Monthly Archives: August 2011

Delivery

We can’t simply share with our neighbors anymore; the harvest is just coming in too fast. We have had to resort to other methods of handling the incoming produce. For starters, we’re drying tomatoes as fast as we can, which isn’t very fast. We’re also packing stuff up and delivering it to family and friends that we think will use it. It’s amazing that it’s come to that, but it’s also really fun. This is why we have a garden… well, this and all the amazing things we make fresh. Today’s salsa and guacamole was amazing.

As we were loading things up to take them around, I realized I hadn’t taken any pictures yet. I missed taking shots of the beans and beets that were already bagged and loaded, but you still get the idea.

Exciting Week

I think we picked a lot more stuff this week than we normally do. The tomatoes have just been going crazy… Almost as crazy as the zucchini. The corn is on. The beans are finally on. The peppers are just amazing. The tomatillos are coming so fast that I have even been throwing some away because I wasn’t able to pick them soon enough. It’s been a really great week for harvesting things.

I haven’t gone out of my way to count or weigh everything, but I’m guessing we picked between 80 and 100 tomatoes this week. That’s a lot of tomatoes. Luckily we have been able to give some away. The tomatoes look like they’ll continue coming in at this rate for a few weeks. These are going to be great weeks. Yesterday we did a tomato cook-down with some hot peppers. It really turned out well… but at a ratio of 2 cayenne peppers to about 30 tomatoes, we’re not going to use up those hot peppers nearly fast enough.

We also started picking and eating corn, and it’s been really great. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot more corn out there. The beets are looking good. We picked four or five beets this week, but I don’t think we’ve eaten them yet.

So from a harvest perspective, it was a great week.

The weeds have been getting out of control recently, and Charmaine has really been working hard to get the cleaned up. She’s really made great progress along the zucchini row along the fence. It’s like a completely new garden. She also tilled under the remaining potatoes, lettuce, broccolini, and cabbage (and all the weeds that were intermixed). She ran into a bit of trouble while tilling those under… the tiller found and grabbed some sprinkler funny-pipe, twisting it around the tines of the tiller and binding the tiller down. In her attempts to free the tiller, she wound up breaking the welds that hold the handles of the tiller to the tiller itself. So we’ll need to find a solution for that before the end of the year.

I disabled the sprinklers in that section in hopes of avoiding a flood. Well, that section stayed dry, but the lawn flooded. I’m still not sure how or why. We did a bunch of digging and investigating, but haven’t figured anything out. It seemed almost like a sprinkler pipe was broken under the lawn, but as we’ve turned on sprinklers since then, everything has been fine… it hasn’t flooded again. I don’t like problems that go away without an explanation, so I’m not satisfied yet. Kyle should be coming back this week to add some curbing to the new side yard. I hope I get a chance to ask him about it and have him take a look and tell me what he thinks.

Hummingbrids and Hollyhock

As we were closing our garage today, a hummingbird flew inside. We opened both garage doors, but the poor bird seemed unable to find its way back out. It kept trying to fly higher, smacking against the ceiling time and time again. It was very upsetting. Charmaine cut a couple tall stalks of hollyhock from the front yard and I was able to hold them up to the bird so it could eat. Suddenly a second hummingbird flew into the garage. This was exactly the opposite of what we wanted to happen. The second bird flew right out again, but the first bird refused to follow it. It was still willing to eat from the hollyhock stem and eventually trusted us enough to stay feeding as we brought the stalk lower and forward, out of the garage. The whole ordeal lasted about 15 minutes.

Also this week, we picked a million pounds of zucchini, a bunch of lettuce and cabbage, some tomatoes, peppers, beets, and tomatillos. The pumpkins are starting to turn orange, which is always fun, but it probably means we’re not going to get any other winter squash. It’s just too late in the year for it to be starting right now.