Rural Gardening: Adventures on Dirt Rich Farm (City goes Country), 1 by Hineni

Hineni wrote:
Paul - I do wear boots, and gloves, and long pants and a hat :) That's why I also take the dogs with me, especially my Jack Russell. He and I have discovered snakes before, and his alarm bark is very distinctive. I don't think that you could get a bush hog into where the garden is, but I could be mistaken. I'm pretty new to a garden this size; wouldn't that compress the soil pretty badly? I actually got my Pyrenees pups over in Saltville, so I've been there. Beautiful place! What a lovely area to grow up in.

Robin - all of the tomato plants except one have fruit, and all have blossoms :) There are two different types of full-size, and several cherry. The cherry seem to all be the same, but I have no idea what *kind* of cherry they might be. They do look similar to the yellow pear that I've grown before, and really like, so I'm hopeful.

I made my first jams and preserves last night...and they are edible! Peach and strawberry-blackberry. And the right thickness...YAY!! But I have no tater masher, so I had to make my potatoes and carrots and onions in the blender - I kinda have soup, but it is very tasty soup :) Now to figure out what to do with all the zucchini and yellow squash that I have. I think I will dehydrate some for winter soups, make some zucchini bread, and maybe freeze some in slices for quick heat up this winter. I'm fast running out of freezer room though! And I hate to waste stuff. Yesterday I froze some beans for later as well - and tried my hand at steam blanching for the first time. I don't think I have ever been so overrun with produce...LOL! I will have to plan next year's garden with a lot of thought. Hopefully we will have a chest freezer by then. My neighbor's garden plot is about half the size of mine (he's not organic) and they have so much food that she is canning nearly every other day and he brings me bags and bags each week. He has tomatoes, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, collards, onions and a couple of kinds of beans. I can also see that I will need to choose my tomato seed differently as well next year. I'll need some that ripen all at once in order to can sauce and stuff, and then some that ripen throughout the season for eating and juicing and the like. One things for sure, unless I have total crop failure, we'll never go hungry!

Gotta go do the bathtub laundry thing and get the clothes up on the line before work starts. Here is a beautiful little flower that I found in the garden area, that I did not weed out :)

Still waiting on an ID on those saSquash up there :) I know there are 'bug files' but are there 'ID this plant' files? LOL!

Have a terrific Tuesday!