and begin prepping your garden beds and get to replanting. Clear away any spent plants from your spring/summer garden. Loosen up the soil if it has become packed again. You might want to fertilize, especially if you've grown soil sappers like corn or tomatoes. You can also plant soil rejuvenators such as peas in those beds. They can help return some life to the soil. Many crops ideal for the short season can be sown directly into the soil. Good. That saves time. Peas, beans, and many lettuce types are direct sow. Squash are direct sow, though avoid any super-long growers (Check the seed packet), or "juicy" squash like zucchini that might resent coldish nights. Perhaps most importantly especially while the days still blaze: water in well!
Every garden is very dependent on tree cover, shade/sun exposure, wind, etc. Even in Texoma the terrain can change from one town to the next. My garden beds set onto straight prairie land perform differently than my friends who have a lot more tree cover. You know your garden best. Check your seed packet instructions (or look it up online of course), trust your instincts and have fun with it!

Jelly Making

I was having a great debate with myself as to whether to title this post 'The Fruits of my Labor' or 'Plum Tired'. As you can see, I ended up choosing neither one. Just too big a decision for this time of night. 'Why are you so tired?' one might ask. Well, even if you didn't ask that, let me tell you. I've been making jelly. Lots of it. After twenty four pints of plum jelly from the plums off of the trees in our yard, ten pints of blueberry (my sad little plants didn't yield this year, so we went to a pick your own blueberry farm), and twenty seven pints of wild plum jelly made from plums my husband picked in West Texas last weekend, I'm tired of the whole thing. The good news is that I learned how to can and am willing to share what I've learned with you!

According to my mother-in-law, you can make any type of jelly you want without the aid of fruit pectin (more commonly known as Sure-Jell). After boiling the fruit long enough to get it soft, smash it up to get the juice and pulp out. Combine two cups of juice with two cups of sugar and boil it for ten minutes. To that mixture, add two more cups of juice and two more cups of sugar. Boil it for another ten minutes. Pour this syrup into your prepared jars, apply hot lids and relax. Each batch yields about two pints of jelly.

She says that starting with three or fours cups to make the process go faster just won't work. For whatever reason, you have to stick with two. I don't know the validity of that argument yet. I got tired standing over the stove stirring tonight, and started adding an extra cup of juice and sugar now and then. My figuring was that if you added a little extra, it would boil down a little slower, so you should add a couple of minutes to the boil time. I don't know how it will jell, as I just poured it into the jars and sealed them, but the liquid consistency looked about right.

If you want to make pectin free jelly with a tested and approved recipe, stick with the one above. I've sampled and tested plenty of it this week and definitely approve! Tonight's experiments may or may not prove successful, but I'll have fun finding out.

Jenny - A Word on Hay

Hi y'all. Jenny here. I see that a lot of us have large melons cooking in our gardens, so it's a good time to talk about hay. Keeping our gardens well watered is essential for tasty fruit and veg, but the moist soil can sometimes cause rot spots in our large melons, strawberries and other things that lay or touch directly on it. It'll break your heart to see a gorgeous melon ready for the picking, turn it over, and... an icky, depressed soft spot. I've heard some tell me that they just try to turn the melons a bit to keep any one side from taking too much of the weight, but this seems like a good way to snap the thing right off the vine to me. I like hay for this job.
You get yourself a small, square bale of hay. You don't need a lot. If you have horse-loving friends or ranchers, perhaps they'll sell you a small portion of what they buy by the truckload. You lay down a couple inches of hay underneath your fruit, and voila, that should help reduce or flat out eliminate the rot spots. It lifts the fruit up off the soil and keeps it from getting too wet under there. The hay can even act as a mulch, keeping the soil underneath it from losing too much moisture in our burning hot, Texoma sun. That reminds me, don't substitute with your flower garden cedar mulch here. It's too strong.

Happy gardening!