Fall Garden Clean Up

This weekend was a big garden clean up weekend.  We had to get the raised beds cleaned up, veggies pulled out, and everything prepared for the hard freeze that's coming this week.  For me, fall garden chores are more urgent than Spring garden chores.  Why?  I know in Spring that no matter when I start seedlings or seeds that they'll start growing when they feel like it, so there's no sense of urgency to get anything done.  I know that un-staked tomato plants will still produce tomatoes (though they will make a huge unruly mess, more on this in another post), so there's no rush.

This year, cucumbers started from seedlings and extra seeds (that were four or five years old) that Alycia threw in the ground both started producing at the same time.  Zucchini, pumpkins, and watermelons all languished in the ground for weeks before starting to grow.  The message from Mother Nature?  You can bust your butt and get things planted right after the last frost, coddle seedlings with little mini-greenhouses, or casually throw seeds in the ground, everything will grow when it's darn good and ready. 

Fall chores spurn me to action, the hard frost hangs over my head knowing that it'll turn those "just-starting-to-turn-pink" tomatoes into frost mangled mush if I don't get them inside where they might have a chance to ripen.  And experience has taught me that potatoes and onions are much easier to harvest from ground that isn't frozen.  This should be intuitive, but sometimes I need to learn things the hard way.

Alycia snipped and pulled the remaining pepper plants.  We're hoping that, like the tomatoes, we can store the peppers in a cool dry place and they'll ripen a bit more.  If not, they're still tasty even though they might be a bit green.

We harvested onions out of this raised bed as well.  The only hard part was removing the marigolds.  Even though they were still full of blooms, they were unlikely to survive the mid-20's that were forecast for a low temp Tuesday night and Wednesday night.  It's also easier to remove everything in the raised bed at once so I can cover it with a thick layer of grass clippings, shredded leaves, and mulch for overwintering.

Sad, empty raised bed.  'Till next year.

Family Visit

We had most of the family out for a visit last week, their annual fall trip to North Dakota is becoming a well loved tradition.  In addition to the usual cast of characters, this trip included a new group member, our new nephew Jacob. 

Jacob and his Dad enjoyed our rocking chair and took time to give puppy lots of pets.  The puppy loved Jacob, giving him constant kisses and wagging her tail non-stop the entire time.  Puppy was closely supervised with him, as Alycia and I are super cautious, but Jacob has five doggie pals at home and does well around them

Jacob and his Dad pose for the camera while puppy pants nearby, exhausted from all her kissing and wagging.

Breakfast time for this little red-haired munchkin.

Watermelon From the Garden

We've had some family (actually pretty much the whole family) in town since last week, and as such, normal blogging activities have been suspended to play tour guide, short order cook, deaf dog wrangler, and 8-month old baby supervisor (though truthfully my only real contribution to the baby's care is to say "Poop!!" Beavis and Butthead style, which little nephew Jacob really enjoys.  I can already tell he has a discerning taste for the arts).  

Regarding garden matters, this was our first year of planting watermelon in the garden.  And while it wasn't an unbridled success, we did get two nice sized watermelon from one plant.  Our fall weather here has been exceptionally warm and dry, which I think allowed for more time for the fruit to mature on the vine. 

Our first watermelon, and it was a doozie.  We got it as a start from the Bergeson Nursery in Fertile, Minnesota and I believe the variety was a "Sweet Favorite".  It was indeed a sweet watermelon, and very seedy, but seediness is forgiven for seriously sweet flesh and intense watermelon flavor.  

Our watermelon cut in half, ready to be sliced up for consumption.  And consume we did, it was quite tasty. 

California and Bust

There's a great article in Vanity Fair this month on California's money woes, the economic issues in the US, and the tremendous problems we're facing as a nation.  It's always sad to see my former home state quicken its circling of the proverbial drain.


Vanity Fair Article - California and Bust

Here's one great quote from a well written article:

"The problem with police officers and firefighters isn’t a public-sector problem; it isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences. Afterward, the people on Wall Street would privately bemoan the low morals of the American people who walked away from their subprime loans, and the American people would express outrage at the Wall Street people who paid themselves a fortune to design the bad loans."

Tomato Cage Update

In case you missed it or need to get caught up, you can read previous posts about my homemade tomato cages Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

These homemade tomato cages were an unbridled success, fully supporting the two plants (an Early Girl and a Polish Heirloom) with minimal training of the plants and effort on my part.  Both tomato plants are spilling out the tops of the cages, 6 feet plus in height and have produced an average crop with almost no fertilizing or attention from me.

The cages do make it slightly more difficult to harvest the tomatoes because you have to reach in between the small squares of the re-mash grid, but that's really the only downside. 

This is the other half of the tomato box, the Roma and Amish paste tomatoes, pretty much a complete mess.  I did stake these with the regular tomato cages (the only thing I had left) and the weight of the plants collapsed them in about a month.  This is the "do as I say, not as I do" mea culpa of our blog post today.

The lesson from the tomato caging this summer has been that I need to make a dozen or more re-mesh cages for all my tomatoes for next year.  They worked so well that I want to stake all of my tomatoes (eating, heirloom, Roma/paste, and cherry tomatoes) with this method next year.  Making new tomato cages will be a good fall/winter project for when the weather turns nasty and cold since I can work on this in the relative comfort of the garage.

A Weekend In Portland

Alycia and I spent the past weekend in Portland, Oregon, attending the wedding of our good friends Emma and Geoff.  It's always a great joy for me to reconnect with good friends who I haven't seen in a while and whose only downfall is a lack of proximity to North Dakota (which includes just about everyone).  We spent a lot of time chatting, recounting past glories, retelling the same old but still very funny anecdotes, and reveling in each others company. 

The weather was unseasonably warm for September, with mid to upper 80's until the last day when it returned to more Portland-esque breezy and showery.  We had great food and fantastic beverages the whole trip.  I also got to play some basketball with old friends, with kudos to the groom Geoff who actually organized a game the morning of his wedding, that's some dedication to the game.   

Instead of a wedding cake, they had tiny pies from a local bakery.  They were delicious.  And no one seemed to notice or mind that I snuck one into Alycia's purse in case I needed a midnight snack (I did). 

Our friends Geoff and Emma, who were very dashing and very lovely (respectively).

Your intrepid blogger and his piece of gluten free arm candy. 

Local San Diego Legend Passes

Outside of San Diego, few people have heard of him, but Jerry Schad was a San Diego institution.  Though I've never even met him, I feel like I know him through his writing.  I've got a dirty, dog-eared copy of his guide book "Afoot & Afield in San Diego County" somewhere, and I've thumbed through others copies a handful of times, in the library, from friends bookshelves, and even the house copy at the local coffee shop. 

Jerry wrote a column in the San Diego Reader (a local independent weekly magazine) that I'd read on occasion.  I was always struck by the power of his words to enthuse me to put on some walking shoes and explore the outdoors.  He was one small component that made the community a little bit cooler. 

You can read the article about Jerry in the San Diego Union Tribune.

Pickles on Parade!!!

OK I lied, the pickles aren't really on parade.  But my How to Make Bread and Butter Pickles post did get picked up by Associated Content/Yahoo media.  You can read it here:

Refrigerator Bread and Butter Pickles

Yay for pickles!!