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.

Mystery Solved and Bumpy Pears

The mystery vine has another fruit. It grew fast after the last one was destroyed in an unsupervised toddler accident only 20 days ago. The new fruit is starting to turn orange so I'm officially going with pumpkin.




The dead leaves all around the pumpkin are from a wicked case of downy mildew. A fungus that grew on most of the leaves and made them dull, white and fuzzy. Now they're dead. There are new leaves so I think we'll make it until this pumpkin is ready.

As I was checking out the garden today, I squeezed a pear. It fell off the tree in my hand. I guess that means it's ready to be picked but it seems awfully firm. I'll leave the rest for a few more days at least.



It's the bumpiest pear I've ever seen.

The world's most amazing squash squashed!

Fall's getting close and the garden's finally starting to pay off. I'm still eating grapes and expect there to be more varieties ripening over the next few weeks. The first round of peaches are gone and I got to eat a few.

Now the sweet corn is ready. I think we'll pick most of it this weekend and freeze what we don't use right away. Some of the ears have minor damage near the end from beetles but nothing that can't be trimmed off.



Still, I'm convinced gardening isn't worth it. I could have bought half a dozen peaches, a bunch of grapes, and a bushel of corn and been ahead.

The mystery vine growing along the house will probably remain a mystery. The only fruit growing on the vine was torn off of the vine yesterday. The details are sketchy but I know it involved an unsupervised toddler who, I was told, meant no harm.



It might have just been a boring old pumpkin. On the other hand, it might have been a new, undiscovered variety of cancer curing, anti-aging, unlimited fuel supply, high temperature superconductor squash. Now we'll never know.

Vine Borers, Cabbage Stalks, and Pickles

Yesterday I spotted a vine borer moth flying around the lone pumpkin that sprouted on its own in a flower bed. I had pumpkins wiped out by this bug a couple of years ago. It lays eggs near the base of the vine and when they eggs hatch, the little worm eats its way inside. Once in the vine,it just keeps eating and growing. Eventually it's eaten so much that the vine wilts and dies. That's how I found out I had them...one morning all my vines were wilted and dead.

When I saw this moth yesterday, I watered the pumpkin and added a little imidacloprid at the base of the vine. This is one of my favorite chemicals. It gets absorbed by a plant and makes the plant poisonous to bugs but not to us. One bite and it's dead bug. I don't know if it's approved for pumpkins but I won't be eating these anyway so I'm not that worried. Hopefully it will work.

We've had hot dry weather for a long time. We finally got rain last night. According to my rain gauge we got an inch and 7/10. That's a lot of water.




This morning is the first time in weeks that I don't hear a dozen large diesel irrigation pumps running at full throttle in the far off distance. Also noticeably absent is tap-tap-tap of a dozen large irrigation guns that we've been hearing and seeing in all directions. It's oddly quiet.

I have been growing "Giant Walking Stick Cabbage" as an experiment this year. According to the info that was in the seed catalog, these things grow a tall stalk with something similar to a cabbage at the top. The dried stalk is supposed to make a good walking stick. Right now these things look like big kale, and are just growing at ground level. No stalk. I have been expecting these things to make some sort of stalk with a seed head just like lettuce, raddish, spinach, and other similar plants will when the weather gets hot. Turns out I was wrong.

I did some searching and found out that to get the stalk, you need to remove the lower leaves. as long as you keep removing the lower leaves, it will grow taller and make more leaves. So this morning I removed the lower leaves. Now it's looking more like I expected.




Something's been cutting the leaves off of my peppers. Probably a leaf cutter worm of some sort.



Now for some of the good news:

I had my first peach this morning. Not as soft and ripe as I prefer but good enough to eat and actually tasted like a peach. We'll probably only end up with a dozen actually etable peaches between the fungusus, insects, june drop, and other problems but this is my first year getting any peaches so a dozen's better than none. (I almost said 12x better but everyone knows you have to multiply 0 by ∞ to get 12 but somehow a dozen peaches just doesn't feel infinitely better)

The pear I thought I was going to loose hasn't shown any signs of fire blight in a couple of weeks. There's still a lot of summer left so I'm not out of the woods yet but I'm hopeful. It's even still got a few pears on it.


And finally, I had enough cucumbers and dill to make a batch of pickles. I made some last year that were not terrible but were too salty. This year I changed the recipe a little and increased the amount of vinegar and only used half the salt. I used my own cucumbers and dill and had to buy garlic. I did spears, flat round slices for burgers, and long flat slices for sandwiches. We'll know if they're any good in 8 weeks.

Hot and Thirsty

It's been in the mid to upper 90's for a week and we haven't had any real rain in several weeks. It might have been a month since we've had more than just a brief evening thunderstorm. The grass crunches when you walk on it and everything around here looks parched. I've been watering every day and am having a hard time keeping up. The loofa gourds are looking especially thirsty. They got water overnight on Friday and they're already wilted again. I guess they'll get water again this afternoon.

luffa gourds

The grapes are looking pretty good. Even I have a hard time messing up grapes. The vines grow wild like weeds around here and they're hard to kill. Getting grapes from the vines takes a little work since grapes don't really make fruit unless you prune them but that's not too much work. They fruit to produce a second generation if they're in danger so you have to cut them hard enough to really scare them. A grape vine can grow to be 100 ft. long. I cut all of mine to about 6' long. I also cut off all the branches and just leave a few buds to make new branches. This jumble of vines will be just two little branches this winter.

grapes

To get supermarket quality grapes requires a lot of work but all I really need is grapes that are eatable and that's pretty easy.

We've got a volunteer squash of some sort growing in a flower bed around the house. I don't know what it is for sure yet but I'm guessing pumpkin. Maybe we dropped a seed there when making jack-o-lanterns. I don't know where it came from but we're letting it grow. We had to trail it up over the steps to the laundry room to save it from the mower.

volunteer pumpkin?