It was an enjoyable day in the garden-harvest time

OMG…Harvest Galore!
Look at how much food was harvested this weekend! Onions (red and white), cantaloupe, potatoes, carrots, little red cabbages, green beans, green and red peppers, jalapenos, cucumbers, and tomatoes…

When my son got ready to eat breakfast, he looked at the heap of vegetables and declared, "I’m going to make breakfast using the vegetables from the garden, Mom!" And so he went about picking red and green peppers, onions, potatoes from the pile and frying them along with a couple of eggs. Can’t get fresher than that!

With the intense heat that we’ve had here in Kansas—what’s it been over 45 days of triple digit heat so far this summer—the plants have struggled to produce anything. Many people I’ve talked to gave up the ghost on their gardens, but if you water often and enough you could still have viable plants. The green bean plants, for example, grew tall (they’re pole beans). They blossomed, but they didn’t produce any green beans—until now. It’s just a bit cooler these days—only in the 90s some days and those persistent plants are starting to produce green beans. We just might get a harvest from those seeds yet!

The potato towers were layered with dirt and hay, but the heat just sapped the strength out of the plants. With only chicken wire around the edges, they weren’t really insulated from the high temps. They either needed even more water, or they needed to be kept more insulated to produce any quantity of potatoes.

The yield was quite disappointing to me, but it serves as a lesson learned. We’re going to try a fall crop and see if we have any luck growing potatoes when it’s cooler. I’m thinking we’ll also pick up some 55-gallon drums and plant them in there for added protection.

What seems to grow well  in this Kansas heat are jalapeno peppers, onions, and cucumbers. I’ve been eating, giving away, and preserving cucumbers into pickles. I can’t remember if this is my third or fourth pickling effort so far and I still have a refrigerator full of cucumbers.

Here’s my largest bowl soaking the cukes, onions, and peppers with pickling salt for 24 hours.

I bought a case of Ball jars with lids and figured if I canned them in these, then they’d be good for giving or selling. Plus they look pretty to boot!

I bought some labels too and they even look professional now! As I was preparing several containers with beets tonight for my lunches during the week at work, I thought that I’d like to have beets in the cooler months—not just right after digging them. I’m storing them in my refrigerator, but honestly, I have a very small fridge these days in comparison to the fridges of years past. In several houses I used to have two fridges. Now I have a tiny fridge and all these vegetables that I need to manage, so it becomes another thing to think about. I’m going to research preserving beets and see what I come up with next. Look for pickling beets, probably, in my next post.

Bon appetit!

 

We have tried many experiments here this year.

The garden is less than a year old and we have harvested several hundred dollars worth of fresh, healthy food.  The little bit of work involved has been a labor of love and even the bunny is becoming more and more used to us disturbing him in the melon patch.  Was able to get within 6 feet or less of the little guy this morning. 

The heat over the summer has taken its toll on several of the plantings. Herbs-none, beans, just now coming in, tomatoes-few and far between.  They now have on them a bunch of blossoms and I hope to be able to get a good harvest from them yet. 

We will be working up beds this coming weekend to prep them for the second season.  It might be a short one, and then the hoop house low tunnels might double this fall and extend our sharing. 

Thanks for all the nice notes and interest in this project.  I have a composting book available on eBay under the author name of Dandee Dirt(I think that is the nom de plume? hahahaha)  And there are some other books available under the Dandy first name.  Good luck and of course

Be well; peace…

dan