This week has been long and hot. Great for my peppers. . . Not so great for us. This week has been full of pests, preserving and outdoor clean up. The greenhouse is full of tools, sunflowers for seed saving and plants. when it cools off a bit, I’m planning on organizing a bit before I start to store things at the end of fall.
Squash bugs completely took over my summer squash and winter squashes. This is the first year I have had them. I think it’s because this is the first year we have planted in our pasture. According to our neighbors it hasn’t been anything but pasture for over 30 years. I spent a lot of time every evening going from plant to plant with duct tape. Squashing any bugs I saw and taping any eggs. Unfortunately I just couldn’t keep up with them so I harvested all of our winter squashes. Luckily most were almost completely cured. The ones that aren’t are laying out in my greenhouse in the sun to finish curing and ripening. Gardening tip: as long as your winter squashes have started to turn color, they will continue ripening if you put them in the sun. Just like tomatoes and peppers.
Speaking of tomatoes, mine are on their last leg. There is still quite a bit of fruits on the plants so I’m just hoping they survive long enough for what’s on the vine to ripen. I finished canning our years supply of pizza sauce so everything left will go into pasta sauce. I was hoping to have enough to make some homemade BBQ sauce but I don’t think that’s going to be on the table this year. It’s going on the goal list for 2024. All the tomatillos have been pulled out. I grew 3 plants last year and had over 200 volunteers pop up this spring. So I took the healthiest ones I could find and planted a row of them in the market garden. Fingers crossed I didn’t make a mistake and have 1000 pop up in the field.
I’m almost finished finalizing my 2024 garden plan so the seedlings I started last month will be ready to go into the garden for winter harvests and over wintering this next week. I’m working around what’s still in the garden to set up the beds. My tomatoes are smack dab right in the center of the garden and not a single set in between t posts is completely gone. This makes it incredibly difficult to set up the new beds because I can’t remove any t post trellising yet. I’m hoping to get it all cleared out in order to get garlic planted along with a test patch of over winter onions. I’m trying out a couple new to me varieties from Johnny’s called red spring and t488.
I got the dehydrator going this week, preserving some basil I randomly found in the garden, some fruits, cauliflower, tomatoes and corn. Unfortunately my blender stopped working correctly so I’ve been having to put all my tomatoes in the freezer. One of the reasons I chose my Vitamix over other brands was for this reason. They truest stand by their products so when I called and told them what happened they immediately got me set up with a repair. It was a very simple process. They emailed me a prepaid shipping label and gave me a list of places I could drop of off or I could schedule ups to pick it up from my house. I wrapped it up and put it in a diaper box, slapped the shipping label on it and sent it off. They received it the next day and let me know it would be repaired within 3 days and then sent back. So I’m hoping it will be back by mid next week and it was at no extra cost to me.
