Tag Archives: Garden

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What Is It???

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I have a tree in my yard that has been bearing fruit lately.

Actually, it bears fruit every year but usually the squirrels have eaten all of it before we can identify what it is.  I have a hunch that it’s a persimmon tree, but this is the first year I’ve been able to see the fruit turning orange, so I am more confident than I was before.

However, since I am no expert in identifying trees and plants and whatnot in the wild, I am opening it to all of ou who may have more experience.

Most of the fruit is higher up in the tree (and I am not climbing it unless they really are persimmons, and therefor worth it) and as you can see from the leaves in the first photo, there is some sort of fungus or blight going on.

What say you?  Persimmons? Shall I harvest them?  Do I harvest them now and let them ripen indoors, or wait for them to turn orange?

I’ve never eaten a persimmon before, though I have lots of recipes for preserving them.

Fingers crossed.

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Making My Peace With Summer

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It’s probably abundantly clear to most people who know me well that summer is not my favorite season.  I have very little tolerance for the heat, and as for the bugs, well.

But it wasn’t always this way.  My dislike for summer is fairly recent – it started about 15 years ago when we moved to central Virginia from upstate New York.  Most of my summers as a kid were spent on lakes or rivers in a place where most people still don’t have central air.  If they do, they don’t need to run it more than a week or two a year.  We run ours nearly non – stop from May through October.

Of course we save on the heating bills come winter.

My point is summer used to be fun, full of swimming and fresh garden vegetables, drive 0 in movies and soft – serve ice cream.

My kids rarely get to see the outside world until late afternoon, once the sun is not so intense and it’s not too hot to swim.

This makes me sad, and I am trying to make sure we have a better summer experience than years past.  We’re still enforcing the “no being out in the sun if it’s over 100” rule, but having the pool makes it easier to have some summer fun.

The garden is also helping me out with my summer malaise.  Good fresh tomatoes and basil and cucumbers go a long way to cure the “I miss winter” blues.

I’ve been conquering some of the heat by reminding myself that without me being out there to manage it, the garden wouldn’t thrive.  Every day I am out there to water it, pull weeds and take care of the squash bugs that have yet again invaded.  The best way to control them without chemicals is to crush the eggs whenever you find them – and find them I do.  It’s pretty gross, and I usually find a few mature bugs to deal with as well.  All in all, however, this daily attention has saved me the infestation levels I have suffered in other years.  Plus – the rewards are many.

Like this beauty, not too far from harvest-ability:

It’s a Dixie Queen Watermelon, and I hadn’t even realized it was there until today.  There’s several little ones around it.

I am so excited for them to mature fully so we can enjoy them!

There’s some pie pumpkins beginning to orange (not enough, but hopefully we’ll get a few more before the vine stops producing), about 6 or so acorn squash getting darker by the day, and about a bajillion butternut squash – several of which look close to done.

This fall we’ll have plenty of my butternut squash and apple soup.

With cucumbers I picked from the front garden today I made 4 jars of refrigerator pickles and then picked fresh basil to make pesto for dinner.

This is what saves summer for me.  I’ll try not to whine so much about the way the humidity deflates my will and the heat saps my motivation and instead I’ll savor some freshness from my garden.

But I’ll still quietly look forward to fall.  Just sayin’.

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Summer Baking

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I know, I know.  Considering it’s been dangerously hot out for the last week baking doesn’t seem quite like the thing to do.

Thankfully Paul doesn’t mind that I keep the AC set to 70.

There’s been so many zucchini from the garden and there’s local peaches for sale at our Whole Foods Market, so I was itching to do something.  Plus my computer got virused and I couldn’t get online for a few days.

Not that I honestly have wanted to do anything while it’s been this hot other than lay around and nap (the pool water’s been into the 95 range, so we can’t even swim) , but I couldn’t let all this goodness go bad.

First up was a twist on plain ol’ Zucchini Bread that I found while wandering around Pinterest.

Zucchini Blueberry Bread. (Click the link to go straight to the recipe)

Fortunately I am also swimming in an abundance of eggs so I got to use of some of those as well.

Grated zucchini plus plump fresh blueberries in a sweet and cinnamon-y batter.  Yum!

I can tell it’s awesomely good, but I can’t tell you much more because Neve’s  barely let me have any.

Clearly it’s excellent summer snacking for the 8 year old crowd.

Next up is Peach Cobbler from a Country Living article a summer or two ago.  It’s made in a cast iron skillet, which I find incredibly charming and rustic in a fruit dessert.

You can go right to the recipe by clicking on it above, but basically you get a bunch of fresh peaches, scald them in boiling water to soften them up a bit and make the skin slide off nice and easily.

You make a luscious topping with your dry ingredients (plus a hint of dried ginger) and toss your sliced peaches in a bowl with sugar and vanilla.  I added a bunch of cinnamon as well.

Throw it in your cast iron skillet, top it with your chilled topping like so:

Throw it in the oven and bake it and enjoy the magnificent aromas that will fill your kitchen.

Then it will disappear with alarming speed, I guarantee.

Just like peach and zucchini season will disappear before we know it as well. So go forth and enjoy the fruits of summer while they last!

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Butternuts & Baby Chicks

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We have been thoroughly enjoying the last two days here.  A cold front has apparently pushed through because it’s been in the lower 80’s with low humidity.  Just gorgeous!  If this was what summer was like here I’d have no cause for complaint.  It does make me wish we lived back up in New England but then we’d be complaining about the bitter cold all winter, so yeah.

We have had some sad moments – two of our new chickens, Squeak and Arwen (both gotten this past spring as babies) were taken by a fox two days ago.  I saw the fox from inside the house and ran outside screaming and clapping my hands and managed to scare it off, but it (or an accomplice) had already gotten two of our girls.  There was a trail of Arwen’s feathers off into the woods and no sign of Squeak.  It’s very sad and frustrating, but we are determined to build them a Fort Knox style enclosure soon – one that they can’t fly (or climb, as those dummies have been doing) out of, because there will be a roof.  If we had 4 or 5 dozen chickens then missing a few here and there wouldn’t be so bad.  But we have just about 2 dozen.  Enough that it’s noticeable.

However, at least one industrious hen is looking to help out in that regard.

Our Blue Copper Marans Hen, Amelie, has gone broody.

She’s sitting on a small cache of 7 eggs, hopefully all of which are fertilized.  I’m still counting down the weeks (maybe months) until our 3 remaining Ameraucanas (Arwen was the 4th)  start laying their blue eggs.  It will be nice to have those again.

I am also counting down until I can harvest the butternut squash, which is going gangbusters right now.  I spied a few squash beetles that I am going to have to deal with and I hope all the squash can mature before the bugs get the better of them.

The Jack Be Little pumpkins are starting to deepen in hue and I am seeing the beginnings of my Acorn squash, yellow crookneck and sugar pie pumpkins.  There’s also the start of some Blue of Hungaria pumpkins.

My Sugar Baby watermelon vines are looking fantastic but so far there’s been no flowering.  Hopefully it will happen soon!

All of the seeds I planted this year came from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

I’m excited to be growing these rare-ish old – fashioned, non GMO seeds.  The selections were beautiful and interesting to look at.  I’m looking forward to when I can have a much larger garden and grow more than enough for us.  My summers will undoubtedly be slammed with canning at that point, but come January, it will be worth it.  Hopefully this winter we’ll still be enjoying the slow roasted tomatoes from this summer.  If they ever ripen.

No, I’m not impatient.  Not one bit.

Nope, not at all.

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Burgeoning Bounty

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Last evening when I went to check on the squash and do some weeding I was greeted by the pleasant discovery of one fresh zuke ready to pick and the rest of the squash plants exploding.

My little pickling cucumbers are still very tiny but are promising plenty of yummy refrigerator pickles in the coming weeks.

Butternut squash!!!

I’m super psyched to see my Jack Be Little Pumpkins are well on their way.  They’re just about the right size but they need to darken up a bit before they’re picked and dried for fall.

Then there’s the tomatoes we’re salivating over.  I have roughly 18 tomato plants starting to fruit right now.  They’re all heirloom varieties: Bloody Butcher, Money Maker, Tigerella, and Amish Paste.  The bulk of them will be slow roasted and then frozen to provide us with a taste of summer all year.  Many more will be eaten straight off the vine.

I am so hungry right now.

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Flutterby

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A few weeks ago I was weeding all of the grass that likes to grow in massive clusters in my front garden box where I have my herbs.

Seriously if only the grass would grow on the lawn like it grows in my garden areas!

Anyway I spotted a bright caterpillar on a stalk of dill.  An unlikely place, I thought, to find such a creature, but I was happy because normally the only caterpillars we come across are the ones that turn into giant ugly brown moths.  Even a luna moth caterpillar would be welcome, but no such luck.

Until that day.

We brought him in the house, stuck him in a glass jar along with the stalk of dill he had been working on, and by the next evening he was spun into a nice chrysalis.

Then the waiting game began.

We looked up what type of butterfly we were growing – a Black Swallowtail Butterfly – and read all about how they grow and how they change and how long it takes.

And then two days ago….

Our patience and vigilance paid off.

We set him out on the blooming butterfly bush out front and watched him fan out and dry his wings for awhile before taking off into the world.

Good luck out there little butterfly!

 

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Surprised By Lilacs

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Have I ever mentioned that lilacs are my all – time favorite flower?

I like a lot of flowers, really, and it’s hard to pick a favorite.  Peonies have a special place in my heart because their scent never fails to remind me of my grandmother.  Ann Magnolia trees with their giant pink saucer – shaped flowers remind  me of spring in New Jersey as a child, when it seemed to me they were everywhere.  When the wind blew and the loose petals would fill the air I thought there could be nothing more magical. It was like a fairy tale.

But lilacs. Beautiful white and purple lilacs.  They have the best scent of any flower, bar none.

My grandparents had lilac bushes growing near the hotel (as well as the peonies….and mulberry trees!!) and I have a photo of me at about Neve’s age, with my messy and super – white hair, sitting in the grass holding a giant bunch of lovely lilacs.

Later when we lived up in the Adirondacks the springtime was full of lilac trees everywhere.  Growing all over the roadsides and in backyards.  You could stop almost anywhere and pick as much as you could carry, and it wouldn’t leave even a dent in those huge, densely packed branches. Then we;d bring them home and put them in vases all over the house and the scent of lilacs would faintly waft all through the house.

I miss that.

Since we moved to the south it has been much more difficult to come across lilacs.  Either they are just not as popular here or the growing conditions aren’t quite right.   I’m not really sure.  Some people here certainly have them, but they were fairly hard won – a lot of soil amending and proper placement and care and whatnot.

A few years ago (3 years?  maybe 4) my mother gave me a small lilac sapling that was supposed to be just right for our climate.  I was excited, but cautiously so.

I planted it and kept an eye on it but every spring since I have gotten nothing but a mass of dark green foliage.  Pretty, but no flowers.

This spring I’ve been so distracted by all the stressful things going on that I didn’t even notice until I was bumbling by the tree on my way to the chickens that it had bloomed.

Two large, beautiful, perfect purple cones of lilacs.  What a moment that was.  I didn’t dare cut them to bring them in.

When I came out of my moment I realized that spring had bloomed all around me and I had barely noticed.  How awful , to not even have noticed the brief and beautiful display going on all around me!

The azaleas were fairly shouting for attention!

When we finally move, I will be digging up that lilac tree and taking it with me, as a reminder to never be too shut down to notice the beauty around me.

And I am so buying more of them to plant!!!

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September!!!!

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I am so happy to be able to say that!  This marks the first day of my favorite time of the year.  It’s when I am always at my happiest and the weather at my most favorite.  Before long we’ll see the leaves turning and the air will be crisp and there will be soup and bread and cookies going non – stop in my kitchen.  It also means Halloween is around the corner – and we looooove Halloween here.  If I can get my act together and get organized enough I may try and throw a Halloween party.

There are lots of projects going on here right now as I make my final push before home school starts next Tuesday (any my birthday on Wednesday, woohoo!).  There are dresses and shirts and sweaters started for all the girls.  I am actually even running out of fabric!  Imagine that!!!!  I’ll need to start buying more!

Among the finished projects are these:

I  made each of the girls a shirt with one of our animals on it.  Oona got Finnigan as a newborn.  Neve got one with Jasper cat and Emily’s has Big Jim the rooster.

Each girl also got a pair of these baggy black linen capris with lace trim, from the book Carefree Clothes for Girls by Junko Okawa.

I also finished another yoga suit for Oona.  I am really thinking I am going to work out a way to make this pattern for adults as well, since it looks so incredibly comfortable and flattering!

Unfortunately it has been way too hot to do much work outside.  We’ve gotten some good swim time in since there’s been no rain, but I am hoping to get some yardwork done before too long.  My raised garden beds need some weeding.  The good news is my acorn squash is doing well…….AND the arugula I planted in the spring has re-sprouted and is growing in again!  Hooray for September!

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We’re Down to Two

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Ok, so it’s either “Merry Magpie Farm” or “Patchwork Llama Farm”.  It’s a really, really tough choice!!!!

It’s hard to do much thinking or deciding when it’s 800 degrees outside.  Today’s high was 104.  Too hot to even make use of the pool.  How’s that for awful?

I’ve spent the better part of the week painting the living room and the kitchen.  They were formerly a beige-mauve color, which was nice enough, but I wanted more of a colonial kind of look, and I wanted to get it looking cleaner and nicer in the process.  I chose a “light amber” color, which is basically yellow.

Nice?  I like how much it brightens the rooms.  It also compliments my Martha’s Vineyard painting quite well, no?

Aside from the painting and cleaning I’ve spent the week fretting over the animals and checking the water frequently to be sure they have plenty.  I’ve also been taking extra fruits and vegs out to them.  They love watermelon and apples.  I am thinking I need to keep a bag of apples on hand for them at all times.  I chop them up a bit, put them on a plate and they snort them right out of my hand.

Some days I get side – tracked on my way out with the fruit.  Like days when my mother points out that my tomato plant on the patio is under attack by some nasty green horned tomato worms.  HUGE ones.  We plucked off three and stuck them with the apples to take out for the chickens.

The chickens fought hard for these juicy fellows.  One hen swallowed the biggest one whole; I was afraid she’d choke!  Alas my tomato plant has not recovered.  Thank goodness our neighbor’s tomatoes are doing well, and they like to trade for fresh eggs.  Speaking of which……

Benny laid a double yolker.

Ouch.

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So Hot and Crispy

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Jerry would like to register his complaint over the heat.  It’s been brutal so far this year.  Normally we do expect some oppressive heat here in Va, but it’s usually later in the summer, and when it does get to be around 100 degrees it certainly doesn’t stay there for weeks end.  In fact, I don’t think it even stays in the high 90’s for prolonged periods.  Generally what makes it oppressive is the heat/humidity combo.  This year has been something awful special in that regard.

I know it’s not just us.  Everyone’s having crazy weather.  Susie mentioned something about how it should be called “Climate Chaos”, and this year has fit the bill.  The coldest, snowiest winter in years followed by the most brutal summer.

Everyone’s gardens are burning due to the excessive heat and lack of rain, and mine are no exception, even with daily watering.  My poor corn, which looked to be on the cusp of readiness, seems  about to spontaneously combust and all of my flowers are in danger of sizzling into nothingness.

Aside from the heat I have had a heck of a time with little Frodo, who has decided that the shock of the electric fence is nothing in comparison to getting at the green weeds beyond it.  It’s gotten to where I am going to have to lock him in the barn if he keeps it up. He’s gotten a little too “bloaty” looking for my liking.   He’s also decided he no longer wants to be petted.  If I try to touch him , he runs.  This happened about the same time he started breaking out.  It’s sad.  At least little Finn is still like a puppy with horns.  He even let me vaccinate him yesterday and still came back for hugs after.  I have yet to successfully vaccinate Frodo.

I also confirmed that the problem with Berry’s foot is Bumblefoot.  It’s fairly common.  It’s a staph infection that gets in their feet through little cuts and then causes swelling and grossness.  I removed much of the infection last night and packed the wound full of antibiotics.  He’s hopping around with vet wrap today and hopefully he’ll be fully recovered before too long.  I also feel like I have passed the “grossness” and “bloody” requirement of being a farmer/goatherd/whatever I am.  If I could just get the fencing thing right, I might have a chance.