Five Days

Life is running me a bit ragged.  Gardens are moving from maintaining to maintaining and harvesting.  This stage usually arrives about 6 weeks ago, but this year is really testing how much we can do and hope for.

The weather has been extremes of cold and heat, leaving me hoping for a long mild fall without an early frost.  For now though, things are moving along and the extreme heat has broken, giving way to slightly lower temperatures, and heat indexes below 100 degrees.

Thursday night I drove down to the Red Wing gardens.  My hope was to harvest Blauchakker peas, blackberries and onions. Ideally the peas should have been harvested when I was on vacation, 10 days before.  I had picked maybe 1/20th of them right before I left, giving me a few pounds of seeds, but my not being here when they matured, and then their sitting in 100+ heat and sun caused nearly all of the pods to open and dump the seeds on the ground while I was gone.  <sigh> so, 25-30 pounds of soup peas went to feeding whatever rodents scrounged them off of the ground.

The blackberries were just starting to ripen, but they are worrying me as well.  The plants are heat stressed and the berries themselves are seedier and more sour than I would expect.  They will be fine for making fruit syrup, and I will be back there to pick more, but for a first picking it was pretty sparse and I only got a gallon of berries.

Onions were a bit better.  A good sized bag of hard storage onions, and a good amount of sweet slicing onions.  The sweet onions do not store well and we will go through those in the next couple of months.  The hard storage onions will go down onto shelves in the basement after curing outside on the drying rack for another week.  Sweet onions will stay in the kitchen until we are done eating them.

I stayed down at my parent’s home for the night, then drove to my office in Eagan the next morning, and finally got home at about 6pm that evening.  I spent the evening playing with the kids and doing basic maintenance on the gardens here at home.  The flowers are attracting monarchs and swallow tail butterflies and I had to take the time to snap a few photos of them.

Tomatoes are finally showing indications that I am going to get some good production before they freeze out this fall.  Christopher Columbus have set what are growing into huge paste tomatoes again so I know their size last year was not a fluke.

The San Marzano, of which I have 5 plants here and another 8 at the Minnetonka garden have all set very heavy clusters of classic Italian paste tomatoes.  This really is a workhorse tomato for me.  They are not the best tasting of the paste tomatoes, but 20 pounds of tomatoes per plant would be a poor year.

Rumi Banjan tomatoes are blushing, and I expect we will be eating them by the end of the week.  I will do a longer piece on them and whatever it is that I do with them for eating.  They are such a beautiful treat.

Saturday started with cutting tops off of garlic.  All of it condensed down to a few gallons of cloves, but it is nice.  Plenty for all of the red sauce this year, planting this fall, and eating all winter.

I spent the rest of the day at the Minnetonka garden weeding.  I had been neglecting that garden because I knew that Frank had been spending a lot of time there tending the tomatoes, but half of that garden is not tomatoes, and Frank had been on vacation for a couple of weeks.  The half that is not tomatoes had weeds waist high, and the potatoes had been pretty much completely defoliated by Colorado Potato Beetles, which is annoying, but hopefully not devastating for what has been growing underground since I planted them 90 days ago.  Hard to believe that much time has passed already.   I left the weeds in the paths on Saturday.  Was just too tired and sunburned to haul them off.

The defoliated potato plants are giving way to watermelons I planted when the weather finally turned warm back in June.  They need 90 days of warmth all by themselves so I have my fingers crossed for a plethora of good sized melons sometime at the end of August or early September.  Last year we had a ton of Arikara watermelons, which I am growing down at the Red Wing farm, but they are a small seedy melon and I really was hoping for another long summer like last year so the bulk of what I planted was a longer season Crimson Sweet watermelon.  If I had known what the summer was going to be like I would have stuck with the Arikara melons.  Oh well.  If we can get another 8 weeks of good warm weather we should be drowning in watermelons.

Saturday evening was a break for me and Patti.  Her sister Cindy had come over to help with some purging at the house in anticipation of another baby this February.  She had also volunteered to watch the kids for the evening, get them pizzas, watch movies, and put them to bed, which left us free to go to another friend’s home for drinks and a cook-out.  <smile> I had nearly forgotten what an adult evening was like.  We sat up drinking, talking, watching a wildly funny movie called “Sordid Lives” and did not arrive back at home until close to 1 am.

After working outside all day, and then our revelry the evening before, Sunday morning I could not drag myself out of bed to make coffee until after 9 am. Once my body had assimilated enough caffeine and I was human again, we all packed into the car and headed to David’s where Patti had some work to do on the chicken coop again and I helped David haul wood chips to cover the paths between the new garden beds he had made, then I headed over to the Minnetonka gardens again where I hauled all of the weeds up against the south fence of the garden, picked 10 pounds of beets, planted 50 feet of beets and carrots for late fall harvesting, then hauled water down, two large watering cans at a time, until all of the tomatoes, watermelons, peppers and squash were well soaked.

Sunday evening found us all at our home, along with David, his daughter Rebecca, and Patti’s sister having dinner.  6 pounds of chuck roast, cooked in the slow cooker all day, with garlic, sweet onions and marsala wine.  Along with that was beet tops sauteed with garlic in olive oil and butter, and mashed potatoes, and gravy made from all of the meat cooking liquid.  As soon as I was done eating dinner I ran out to the Ness farm to water and feed their chickens because they are up north at their cabin.  They were out of food, but not completely out of water.  The hen house is a slick set up, but since the Ness family was gone Lance had shut them all up in it so he did not have to worry about predation.  When I opened the door and put the food in the hens rushed the food and a few of them fell out the door, then ran under the coop.  Crawling to catch chickens under a coop that has a wire mesh bottom 24 inches above you is not a ………  pleasant thing to do at the end of the day.  I needed a shower, and to collapse for a few hours before heading to the office the next morning.

Today was a busy Monday at the office, but I got a chance to talk to Frank (he got home from vacation last night) and he told me he had spent some time at the Minnetonka garden tying up tomato plants because they had sprawled over all of the paths between the rows, but before he could do much he was chased out of the gardens by mosquitoes.  I think Frank is like Patti, with the blood type O-yum.  The hardware store in Minnetonka had seventeen 50″ re-bar stakes.  I bought all of them, stopped by Frank’s to pick up a bag of cut up nylons (which are great for tying up tomato plants) then ran home to change into grubby gardening clothes, back to the Minnetonka garden, and tied up tomato plants, finishing just as the sun slipped below the horizon.  Mosquitoes were there the whole time.  I thought I was sweating and went to wipe my brow, my hand coming away covered with smashed mosquitoes and blood.  The garden looks good.  I am a couple of quarts low.