It has been a busy week for me. On Monday I got together with Frank Calta and we made 16 double batches of Pesto from two huge bags of Genovese basil I harvested. A double batch makes two meals for 5 people. It is a lot of pesto. On Wednesday I made a run out to the Ness farm and harvested more sunflowers and squash. All week I had the dehydrator running full of sliced summer squashes. The office was busy. Today after work I drove down to the Red Wing gardens and harvested. I had thought more corn would be dried down and that I would be working until dark and again in the morning. Instead, the later plantings of corn are only just starting to dry down, so I was finished with what I could harvest by 730, so I packed up, and made it home by 930. <smile> I get to sleep in my own bed tonight.
There are a lot of big orb spiders in the garden this year. I remember them being everywhere when I was a kid, but had not seen them in any great amount since (and that was a long time ago) so I am glad to see them again. Had tried to take photos of them a few times in the last weeks, but these point and shoot cameras are just not made for close up work of small things. I don’t shoot film any more. Just cannot afford to develop it. That means I am not carrying around my nice SLR Pentax any more. The photo at the top is as good a shot as I have got of one of these.
I picked the last of the Wamneheza corn. Next year, I think I need to plant it later in the spring, and where I can pay more specific attention to keeping it weed free. Oh well. It sure is a beautiful corn though. I have plenty from my harvest last year, and good ears from this year, to still do a large planting of it again.
The Dakota Rainbow Flint corn is drying down …. but just starting. I had though there would be a lot of it for me to gather, and I try to pick it as the husks go papery, but I found only a few that had. It was nice to see them filled out nicely, and some of the same speckled kernels on them I see on the Wamneheza and Painted Mountain. The parent gene pools were grown in close proximity for hundreds of years and that probably lends to the the great diversity of these corns, and their ability to adapt to local conditions over the years you grow it.
The squashes here are behind what I have at the Ness garden, but while working my way through the field I did come up on a nice Arikara squash suspended in the weeds. Not a mature one, but good sized already and well enough along that it will mature well before frosts.
The Arikara watermelons are thriving. A good thing too. Unless my longer season ones pick up I will only get these. The Arikara watermelons are descended from the original watermelons brought by the Spaniards to South America. They slowly made their way northwards, traded from tribe to tribe and slowly adapting for shorter and shorter growing seasons over the course of 500 years until the Arikara moved north a few hundred miles to join with the Mandan & Hidatsa tribes after their tribe was decimated by smallpox and they found their suddenly smaller agrarian community at risk of attack by the less agrarian Lakota. It is a nice little melon.
Tomatoes down there are coming in well now. Having them on the landscaping fabric and tied to a stretched cord is keeping them off the ground, and I picked an entire grocery bag full of Czech Bush tomatoes, with a few New Big Dwarf tomatoes to top it off. The Czech Bush tomato is really peaking now, and appears to be about 10 days ahead of the other. Nice to know I have tomatoes to process. We will see how much I pick from other gardens tomorrow, and how much red sauce I get from it.
The zucchini plants are producing and I brought 5 large ones home from the gardens there. All of the ones I have picked in the last 10 days from the gardens on this side of the world have been sliced, dried in the dehydrator, and packed into bags to store for the winter. Three and a half of the ones I picked today filled the dehydrators back up and they are whirring away in the back of the house. I should get up early to pick at the other gardens, and I want to take a few hours to take my daughter Nell fishing, since I am home when I thought I would be away. I need to treat that extra time as found time to do something fun that is not directly related to gardening.
Couldn’t sleep, so got back up and processed tomato seeds from the fermentation jars I set up last weekend. Now all of those are drying on plates on shelves above the stove. Maybe now my body will rest.
