My Fall Garden

Here is a lot of it, though not all. In the foreground are the sweet potatoes, looking to engulf the chard entirely and probably hiding a whole host of slugs and creeping things. In the middle (messy) bed are the melon plants, volunteers, and also a volunteer milo plant from the birdseed. At the back of the main bed is the cauliflower/ broccoli/ beet/ onion/ radish bed for fall. In the rear bed, across the front there is rosemary, Indian mint, oregano, and thyme. In the middle is one straggling amaranth plant (the others already died) and weeds. Across the back, the tall spindly red things are okra plants. Under the crape myrtles is an experimental spinach and kale bed- no germination noted since last week so far. On the right in front of the crape myrtles ( and growing into them) are my tomato and basil plants, with one volunteer melon in the mess of vines. Then the limas are down the fence row with  carrots, onions, bok choy, lettuces, and eggplant, and a little poke salad and Malabar spinach volunteered from last year. Whew! 

White Thai Eggplant

This should be harvested while white if grown in shade on clay soil. They will turn brown (rot-brown) instead of yellow if left on the plant too long. They do not have seeds if harvested in this way. They are the size of a large marble or a small egg, true to the name. This is a cute plant, more for looks than for edible value.

Cleaning Old Wood Floors

This house came with Original Hardwood Floors, according to the realtor. Abused ones that had served as under-carpet flooring for years. People had ripped out the carpeting, painted without covering the floor to protect from spatters, and even waxed dirt into some places. See the before picture here, from a corner between the fireplace and a radiator cover in the living room.

Here is the "after" picture. I took off the paint spatters with sandpaper and a plastic knife, then wiped with a moist rag and re-waxed. It isn't perfect. I need to work on getting the spatters off close to the wall. I did not have the tools to pry an errant staple still sticking out of the floor. But it is better.

Radishes and Beets

I sowed some seeds among the transplants last week for beets, radishes, carrots, green onions, and lettuces- all cool weather plants that should thrive as the trees lose their leaves and more sun hits the garden, at least until frost. The radishes and some of the other plants are already up! This fall gardening may work out well. We are due to fall into the low 50s at night, with highs in the 70s during the day this week. The dogwood that shades the garden from the south is losing leaves slowly now, with the rest so wilted that a lot of dappled sun gets through the branches. The oaks to the west are still thick with leaves from all the rain, so we'll see if we get enough sun to keep going. 

Carrots

This is a photo of one of my baby carrots. They are coming up well. Sun today! Life is good!

Calm Times in the Garden

It is hard to be patient sometimes. The lima beans will start coming in soon, but the pods have not completely filled out yet. The cole family and other starts I put out there earlier this week are starting to grow. I caught a cutworm at work out there last night and dispatched it, but the plants are still small and vulnerable. I have three small melons developing, but with no sun and cooler temps, they are not ripening. At least they have plenty of water!

These times come, and we have to wait in patience. The Thai yellow eggplants are finally producing! They're just not yellow- they are white. Maybe that means they are under-ripe, and I should leave them on the plant longer. Patience again. 

Must go look again, and watch the beets grow. Slow work, but fun.

Broccoli and Cauliflower

This is my broccoli and cauliflower bed. Two of the plants have been shorn off an inch above ground, with no slime trail. One had the leaves nearby, and looked like it had been cut. I discovered the second today, leaves gone. Both broccoli plants. I am sad, but I hope the rest survive. When I find suspicious looking grubs as I dig the bed, I try to kill them so they will not eat my plants. Did one of them (that I missed) do this?  I don't know. This is my first attempt at fall gardening beyond nursing the summer plants through cooler weather to frost, so it is all experimental. 

Fortunately the slug count is a LOT lower than in the spring, with a few big ones instead of multitudes of small-to-medium ones. I'm still going out every night to observe and to minimize damage, as a big one could theoretically eat lots of baby plants in a night. Hunting with disposable gloves on actually works, and really cuts down on the "I'm-actually-picking-up-a-huge-slug-ICK!" factor. Highly recommended for the small-scale "organic" gardener.

I Love My Skillet

If you are going to do ANY Southern cooking, you need  a cast iron skillet. The skillet will become one of the things you would want if trapped on a desert island. You can make wonderful cornbread with a most delightfully crispy crust in it. You can fry everything under the sun in it. You can stir fry in it (much more awkwardly than in a wok, but it works). You can braise a cheap cut of meat in it. You can drop it on a cockroach, or use it as a weight to flatten flowers. You can season it for a non-stick finish that will not give anybody cancer or accumulate in the bloodstream of polar bears. You can scrub off said fat-based finish if it grosses you out, or starts getting sticky. If treated properly, the skillet will last your lifetime, even if it is given to you as a child and you live to be 120. Just hand wash it and keep it dry, and oil it once in a while. That is it. How many "consumer products" can we say will last your lifetime these days? Not many. So if you want to cook like Grandma, get a cast iron skillet. You'll never regret the purchase, unless you drop it on your toe. Just say the requisite expletives and cook. it'll be good.

Magnolias are Strange Trees

We have lots of magnolias in Memphis. DO NOT plant them expecting them to be bushes. They grow up into huge trees in our mild climate. They have huge white flowers with a heavy, over-ripe fruit aroma. After the flowers, they produce these odd seed pods. And look!

 Seeds like those little square pieces of candy-coated gum! I did not try one, but it looks like some pre-historic gum dispenser. God had fun making this tree.

Finally In the Ground!

I finally got my fall crops out of the flats and in the ground this evening, mostly. A few more plants remain for tomorrow afternoon, Lord willing. Must slug-hunt. Pictures forthcoming.

Rainbow Harvests

The picture to the left is from September 7, before the rains slowed down tomato production again. It rained again today! Anyway... I did get the last bed dug and fertilized and a few plants out. I'll start the slug hunt again to try to minimize losses.

I like rainbow chard. The stems are like celery in cooking and keep some of their bright color. The green leaves are beautiful, too. God gives us so many things to enjoy!

Finally Digging

Today is a dirty day. I'm finally having a day without POURING rain, suitable for getting the beds ready. It's still a bit too wet (or potentially wet) for planting, but the sand is going in the carrot beds. I was starting the process, turning around to get the pick, when my slimy nemesis waved its eyes in my direction from the garage wall. A slug! AARGH!! I must beer-bait the beds after digging tonight, to see how many are there and if my precious seedlings can survive. All this is an experiment,so we shall see. Back to digging.

Anybody got any gopher wood?

It is still raining! I was hoping to get the babies (broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beets, lettuce, bok choy, green onions) in the ground this week-end! If it rains much more, we'll have to turn the backyard into a rice paddy. A co-worker says I should grow basmati. Hmm... the rice growers in Arkansas must be having fun- or trying to harvest by boat like the Native Americans do with "wild rice". Anyhow, if you are dry and warm out there, thank God for it, as we thank God for the gift (albeit prolonged) of water.

A Child at Play

That's how I feel sometimes in the garden. Sometimes I'm just a sweaty dirty beast, but at other times, picking tomatoes out of the crape myrtles or wondering why the slugs don't eat oregano, I'm a child wondering at God's creation again. 

A lot of people think that Darwin's theories make God irrelevant. That's like saying that your local mechanic's computer makes the car company and its engineers and factories irrelevant. Darwin's theories are not nearly as all-encompassing as some people would lead us to believe. They DO NOT explain altruism, or love, or joy, or why a lot of insects in amber (millions of years old? Tree sap?) look a lot like their many-great-grandkids. Ants are still ants, bees still bees, lizards still lizards. Waist sizes and hair configurations may change, but that certainly does not involve "evolution" in humans; why should it in insects? I'm one of those who believes more in de-evolution. Downhill, not up, from brilliantly complex to simpler, especially on the ecosystem level. The fossil record shows that in parts of the planet not inhabited by humans, God seems to play around with fantastic body forms and shapes and sizes (Burgess shales, Cambrian explosion, Chinese beds, etc.). He mercifully lets the most delicate and beautiful die before we show up to kill them. We see things with a chance to survive around our clumsy, dangerous, and fallen selves. We live in a world impoverished by our sin, yet incredibly rich nonetheless. Let's take care of it so our descendants can ask those many questions about the wonders they see.

We Need an Ark!

It is raining for the third or fourth day in a row, with heavy downpours last night and rain due the rest of the week. I can't plant anything out or dig in the garden- soil is saturated. With clay, this means wet enough to mold into pottery. I have sand in buckets of sand and water, ready to dig in as soon as I get a break. I like rain, but this is getting crazy!

Wild Kingdom Gets Wilder

Sunday night after 10 PM I was looking out one of our rear windows when I saw a new animal at the plant/animal watering bucket: a possum! Evidently they think slugs are a delicacy. Come to the buffet, then! It was rotund and lumbering. When we tried to get a better look with a flashlight, it waddled to the tree, surprisingly hauled itself up, and disappeared into the leaves. It is amazing how many wild animals are surviving in this urban area. Here are some links with pictures and more information:

http://www.opossum.org/facts.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opossum.

Fall Rains Have Come!

My grandparents mostly farmed bottomland of two small rivers ( Little Harpeth and Big Harpeth, named for brothers who killed people and threw the bodies in the river). The land was fertile, as river bottom usually is, but farming there is always risky. The spring floods came every year except during extreme drought. Both rivers would flood over their banks for a week or two, depositing rich silt and organic material, but leaving the ground saturated so that crops went in late, after things dried out enough to plough the fields. 

Tennessee has a long growing season, so that might not be a problem, except for two more seasonal happenings. We usually have a dry July/August with very little rain. Then things shrivel up. With the spring soaking, the bottomlands held more water and could be irrigated from the rivers until they, too, dried up to barely flowing creeks you could cross on foot without getting your rolled-up pants wet. Then some years the fall rains came, bringing welcome moisture, but the risk of flooding. That's what we have this year. It is all within normal variation of rainfall for Tennessee. But late planting and a fall flood could be devastating to harvests. No wonder my grandparents switched to mostly growing hay and grazing beef cattle in the bottoms, except for a few vegetable patches.

How To Give Yourself a Very Busy Week-end

Buy a half-bushel of apples when you have a meeting at work on Saturday. It took me until 11 

PM last night to get the first batch of apple butter done. Another today and the rest of the apples sliced and either canned or frozen (I'm running low on jars), and the box will be empty sometime tonight.

It has been a rainy week-end, so the urgent digging needed outside has not been done. Looks like it will rain next week, too. Wow! this has been a wet year. Time to work.

Apple Butter On the Way

The dark red, rock hard cooking apples were at the Farmer's market today. You know what that means. Apple Butter Time. Must run. First, a short rant.

I stopped to get some apple juice or cider (storebought, they are the same thing these days) yesterday for the week-end's preserving. All the juice on the main shelf (even the dirt cheap stuff on sale, and the name brands) was from CHINA! We grow tons and tons of apples in this country. What on Earth are we doing getting apple juice from China? I finally bought an "organic" brand that appeared to be American. Aargh. Off to drown my frustrations in a half-bushel of apples. Whew!

My memories of 9/11/2001

I was still teaching middle school math and science in 2001. Newly married during the summer, starting a new school year with a great group of kids and an outstanding team of teachers, I felt that we were off to a great start.

Fifteen minutes into the school day, the assistant principal unexpectedly interrupted the morning routine: "Turn on your televisions now." We did, just in time to see the second plane slam into one of the towers.

We were all in disbelief for a while. Then shock set in. The towers fell. People ran. The images started to repeat. A few students asked to go call parents in the airline industry or other relatives in D.C. or New York. A few parents came to pick up children.

I changed my lesson plans from my usual interactive fare to a routine worksheet the students could do without thinking too much- many were too shocked to function well. I let them talk at will, and shut off the television after less than an hour. It was one of the quietest days in my room, even though the kids could talk freely. The students coming later in the day were relieved to find a refuge of quiet; the social studies teacher left her television on all day.

I don't believe adolescents (or adults for that matter) need to be continually bombarded with horror, no matter how "historic" it is. They need to know the facts, and they need to remember them.

Christians do not believe that everyone is fundamentally good, and we all really worship our own "inner light", and as long as you're sincere, you're O.K. If we read the Bible, we know that all men, all human beings, are fundamentally lost. We all tend by choice to do the wrong thing, the cruel thing, the inhumane and unjust thing if we gain power to do it, and we are not fully in Christ. Most of us don't have command of an airplane when we're unjustly fired from a job, or we see others with privileges we do not share, or a gun in our hands when we see our child hurt by another. Thank God for that.

The freedom and balance of powers in America set up by our Christian and Deist founding fathers (even the Deists knew more scripture and had a more Bible-shaped world view than most church attendees have now) must continue. They are not outdated, nor should they "evolve" to reflect a modern amoral worldview. We have to continue holding up a lamp beside the open door for the huddled masses out there. I'm not saying America is a Christian nation. That ended, especially in academia, a long time ago. I am saying that the freedoms we share are based in a Christian system of beliefs and ethics we cannot reject without devastation.  All human efforts to gain Heaven without Christ end in a fireball, no matter how good our intentions. We must remember, and remain free, and fight to help others achieve freedom as well. That is the right remembrance for this day.

WYSIWYG

I'm a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) girl. I don't wear makeup  (chemosensitivity and oily skin turn my face into an itchy, sludgy mess, even with the "hypoallergenic" stuff). I get my husband to hack off my split ends a few times a year hairwise. I'll go gray naturally. I'm currently wearing a 20-year-old skirt, long and elastic-waisted, totally comfortable.

I think more women would be happier if they gave up the pursuit of consumerist cosmetic perfection and just made themselves comfortable. Stop trying to walk with spikes strapped to your heels and get some shoes you can use without shortening your tendons. Let your hair do as it will. Wear clothes that make you happy, not necessarily the clothing retailers. Relax. Your smiling expression will do more for your appearance than all the anti-aging creams and cover-ups on the planet. Smile. And go plant something- watching things grow (and relentlessly hacking out bushes) helps me immensely. If you like fake nails, look at the undersides under a dissecting scope. You eat with those hands. Relax. Your real nails will do fine. Starve the consumer-debt-slave monster and feed your soul. It will work out much better for you.

Amending the Soil

We have a soil composed of a thin layer of topsoil over clay you could use for making pots. It is red. It holds together and can be molded when wet. It is the color of a flower pot. 

I tried growing carrots, radishes, and beets in the spring. The beets and radishes grew on top of the ground, and were small. The carrots came out deformed, even though I grew a stubby variety adapted to clay soil and dug the area extensively. 

I have finally broken down and asked my husband to acquire some sand. He brought home a few buckets-full for me, and has even offered to dig it into a bed. This entire area was once under a shallow sea, and is still well-watered, so everything under the topsoil is layered sand and clay.The layers can be many feet deep, though, so I can't just dig down to sand and mix to solve the problem. Hopefully adding sand now and organic material when I put the bed to rest in late November will help. I'm trying to save as much organic material as possible, to build soil so we can grow more stuff next year. We shall see.

Tomatoes in the Trees

My Sungold plants are close to a crape myrtle tree. They have outgrown their 4-ft cages and decided to use the tree for support. So I have tomatoes in the trees. Last year I had a green bean plant doing the same thing. Maybe this will be a new trend, or a very old one- some of my Indian friends say that they grow Malabar spinach (an edible green on a vine that loves hot weather) up the trees back home.

Hostafarian!

We have way too many hostas. All of them grew from one half-dead bunch I split when we moved into the house. It does not take a lot of talent or horticultural expertise to do this. These plants are survivors. Here's how I split them:

1. Dig up a gigantic mass o'plant. That is my foot (one foot long) for reference down there.

2. Use the Fearsome Hacking Implement to hack a piece of the plant with a sizeable root base off the main group. Usually in a large clump you'll find at least 2 or 3 smaller clumps that can be split fairly easily from each other.

3. Plant 

the newly-severed mini-plants and water generously. They'll need a bit of extra water the next few days, but they'll be fine, though some badly-hacked parts may wilt and die. It will come back next year bushier than ever. You will need to do this again. Praise God for manual labor on Labor Day!

A Labor Day's Labor

I hope to spend a lot of tomorrow outside. The hostas really need splitting. The mums are out of control, growing to the point of smothering some things. Weeds abound. This is the flower bed facing a long-suffering neighbor's house, so I need to get out there, just out of common courtesy. I'll try to take pics tomorrow.

More Canning Tomatoes Today

My plants are back to roughly a pound per day of production. That starts overflowing the windowsill and our eating capacity after a while. So I got another batch of tomatoes from the Farmer's Market and I'll spend the evening crushing tomatoes. We'll be set for chili for the winter, probably. What fun!

Moths To Scare You

If you want to identify that large thing flitting about in the gathering dusk, and it ain't a bat, here's a good place to look:

http://www.silkmoths.bizland.com/TNsphinx.htm. It shows the moths native to TN, what their offspring look like, where they live, what they eat, etc. I could spend days on this site- but then I'd be too scared to plant anything. Neat place to look around.

Okra Flowering

Okra is not the prettiest plant in the world. It grows tall and gangly, with rough pods for fruit. But oh, the flowers! They are good enough to make up for the rest of the plant. I'm growing a red variety of okra, so the plants are a bit decorative with their red stems and pods and green leaves with red veins. The flowers open during the day, so I generally do not get to see them. I'm glad the bees (see one down in there?) do.

Fixing a Cheap Broom

I was sweeping on Saturday when the plastic, dollar-store broom that had seen several years of service broke. The sweeping head broke off the handle in a seemingly irreparable way. I sighed and prepared to go get another one- budget Marts are pretty common in our area, though not the big box ones. My husband stopped me from going, saying he wanted to try some J.B. Weld first. It worked! The broom is fine again. If you're into the economic doom scenarios going around, you might want some JB Weld along with the duct tape and baling wire and stored food in the bunker. It is good for fixing things.

Unknown Citrusy Flowers

My husband bought two root-bound flowering plants on clearance a few months ago. We did not expect much out of them but a temporary bit of color to hang in the pots on the garage. Imagine our surprise to find these beautiful flowers, coming and coming! The plants will soon be too big for the pots, but I can rip out some overgrown mums and place them in a decorative bed. Another interesting thing- I was"dead-head"-ing the plants yesterday when I opened a dead head to show my husband all the seeds inside. It was packed! And after handling them, my hands smelled like oranges! I do not know what these flowers are, but I like them.