Experiments, Deer Damage, and Funky Fungi

Clay read that you can pot large tomato suckers and once new growth starts they can be planted in the garden for a late season crop.
Heirloom Tomato Seedlings, Brandywine Pink and Marglobe.

The deer's favorite munchie, sunflowers. I've noticed that once the top is eaten that it will start two sets of new leaves. I'm sure it is not easy to recover from having your head chopped off, even if you are a plant.
I just purchased some brussel sprouts from Crows Nest, hoping I can harvest them in the fall after the first frost. The deer stepped right on one, but since the soil was so moist it just sunk in instead of breaking off.
The biggest damage was on the beans. I'm wandering since the blooms were not eaten off if we will still get beans from the plants that were damaged?
Here is the mysterious fungi. I would like to find out if I need to worry about this stuff.
Close up of fungi.

Today's Harvest - nine cucumbers.

Today is a Sunday. Sometimes I like to try to get some work done before church but I only managed to cook myself some oatmeal with strawberries and blueberries on top. When I finished I crawled back into bed to read. After church I did start working. I weeded the beans and cucumbers. These are two areas of our garden that we don't have weed paper down. It is easy to think my bean bushes are really think, but in a lot of cases there are just big weeds mixed in. I also discovered quite a bit of deer damage on the beans. I sprayed them with a really stinky (natural ingredients) deer repellent, but of course it is now pouring rain and the deer will probably feast again tonight. I also noticed a lot of fungi growing in the soil around the beans. We've seen this before, usually in areas that received a little more horse manure. I would think the fungi are just going about their business breaking down the soil and making it more nutrient rich, but I'm also nervous that they shouldn't be there. When Clay gets back with the camera I will take a picture and see if anyone has any advice. I also hilled up the second batch of corn that we put in.

I had big plans to do dinner with my folks here at the house. Mom ended up needing to take Papaw to the funeral home and with the down pour my parents are about 30-40 min. late. If they were on time I would have actually had everything done and ready to come off or out of the oven on time and still warm. So I'm a little disappointed but here is what I prepared. Yesterday I did a casserole for my friend Crystal's goat roast. I had enough stuff to make two so that was the main dish for tonight. The casserole was mild and hot sausage, zucchini, squash, green peppers (frozen from last years garden), onion, elbow noddles, garlic, oregano, basil, and some cheese sprinkled on top. Then I made batter fried yellow squash and fried a little kale and chard with some garlic. I had fresh cucumber slices for a side dish and a raspberry/blueberry cobbler for dessert. Now I'm just trying to keep myself busy so I don't worry over the food until my folks get here!

Blueberries and the Fourth of July

Strawberry and Cherry Jam.

Yesterday Clay was taking off for a bachelor party in New York and I had to drop him off at a friends house by 1:00. That left us enough time for him to get packed and go to Crow's Nest to pick blueberries. I have been there to pick blackberries but this was my first time for the blueberries. It seemed like a lot of the people were starting at the far end of the field and working their way back to the entrance where you pay. I think must of them had their buckets full before they made it back to the first few bushes because Clay and I filled up our one pound bucket just picking on about six bushes and we didn't have to walk far. When I got back home I rinsed and dried the berries to freeze. I put one tray of berries in the freezer before bagging. Mom suggested that this will let each individual berry freeze and then when you want to snack on a few, you don't have to thaw the whole bag. This seemed to work great but when I pulled out the tray to bag it fell from my counter and it sounded as if I had just dropped one hundred marbles on the floor. Being frozen they were a little easier to pick back up at least. I hope to make a blueberry crisp for a cookout that I'm going to tomorrow on the 5th. As for the fourth I went to a picnic sponsored by our local Grange that my parents are members of. I'm sure to post later about the Grange when the Price's Fork Fair rolls around. There was a lot of yummy food but I plan to rest and work around the house the rest of the day so no fireworks for me. We are having a nice sprinkling outside now and if it dries up I will plant a few new plants I picked up at the Crow's Nest Nursery that were half off yesterday! Clay took our camera so no pictures for now.

Update: I did not end up planting today, but I did get a nice Fourth of July surprise. I knew that I needed to pick black raspberries before they went bad so I gathered about a cup and 1/2. When I'm done I usually go over to the strawberries and find just a handful. Today they berries were just glorious. I picked at least 2 and1/2 cups and they were the size of golf balls! Of course Clay is not here to share them with so I called grandma to share my news. Now I'm snacking on some sugar snap peas from my neighbors garden. My neighbors are a girl that is in the Osteopathic School of Medicine at Tech and her boyfriend that does art work for science books. He works at home and was happy to play around with the land they have and started a very nice garden. We get to share our ups and downs of gardening. We have a pact to run off any deer or critters if the other is away and of course we share the produce. Clay can remember when his grandfather farmed at our house and the neighbor at that time also had a garden and they were always "competing" for the best garden. I would love to see pictures of the gardens during that time.

Grandparent's Day

I had a very busy day, but not much of it was in my garden. I did water everything first thing this morning at 7:00. I did a few other chores including laundry. Then I took Papaw Melvin and Rubel to Hardees. This is a great social joint for my grandparents. I love how everyone has to come over to our booth to talk with Papaw, he is so popular! Then back at their house I helped stake some tomato plants, and then we rode his golf cart down to his son, Butch's pond. (My grandparents gave both of their children pieces of land on their property. All the houses are close together, Butch's is behind my parents, but they have a path from my Papaw's house to Butches through the woods, very cool!!) My Papaw has Macular Degeneration so he see nothing but shadows, but he loves to tell me where t he path is and to make sure I don't fall into the big ditches along the way! At the pond we fed bread to the stocked rainbow trout pond. Actually it is not just one pond. There is a very small goldfish pond, a medium size trout pond, and then the big pond that you can use a paddle boat in. During our trip we were joined by Butch, Monica, and three of the grandchildren, and Cindy the dog, all arriving on another golf cart! Butch has a severe case of muscular dystorphy, but never complains a bit and completes an amazing amount of work even though some days he can barely get moving out of bed. (He spends a good bit of the winter in Florida, because the sunny weather helps with his pain.) I paddled around wtih the kids in the pond and then went back up the hill to Papaws.

From there I was off to my grandma Margaret's house. He had a big day planned to make strawberry jam. I do the berry picking and she gets the materials together and then we cook together. I got to pour the jam into the jars and discovered how sloppy I was with dripping jam down the sides of the jar. I was forgiven since we had enough jam for a whole extra jar. Then I asked grandma about her cherry tree outback that was loaded with berries. She said she had already collected all the ones that she could reach. Neither one of us like to see anything that delicious go to waste so I asked about ladders and off we went to pick some more. Grandma didn't use the latter. We quickly had enough to make seven jars of jam. Grandma started talking about cherry pies so I went and picked some more to have some to take home and freeze for a pie attempt later. I had never picked cherries and I learned a few new things. Her cherries were not very sweet and not the best for snacking on uncooked. When we started to deseed them she went over how to spot the possible worms. If the seed is a little discolored, kinda black then you probably have a worm. We found about five altogether and sure enough the seeds were blackish. I also saw a picture of the first year the cherry tree was blooming. Her son Larry was in the picture, the tree was his height and he could have reached all the berries. Sure enough that night the weather dropped and a freeze killed all the blooms. This happened again last year but I'm sure that first year was the worst. So I went home with five strawberry jars, seven cherry, and a bag of raw cherries, not bad! Of course I'll be giving several away. Grandma kept some of the strawberry.

One funny story from the day. I packed some squash and kale to take to both grandparents. When at Papaw's house I took in my bag containing some jars and the veggies. I put some in the fridge for him and Rubel and left the squash for grandma in the bag at their house. We went to Hardees and when we got back Rubel's granddaughter was there (she is a registered nurse that helps out there on a regular basis) and she was frying up a huge load of squash. She had just recently told me how much she liked squash and would eat it as quick as I could bring it and I guess she wasn't kidding. So no squash for grandma Margaret. Erica truly couldn't have had any idea that I was saving that bag for later. There is always more squash though!!

I have to leave this post saying that I am soooooo thankful and blessed to still have my grandparents to spend time with. It is one of my favorite things actually about being back close to home and having my summers off. I have more time for visiting!

Here is a picture of today's harvest.

And under the strawberries I got a handful of black raspberries. I will be making strawberry jam with my grandmother tomorrow. I collected 2 quarts of berries while she was in Alaska and froze them. The first berries we collected were much smaller and very sweet. They were coming in like crazy for about two weeks. I already made nine cups of jam. Then it really slowed down but there were still several blooms on the plants. The new berries coming in now are much bigger and just as sweet! The down side is the pests that keep showing up. Originally I kept seeing little tiny gray slugs, mostly just in the morning when the plants were wet. I didn't use any beer bait because when the plants were dry I didn't see any and the fruit didn't seem damaged. Then after the first burst of berries was done producing I found a couple of over ripe berries and as I was about to bite in I noticed a little tiny larva crawling around inside, and as I looked at any of the other berries still hanging on they had the larva too. Yuck!!! So I actually just ignored the patch for a week being turned off by the yucky critters. Then bigger berries showed up. Now the only berries with damage are then ones touching the ground, they have a little black insect of some sort aggressively feeding on them. The berries off the ground seem ok. I can't decide if this is big enough of a problem to combat or just collect the ones that are good? As for the raspberries I have had enough on my little bush to add to ice cream and an additional two cups to make a small cobbler. I think I'll get enough for another cobbler before it is done producing.
This is the monsterous thing that grew out of our compost pile. We actually had several plants growing from the compost but I just weeded most of them out when I turned the pile, but decided to save a few to see what would happen. So you would think that this giant plant would be producing a lot of fruit. (It is more than one plant but still all the leaves are huge compared to the ones I bought and put in the main garden. If you look below you can see that the fruit/vegetable doesn't resemble a zucchini or a squash, it looks like a hybrid. So I tried reading up on volunteers and know that they may produce lots of great green leaves and sometimes no fruit or fruit that just doesn't ever ripen, but why such a strange looking squash. I cut one open and it looks void of nutrients. If anyone has an answer please share! In the mean time Clay and I know we need to work on the compost pile. We finally moved the new material we were throwing out to the pile of horse manure we had dropped off by his boss. It just wasn't getting enough sun to get hot enough. Do we need to cover it with a tarp? I've still used the compost in the garden and even in some potted plants but we are getting volunteers everywhere so I know it didn't get really good and cooked.
Mystery vegetable.

My First Post with Pictures

This is year number one for our asparagus, so we have two more years to wait before we harvest. There is one tomato plant in the middle!


Cucumber blossoms.


A little color for the garden. These are sprinkled throughout the main garden.


Swiss Chard, which also adds some nice color.


This picture was actually taken about two weeks ago so most of our poppy petals have blown off and the seed pods are drying.

When I picked this duo I was wishing it was time for the Price's Fork Fair, so I could enter it in the most unusual contest!

Cilantro that we started from seed and we're hoping that it doesn't bolt right away.
Overall image of the main garden, mostly showing tomatoes, peppers, and squash.
Another angle of the main garden showing beans and corn.
This is our strawberry garden with a volunteer tomato.

Getting Started

I finally decided to give in and start a blog. I'm always aggravated with myself for not keeping a journal especially for gardening. So why not give an electronic journal a try. Here is a list of some things I look forward to with using a blog:
*Showing pictures (If I have a question about a garden pest or plant I may get advice from other readers!)
*Having easy access to a list of other gardening blogs that I like.
*Posting recipes and other fun stuff that comes from gardening.
*Having an easy way to keep track of progress or problems in the garden.
*Listing what varieties of plants I have so I have an answer when some one asks!
*Having one more reason to fight my husband for computer use time!
So now if I can just figure out how to use this thing.