The Harvest

A few weeks back we had several days of heavy rain with the first hard frost forecast for the season, so we went up to the garden to see what was to see. These are pictures of our two plots in mid harvest. We found that many of the tomatoes had begun to ripen and a mild frost at some point had weakened the plants enough that some of the fruit was falling off.


We collected 83 pounds of produce that day, mostly in tomatoes, and made our first batch of awesome tomato goodness. We went back up to the garden before the big frost was expected and harvested every green tomato we could get. These we divided up with TJ and we loaded our bounty onto a 4x8 sheet of hard board in the garage to ripen. We also put up a small table on the front porch and loaded it with plenty of green fruit.

Here's a peek at some of the cool stuff we grew. You'll see lots of tomatoes, but there are two kinds of squash shown here and a reddish husked breed of sweet corn that turned out surprisingly well. Slugs, centipedes and mammalian garden varmints got into our potatoes pretty bad this year, so our crop left a bit to be desired. We ate several batches of beets but lost the last one to the voles.

How to Eat Out of a Brain Bowl...

First we wanted fresh, firm tomatoes. These ones were collected from our garden and from the Farmer's Market in Duluth. We have them ripening here in the south facing windows of our three season porch.

Next, we prepare the tomatoes. After you quarter them, you roast them for about 40 minutes at 350 degrees. We drizzled some good olive oil over them and sprinkled some sea-salt and fresh cracked pepper, plus added some fresh, minced garlic before they went into the oven.
Here we are using our Foley Food Mill, a device that separates most of the seeds and the skins from the flesh of the tomatoes. We purchased ours at a second hand store and I had to bang out a dent in before it would work properly, but once we got going it worked like a dream. I think I prefer this approach over the large conical sieve and wooden paddle model. This one is compact and worked very well.
Here we added fresh chopped basil and rosemary to the velvety tomato goodness that our food mill created. We had both herbs growing in the back yard, so this batch of soup has some extremely fresh ingredients!
We cooked the soup for a bit to mix the flavors, then fried up some cheese sandwiches, poured the delicious tomato nectar into our brain bowls and, voila! Aub found the brain ware on Etsy, an on-line artist's studio. These were hand crafted and shipped to us for just this kind of culinary excitement. We also have matching brain mugs, so we may need to experiment with some Bloody Mary mixes for those...

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

Get a load of this. I had to stand all the way across the alley, almost had to climb the neighbor's fence, to get this monstrosity in the frame. This started as a few sprouts that volunteered in the compost pile. The next thing I know, they're taking over the fence, the garage, half the alley... Cars have to drive around this behemoth!

Here's a close up of two different gourds growing together. On the left is a pumpkin (90% sure on that- it could still be a spaghetti squash), on the right is an immature acorn squash. In the front/middle of the frame is one of the fronds that are close to the size of trash can lids.

This is a Hubbard volunteer, I believe. I don't recall the longitudinal stripes, but my memory isn't specific on these. In any case, this thing is about the size of a foot ball.

This is a photo for perspective. That little white spot at the bottom is my size 12 shoe. These fronds are almost knee high and could possibly serve as an alternative roofing material in a pinch.

Here's the other side of the fence with the clematis on it. The pumpkin hanging there is larger than some of the water melons we bought this summer. Notice the tiny one in the upper right hand corner. I'm sure that will get pollinated (the bees were scarce earlier in the season but have been making up for lost time just lately) and then perhaps my fence will collapse. Rest assured that I will post pictures of that if it happens!

More Bounty of the Harvest

A huge batch of pickles waiting to be pickled. On the side are beets and a few carrots. Stay tuned for the pictures of them after pickling.

Here's a better look at the whole variety of our recent harvest. We have some beans, lots of tomatoes, several egg plant, one large Hubbard squash, more beets and a nice selection of glads.
The artful way they are displayed is according to the careful eye of my lovely wife.






We planted our onions under a layer of black plastic, like much of the garden. By far, the onions fared the best. We pulled a few along the way, but here's the whole rest of our crop, drying away in the garage. In a few weeks we'll braid the dried greens and hopefully have a cool way to store/display our harvest into the winter.

Container Gardening!

Here are some early Fall pictures of our tomatoes as they ripen in our various containers. This first shot shows all four varieties of container we used this season. On the left, our original, store bought EarthBox, which produced a decent crop of pickles, many of which are canned and in the pantry.
Next is a plain old pot, painted purple, with our sole surviving specimen of the Wisconsin 55 tomato. It's done quite well nestled in between the cukes and the Red Figs.
Next in line is the new GrowBox 2.0, which boasts a whopping 8 foot growing frame. The tips of the tallest plants are just reaching this amazing height as the days get shorter and the nights grow cooler. Hidden under all this foliage the Red Fig tomatoes are abundant.
And lastly, hanging to the right is one of six hand made upside down growing containers that are laden with green fruit. All six hangers have the same variety of tomato called Mucovite. I don't know much about this type, except that it is an heirloom breed and seems to like hanging upside down.

GrowBox 1.0 in all its glory. This has two varieties of plant going strong. On the left, one of our two Brandywine plants is loaded with large, interestingly shaped fruit. On the right is an Early Girl that produced a few fruit right away and has been slightly disappointing as the season wore on.



Here's a close up of the third, fourth and fifth ripe fruit the plant has produced. We've struggled with keeping our plants fed with the proper minerals and nutrients, so for the past several weeks, many of the fruit that were ripening on these plants were rotting from the blossom end. These were inedible and very frustrating. After consulting several organic gardening books, the best guess I can make is that the plants were low on calcium or manganese, which is a common problem for container tomatoes. After adding the powdered shells of several eggs (in a mortar and pestle), the plants seemed to stop producing rotting fruit. I added some specialized fertilizer that is made for container tomatoes, too, just for good measure and the result is pictured here.

Here's a good view of the next four hangers. Keep in mind that those are five gallon buckets hanging there and that the top board of the fence is a good 8 feet off the ground.


Here's the sixth and final hanging tomato of this season. It grew down into the clematis I was certain I'd killed over the winter. Notice the rogue squash or pumpkin that has grown over the fence and is threatening to take over the yard. The peas are done for this year. At the bottom there are several Swish Chard plants that are standing tall next to the Black Eyed Peas, which are really beans and I really don't know what to do with yet.

Volunteer Army

This is a cherry tomato growing in the geranium flower box on the garage window. It's a hearty little thing with several small tomatoes getting ready to go.
This is the volunteer ground cherry that is attempting to take over our flower and vegetable bed in front of the garage. We grew a ground cherry last year and didn't use any of the fruits, mostly because we weren't sure what to do with them. This one popped up on it's own this year and I plan to attempt to make some jam with the fruit.

Hollyhocks

The hollyhocks finally bloomed. They turned out to be a bit short on variety, but they were loaded with flowers. I'll need to start some other seeds this winter to hopefully get more colors going. Someday, we may have a crop of these things that cover the whole side of the house.

Here's a close up of the red ones.

Feed Me, Seymour!

Here are some update photos of the rogue squash growing in my compost pile. Somewhere under all that vegetation is a small pile of organic matter that should be breaking down and getting ready to provide nutrients to my plants next year.

Instead, it's providing all the nourishment that this seemingly steroid supported squash plant is consuming right now. I have no idea about what condition the compost will be in, but I do know that there are tons of blossoms on this thing. Since this photo was taken, the runners have infiltrated the alley en masse and the small receptacle for dog waste is completely obscured beneath squash fronds that could double as hang-gliders. Wow.

Bountiful Harvest?

I won't exactly be giving Bayfield a run for its money come next blueberry season, but I did manage to produce three (3) delicious berries this year. Not bad for two whole bushes...

Bag Man

I enjoy making reusable grocery bags. Our current technology is stuck in a lose-lose argument on the answer to the age old question, 'paper or plastic?' Creating new plastic bags is amazingly poisonous to the environment, toxifying hundreds of gallons of water every day, per bag making factory, to make a product that is so difficult to recycle that most centers won't accept them. (Some stores have started a re-use campaign, or provide receptacles to drop off you used bags, which is better than just throwing them in the lake). Paper bags lose much of their strength when they increase the recycled fiber content, so many bags are made with first run wood fibers, meaning new trees were used to make the bags.
Many stores are now selling durable, reusable bags in a variety of designs, which is a great step toward limiting our consumption of paper and plastic, and I applaud anyone who uses them instead of disposable bags.
My clever wife discovered a design for home made grocery bags online and we've been working with this design for several months. Shown here in the picture are several variations on the original design.
I'm getting better at remembering to bring reusable bags with me when we go to the store, and if I forget them, I'm likely to try and carry everything to the car in my arms rather than use a disposable bag, much to the chagrin of my wife.

New Project

In our small house, room for storage is hard to come by. One way we've attempted to combat this is by reducing the amount of junk we own, and that has helped prevent clutter pretty well. Another way is to keep our eyes peeled for better storage systems or other more efficient household items, and one of the best places we've found for this is the Goodwill, followed closely by Craigslist and Freecycle. This little gem was waiting for us at the Goodwill a few weeks ago.

It's in good condition, but desperately needs some minor cleaning, a new coat of paint and possibly some different drawer pulls. We haven't entirely decided on the top surface, but the wood grain Formica is probably on the outs. The drawer slides are severely worn and the floor of the lower storage area is sagging significantly. Once it's all spiffed up, it'll go in the dining room as a sideboard. Stay tuned for project updates!

Lulu's Pie

Toward the end of July Lulu made a pie. The crust is hand made from her grandmother's recipe and we used all fresh fruit, including Michigan cherries procured on her recent trip to see her family and raspberries we had just picked in Bayfield. The pie was fantastic. If you look closely, you can see that I cut out a piece for myself and was ready to dig in before I was reminded to take a picture.

Flowering Miscellany

These are Outhouse Hollyhocks we grew from seed we ordered from SeedSavers Exchange. They are an heirloom variety that should produce a variety of bold colors with lots of blooms. According to the literature, Hollyhocks were often used to both identify and hide the outhouse. So, if you were at house you were unfamiliar with, instead of embarrassing yourself by asking where the outhouse was, you could just look for the Hollyhocks and figure it out. I'm just hoping I don't find some old timer rooting around next to the house after these things bloom.
Here are the day lilies in full bloom in front of the rain barrel on the East side of the house.

This is a mixed planting of flowers and greens with Amish snap peas growing up the fence. We've had a great crop of peas this year. On the right is our Clematis, which I was certain I had killed this past winter. It hasn't bloomed yet, but it has more vines than ever, so I'm optimistic about the flowers, whenever they show up.
Here is the front yard bed showing its first blooms. The light colored flowers are poppies, the yellow ones are Jolly Jester marigolds. The red tinged flowers are Bishop's children- not sure what they are going to look like.

New Addition

Not to be confused with Bobby Brown's original boy band, this new addition to our flower garden is called a Balloon Flower. It's a shade loving perennial which has flowers that look just like purple balloons as they ripen, then they burst open into large star shaped blooms.

Compost Tumbler 2.0

Here is the compost tumbler I made from a recycled car wash detergent barrel on its new improved stand. The original version was much lower to the ground and difficult to work with. I also added baffles to the insides of the barrel, similar to those in a clothes dryer, to help mix the compost more thoroughly when I turn it. The stand is high enough that I can wheel my neighbor's wheelbarrow under it to empty the contents instead of digging it out like before. I still need to add a few more handles to make it easier to turn and finish reinforcing the hatch, which has warped slightly, but so far the new version is cooking the compost like it's on a mission. The other day I opened it to check on something and heat just blasted out at me. It was awesome...

Rogue Squash

Earlier this spring I noticed a few sprouts in my compost pile that looked a lot like squash or cucumbers. I had intended to transplant them up to our community garden so they could spread out and so I could finish changing the composting process here at the house. Well, I didn't get to it right away and now I regularly need to move the vines so they don't grow out into the alley. This is the biggest squash plant I've ever grown. I keep waiting for it to shout, "Feed me Seymour!"

Planter Update

Here's our lettuce garden, going crazy. We are fully out of things to do with lettuce, except eat salads. I wonder if you can make it into biofuel...?

These are the tomatoes we've planted in the Growbox 1.0. They are now nearing the top of the frame and will undoubtedly overgrow the whole thing. They are now sprouting bunches of little flowers and should be loaded with tomatoes in a few weeks.








The double impatiens in this planter are full of blooms.

On the right is our pear tomato, which is very full of blooms.





The geraniums are coming back after their initial shock at being planted in this window box. There are bunches of blooms about to open on each of them.



This begonia is also doing quite well. In front of the left blossom are three blueberries, which are shaping up to be our total crop for this year. Behind the planter our grape vine is growing several inches a week. Soon it will cover the whole fence.

Lily profusion

These are my favorite flowers at our house. They were planted here when we moved in and were a pleasant surprise the first summer we lived here. Had we negotiated our deal in July instead of February, we may have been tempted to pay more for the place. Since we've lived here these wonderful, orange flowers have proliferated. We hope that at one point soon they will fill this entire flower bed.


These are two new lilies we purchased this year at the farmer's market. They are dwarf lilies and won't get any taller than this, which is about a foot. They are already loaded with blossoms and we look forward to next year's crop as well.

Just Dangerous

Imagine the force of water needed to hurl these two tree trunks down the river and fling them over the falls, where they landed and stayed suspended precariously over the rocks below. Now imagine if a person were to fall into that torrent and get sucked down stream before your eyes. Sobering thought, isn't it?









Then what, you might ask, are these two morons doing walking across this raging river? There is no excuse for the one in the blue, but the one in the yellow later admitted that he only agreed to cross because he needed to use the restroom and didn't want to walk all the way back to the sanctioned crossing. Amazingly, there were no casualties.

Beautiful but DANGEROUS!

How did they know that TJ Mackey was coming to the Presque Isle crossing?
We spent an awesome afternoon in the Porcupine Mountains State Park in early July when we went to pick up Squid.

This is the waterfall under the suspension bridge to the island.
We found the perfectly round holes in the rock fascinating.












This is the river joining Lake Superior. The overhanging trees seemed to provide just the right shade and shelter.








Still dangerous, but significantly less beautiful, Trevor dangles over the precipice. Or maybe just over the weird brown lagoon.









This is the biggest waterfall we visited that day. We hiked up the East side of the river and explored some interesting terrain before we made it to the spot we chose to cross.