For Oct 3-13
Last year I think I put about two dozen grocery bags of
garden tomatoes in the freezer for spaghetti sauce in winter. Every afternoon
when I got home from work I gathered up enough tomatoes to fill a couple bags.
This year I got two grocery bags and three batches of fresh salsa. Over the
entire harvest. Not sure what happened. I must have planted a different type of
tomato or something. The yield wasn’t anything like it was last year.
Our potatoes didn’t grow at all. They were complete duds.
The Farmer even dug them up and replanted new ones and still, nothin’. It
wasn’t a matter of potato bugs eating the plants, either. They just didn’t
grow. How disappointing.
We did get a few huge Butternut squash (my favourite), some
acorn squash and a huge crop of beets. The cucumbers weren’t bad either,
although they were bigger in size than they were in number. The carrots were ok
– tasty but short and fat. We only got a bushel of peas off that row and the
line of pepper plants yielded about half a dozen fruit.
All in all, I’m pretty disappointed with our garden this
year. And don’t even get me started on the string beans.
I mean, the package said pole beans. So I guess I was thinking
about the lovely wax beans and butter beans that we grew last year, and
gathered for weeks at harvest. Served steamed with hot butter and salt, they
went with everything on the dinner table. Not so the pole beans. They are fun
to grow, because the vine literally clings to the pole and the beans are very
easy to find and pick. But then when you cook them, there’s this weird string
thing running up the seam in the bean. What the heck? The first time we served
them everyone at the Sunday dinner table was picking string out of their teeth.
Niiiice.
And unlike the more favourable veggies, there was just no
end to the pole beans! We would pick a huge tub of them and the next day there
was another pile hanging on the vine. One week I steamed and cooled the beans,
then hand-stripped them of their strings before covering them in cream of
mushroom soup and turning them into a casserole. I did that once. It was
delicious but far too labour-intensive. Eventually I gave up and just shoved a
few bags of beans into bags and plopped them in the deep freeze. The Farmer is
going to be absolutely thrilled to find those mid-winter, I’m sure.
The last few pole beans were pitched over the fence with
their plants, for the sheep, horse and donkey. They were most appreciative. Although
I’m sure they spent a few hours stressing over the strings in their teeth too.
I think next year I will go back to the Roma tomatoes for
sauce, beets for Borscht, wax and butter beans, potatoes, carrots, onions and
squash. Most of the veggies we plant are the ones that store or freeze really
well but let’s face it – with an average 18 to 20 dinner guests every Sunday
our veggies don’t last long.
The boys were pretty good at picking veggies; that is until
they saw the toad. They won’t admit it but I think it really freaked them out.
They haven’t offered to gather veggies again.
The one thing that I really enjoyed about the garden this
year was the twelve-foot sunflowers that sprung from their own seed sowing. I
forgot to plant them this year, and it’s a good thing I did because the garden
would have been completely overwhelmed by them. It amazes me that they pretty
much grew in a row, at the back of the garden, right where I planted them last
year, even after The Farmer carefully drove his tractor in between the heritage
peonies, added a layer of composted sheep manure and roto-tilled the soil
before planting. The sunflowers sprang up and when I recognized their little
plants I had to ask myself if I had planted them. I couldn’t recall.
Another growing season has come and gone and it’s time to
carve pumpkins, bake apples, and decorate with frost-hardy Chrysanthemums until
November.
Wishing all of you a very happy Thanksgiving and all the
best in the coming season. Next year I’m planting the potatoes on the other
side of the garden. Apparently they won’t grow in the same spot twice. Now you
tell me.
Email: dianafisher1@gmail.com
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