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.

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.

Just a Boring August Update

My first batch of peaches in July were awful. The bugs had almost completely destroyed the fruit before it ever had a chance to get ripe. I got to eat a few but that was only because I was willing to eat around to cut out the damaged parts. I never would have bought any peaches that looked as bad as mine. I may have found the solution to my problem.





My other peach tree, the Belle of Georga, is starting to ripen now and there's no insect damage. It' s late enough in the season that there aren't as many bugs around now. I found a semi-soft peach yesterday and ate the softest half right off the tree just to see how they tasted. It was a little crunchier than I like but really sweet. White flesh instead of the yellow flesh on my Gala peach. The few I picked today will need a couple of days on the counter to ripen but they look great.




If these work out well, I might order a couple of more Bell of Georga peach trees in the spring.

As you can see, we've also got tomatoes, (on the bottom of the basket) and all the grapes are ripe now. 6 varieties. 3 seedless (one of which has seeds - I don't know why), and 3 with seeds. I prefer seedless grapes but had read that the seeded varieties produce bigger fruit so I tried both. I could fill this basket 10 times with just bunches of grapes but how many grapes can one family really eat? I've never heard of frozen or canned grapes so I guess the rest will go to waste.

The best in my opinion are the white Lakemont seedless (Just like the white grapes in the supermarket), the red Reliance seedless (same variety as the supermarket) and the dark purple Concord seeded grapes.

Concord are what's used to make grape juice and they taste just like grape juice. I also have a variety called Glenora that's dark purple. This tastes just like grape soda. I never realized that the grape flavor in grape juice was different than the grape flavor in grape soda until I tried these grapes.

The fire blight I haven't seen in a month or more has shown up again on a pear tree. Since the limb is dead all the way to the trunk, I had to cut several inches of the top of the trunk. This meant cutting off one of my 5 remaining pears. It's not ready yet but I took a bite anyway. Needs another month.





The sugar sorghum seed heads (say that 3 times fast) are starting to turn orange. I'm going to try to use the seedheads like any other variety of sorghum. Sorghum is grown in Africa and the Middle East as food for people and animals. My dad actually grew several acres of sorghum as a grain crop when I was a kid growing up on a farm. My parents had a bird seed store and mixed their own seed. Millet (sorghum seeds) was one of the ingredients in their mixed bird seed.




When this stuff is used as people food, they toast the seeds and then boil them with water to make a porage similar to oatmeal. Mixed with milk and sugar it's eaten in lots of places, just not here. I'll let you know how it turns out in a month or so.

No More Water

Yesterday afternoon, I turned on the water in the bathroom sink and I heard the sound of air being sucked into the faucet instead of the sound of water coming out of the faucet. I tried the kitchen sink...same thing.

I checked the expansion tank pressure gauge: zero pounds. I checked the circuit breaker: On. Something was wrong with the well pump.





I had 240V to the controller in the basement. Good so far. I dug up the top of the well head and checked the wires there...240V. I then tried to start the pump from the controller. The pump should draw about 6 or 7 amps when it's running. Mine drew close to 50. I measured the resistance of the motor windings by using the wires leading to the pump motor at the bottom of the well. Both pump motor windings tested fine. For some reason the motor was stalled. Could be bad bearings, sand in the impeller, a small stone, or anything that was preventing the motor from turning.

So I pulled the pump.





Wanting to get a shower before going to bed, I went to buy a pump yesterday afternoon. We went to Lowes, Home Depot, Sears, and Tractor Supply. All had some type of pump or had the pump I needed but didn't have the controller. We showered at my parent's house last night. It's Sunday. I'm sitting at home waiting for some place to open this morning so I can go pump hunting again.

Hoping the pump was still under warranty, my wife searched through her warranty file. The warranty file is now a huge box of paperwork filled with warranties that expired when I was cool in my hawaiian shirts and velor sweaters.





Warranty for the pump was for 18 months and it's been 3 years since I installed it. Of course. A residential pump should last a lot longer than 3 years. but of course, mine gets a lot of use. I run the pump for lots of hours and thousands of gallons more than most people because I have a ridiculously large garden.

When I add the $300 for a new pump into the cost of having said ridiculously large garden, I'm now convinced more than ever of gardening truism #1.

"Gardening is Stupid."

Watermelons, Peppers, and Mowing Down the Garden.

Late Summer into Fall is harvest time and we're finally there. Last weekend I cut a watermelon that wasn't quite ripe. Today I found one that was. Picking a ripe one is tricky. They all look the same on the outside so you're left to thumping them and listening to how they sound. Supposedly the spot that touches the ground turns from white to yellow when they're ripe but that happened weeks ago. Some people say the vine starts to turn a little brown when they're ripe. That hasnt' happend at all. So I was left to thump them and listen for the one that went "plunk" instead of "plink". Not very scientific but it seemed to work.



These watermellons are "sugar babies". Smaller than the regular watermellon at about 12" in diameter. They are very sweet.

We also picked the peppers today. That half of my garden was used for all the leafy stuff that was done back in June. It's been pretty much forgotten since then except for me pulling a carrot to eat once in a while while I was out there working. The carrots are past their prime so all that was left to tend to on that half of the garden was the peppers. We picked them all today so I can mow that half down and not worry about it anymore.

We cut them up and freeze them in big chunks. Whenever we're making something that could use pepper, we pull a chunk out of the freezer, chop it up and throw it in the dish. We don't eat a lot of spicy food so this basket will probably last us until we harvest again next summer. There are several varietis of mild peppers here, mostly bell peppers. If we had waited a few more weeks, they would be all shades of yellow, orange, and red but I'm tired of dealing with them and green tastes just fine.