Clean up weekend.

I did a lot of garden clean up this weekend. I rolled up the hoses I use to water everything and hung them. I pulled the posts for my climbing cucumber vines and the stakes for my garden sprinkler. I mowed down everything in the garden except for the corn and sugar sorghum. I tried to mow down the corn but my mower couldn't make it through so it still stands for the moment.

The only thing in the garden that was still producing was the two tomato plants. I always grow tomatoes in tomato cages to keep them growing up off the ground. This year, my first planting got a disease and died so I got my second planting in late, I never really got back to them to trellis them and they grew wild. I'm sure they were 10' across, and so dense you could barely see the tomatoes. In fact, when I ran the mower over them, there were so many ripe tomatoes down under the plants that I didn't know about, the mower got stuck in the slippery, slimy, smashed mound of tomatoes. I couldn't even get off the mower for fear of sinking in the goo. With some fancy mower driving, I was able to get out with clean shoes.

I turned my rain gauge over so it doesn't freeze and crack this winter and cut down all the string I was using to trellis my cucumbers, peas, and luffa sponges.

I de-headed all my sorghum and have the heads set aside to dry. I plan to remove the seeds, toast them and try millet porridge, something that's eaten as a staple in arid parts of the world.

I also cut a couple of sorghum stalks, stripped off the outer green layer to get to the white interior and chewed a piece. It is surprisingly sweet. It's not really edible because it's so course but it does contain a lot of sugar. Interesting.

I removed one more small and slightly green pumpkin from the mystery vine and mowed the vine down when I mowed the yard.

I pulled the last two pears off of the Bosc pear tree that did pretty good this summer and pulled the first apple off my 5-in-1 apple trees.



I'll probably end up with two dozen decent apples this year but most need a few more weeks.

I cut down my Bartlett pear tree that did not fair so well. I'll replace it with something else in the spring.

The luffa squash did well. I didn't know anything about these but we figured it out. If you let them dry on the vine they turn brown with a papery skin. Strip off the skin and you have luffa sponges. I don't really know why rubbing abrasive squash innards on your skin is good but my wife seems happy with the results.


I don't know what these stupid sponges sell for but they grow like weeds, in fact I have one that's sprouting in my burn pile right now from a rotten squash we threw in there over the summer. A half dozen vines will produce a hundred or more and other than needing lots of water, they're easy to grow.

I think I paid almost $5 for 15 seeds for this unusual plant. I might get into the luffa seed business. I could have easily had a hundred squash if I had wanted to go to the trouble to clean them all. Here's a picture of the seeds I got from one squash.




We opened a jar of pickles. I like them, wife thought they were too tart. We all thought they were a little soggy. I've got a big pressure canner and it took so long to get the canning jars and boiling water bath up to temperature that I ended up over cooking the pickles and now they're soggy. Still good to eat.

We also opened a jar of canned peaches. They were great. Much better than the ones that are picked early for commercial canning. Mine were much softer and tasted more like fresh peaches than what you'd buy in the store because they were canned ripe. If you want the "crunch" from canned fruit, this didn't have it.

The only thing left is apples. I hope I'll get a few a week into November but everything else is done.

I think I need to do a garden score card for each thing I tried to grow this year.

Almost done

The season's almost over. I plan to mow just about everything down tomorrow. The only thing still producing are the tomatoes and we stopped picking any a month ago. I planned on posting this stuff last week.. I took these pictures last week but I got busy so here's what everything looked like last week. I've probably got apples that are ready by now. I'll have to get out there and check. I didn't get many but the trees aren't very big yet.






The mystery vine is definately a pumpkin. It's been cut off the vine and now it's on our porch hoping it lasts until Halloween.






The sorghum is definately ready and I'll be cutting it tomorrow to see if it actually tastes sweet. I'll even be trying a bowl of sorghum porridge. I'll let you know how it tastes. Since we are lucky to live in a country where we have food options and we don't choose sorghum porridge, my expectations are low but I could be suprised.




And the fire blight is back. Bad this time. I'll be cutting down the bartlett pear tree tomorrow. We actually got 3 good pears from this tree but it's been infected all season. My bosc pear tree had some fire blight and even a couple of apple trees had a little but I think this tree is the source. Every time this tree shows a bad branch, something else has a bad branch a few days later. If I get rid of this tree, I might get rid of the problem all together. I'll plant something less prone to disease next year. I guess this is why nobody grows pears commercially around here.

Country Living

No gardening post today.

Friday, on the way home from work, I got a phone call from my brother. He had been cutting down some dead trees around his house. We were expecting the remnants of Hurricane Friday night and Saturday and he wanted to get these down before they were blown down onto his house.

When you cut down a tree, you can usually control the direction it falls by how you cut your cuts with the chainsaw. Unfortunately this tree was pretty rotten at the bottom and broke apart and fell the wrong way, toward his garage.

This tree was probably 60 feet high, 2 feet in diameter, and only 20 feet from the back of his garage. If it had fallen all the way, his 3 car garage and all it's contents would have been completely flat. Fortunately, it came to rest against another tree. But now he had a bigger problem than he had before.

We spent the evening trying to get a rope tied near the top of this 60' tree so we could pull it over the right way. We tried shooting an arrow through a notch in the tree with a fishing line attached. We then switched to a slingshot. My brother stood on the garage roof and I held the fishing pole from the ground. It took dozens of shots, but it worked. We used the fishing line to pull up some heavier string and then used that to pull up some rope. Everything takes longer in the rain when it's getting dark.

But we had the rope tied at the top of the tree right where we wanted it. My brother pulled his 4WD pickup out to the edge of the soybean field and with a few lengths of chain, we got the rope out to his truck and he pulled. The tree lifted about a foot and the rope snapped with a snap that sounded like a rifle discharge. The tree fell right at the end of the little branch that had been holding it before. It now looked like it would fall any second. We had not made it better.

We've got a friend in the tree cutting business. We called him. No answer. My brother drove to his house, not there. Stopped by his parents house, no body home. So it was just us.

We drove the 20 miles to Lowes to get a 150' foot length of heavier rope and some 500W flood lights. Drove 20 miles back to his house and worked until about 10:00 and gave up. We had run out of fishing line, masons line, and hitting the bullseye in the dark was not working very well.

The next morning, the tree was still standing, we started working at sun-up. It took us several hours to get the new rope in just the right spot. We had to weave it over and under several other branches of other trees , it kept getting tangled, We pulled up weights to get it over some branches and then let the weight fall, we shot string over others. It was kind of like knitting a sweater with a a slingshot from 50' away above the tree canopy, sometimes with binoculars. A friend of ours stopped by with a tractor do to the pulling this time but we took so long and he had to go.

It took us about 4 hours but we had the rope where we wanted it and tried to pull qwith my brother's truck again. It lifted off the other tree. He was out at the lane with the rope threaded around a couple of trees and couldn't see what was happening. I radioed my brother to keep moving, don't stop. The tree went over center and fell exactly where we wanted it to fall.

Done with the tree, I headed home. My grandmother passed away a week and a half ago and we were having the memorial service Saturday afternoon. I was pretty dirty and disgusting from the morning's work and despritely needed a shower before the service. When I got home, the wind and rain really started. My wife, thinking we might loose electric started to fill the bathtub with water. You can scoop a gallon of water out of the tub and at least you can flush the toilet when the electric's out. It's also nice to have some water for hand washing or other things. We don't have city water or sewer or gas. When the electric's out, everything is out.

She only got a few inches of water in the tub and we lost electric. I got a crappy sponge bath out of the 3" of water in the tub, got dressed and went to the service. The church didn't have any electric and it was hot and miserable in there. We got home hot, sticky, rain soaked, and with no shower. At dusk, I got out the oil lanterns and set one up in the living room, one in the dining room, one in the bathroom we couldn't flush (fortunately I'm a guy and I've got an acre and a half), and one in my daughter's room.

After the kids were down, my wife and I went to bed, in our clothes, her in a recliner chair and me on the couch. We were just too disgusting to get into bed.

The electric came back on about 3:00am and woke us up. We got up and took showers and went to bed for real.

This morning, when I woke up, I headed out the kitchen door. I stopped just before getting a face full of spider.




I now have it in a plastic container. I'll move it somewhere else or it'll build a web in exactly the same place every night. After I took a few flash photos, it started cutting down the web. I guess it thought the flash was morning.