Not So Wordless Wednesday

63°f/17°C, supposed to be 90 today. Ugh.

Where I've been since Sunday morning:

Root cellar tidy-up, putting all the empty jars on shelves and organizing like with like-- pickles, fruits, etc. The green is the leeks I dug the other day. I'll be making them into soup for canning tomorrow.

Garden: hoeing, planting, tilling, digging, weeding.

Red Sails lettuce, ready to pick. 

Broccoli is heading up, should be ready to cut soon.

Yellow squash just sprouting.

Making changes in this area because it just too wet. So I am making raised rows.

The cool bird feeder with wifi camera my son Derek gave me for Mothers Day. We finally got it mounted, but the birds haven't found it yet.

We restocked booths on Tuesday, because the wicker dresser I put in the window a week or so ago already sold. Unfortunately the sun glare messed up my photo, but I put a table we made from a treadle sewing machine base, a cool old typewriter, and an antique chair in the window this time. I don't like putting dark furniture in the window because it just doesn't show well, but had nothing else ready to go.

Got my stringtrimming done. Buddy approves! 

Also dead-headed the roses and did some other garden cleanup while Daisy just rolled in the grass.

Bye-bye, crabapple tree! After 50 years, she finally gave up the ghost. Larry is cutting it into firewood for the firepit. I am so sad to see this tree go, as it was one of the first I planted here. It was just an ornamental, but so pretty.

And hello hollyhocks! After years of trying to grow them, I have two sturdy patches this year, from plants I grew from seed last year. In the past I planted them in my big flowerbed but the deer killed them. This one is right by the house, so I think it is fairly safe, now that we have two active dogs. The other one is in the herb garden.

A few of the roses now in bloom:

And the last of the peonies.  The heavy rains shortened the peony season this year.

Working on this end of one flowerbed. I am not happy with it, but the wire we put under the mulch limits planting pretty severely, so I am messing about with planters. I lost several perennials in this area due to water, and have to figure out how to correct that. If I even can.

And finally,  we had some really pleasant, cool evenings by the firepit. Friends Jeff and Tamara came over Sunday evening with their son and another boy. We roasted hotdogs and marshmallows and the boys stayed busy finding sticks to burn and burning up more marshmallows than they ate! Good times.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. Nao Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Thaw

10°f, -12°C, warming to 41°f. Clearing skies.

Morning sparkles

Finally, a mostly sunny day that actually warmed up to let some thawing begin! Snow left the roof of the log room with a great whoosh, and took all the lovely icicles with it. Ah well. 

The icicles I have watching grow the past couple days, all gone with the whoosh. I took this photo this morning; you can just barely make them out.

I shoveled part of the deck and salted the porch steps, and Larry salted the walks and tried to shovel, but alas this ice us still quite thick under the snow. He did get the tractor out again and worked on the driveway, so perhaps one day we can drive the van back down again.

Across the hill, we could heat the laughter and shouts of our neighbor's grandchildren as he hitched a large piece of metal roofing to his four-wheeler and was pulling them around in the snow. Other children down the road were sledding, I see, according to their Facebook pictures. It was a good day to be outdoors.

The cellarhouse. The top is storage, the bottom is where I store apples and all the food we can.

I was in and out all afternoon, after the air warmed up, but spent the morning canning pasta sauce. We still have several gallon cans of sauce given to us last summer; it is pretty bland so I added seasonings and canned it in quart jars, which will be much more suitable for us.

This evening we watched Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, an older movie that we watched several years ago. I could not remember the story line, but I knew I liked it. Such a touching movie! 

I did step outside during the movie to see the beautiful full moon though. What a sight! 

I guess that's all the non-news for today. I hope you all had a great weekend!

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Wordless Wednesday: The Cellar, So Far

62, cool and sunny. Warmer and humid later, a small downpour, but sun returned.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Covid Journal, Day 108: How One Thing Leads to Another, and Cellar Work

65 this morning, blessedly cooler. The morning was glorious, cool and clear, with a good heavy dew. We've started watering the gardens as it looks like there is no rain in the forecast for the next week. Don't want to lose the growing momentum now that plants are really beginning to take off. Small tomatoes on the plants, and we should be eating zucchini in a day or two.

I had three plants that I needed to put in this morning. I've been putting it off for no real reason, just procrastinating. This morning I got to it. And that led to a chain reaction.

First, I dug a hole for the first plant, a vinca, and planted it with no trouble. Next I dug the hole for the second vinca but this one meant that I had to dig out some spreading oregano. I set aside the oregano and got the vinca settled in. Then took the oregano--two chunks, actually--and planted those in a couple different places. I went ahead and cut back the rest of the oregano and took it inside to be dried and stored.

The flowerbed I was working on this morning. This is not my favorite garden. For some reason I never seem to have the bloom in there like I want. I keep trying! I added some white phlox this year; there is a pink peony in here that I planted last year, but it didn't bloom. Also some iris I planted last year that had one bloom this spring, and a rose bush from last year that hasn't bloomed. I moved some coral bells and a columbine in here last month, no blooms yet. Then there's thyme, oregano and in spring lots of daffodils and a few crocus. Oh, and bee balm, which I love, that self-seeds every year.

 The third plant was a nice sized rosemary. I wanted it to go into a large flowerpot, but I was out of pots. Then I noticed that I had a large geranium in a nice big clay pot. I could move the geranium to the garden and use that pot for the rosemary, so that's what I did. Then I hoed a few weeds out of the flowerbed, and hauled a few watering cans full of water to water everything I'd just moved. 

I finished--I thought--by picking up and cleaning up odds and ends in the yard, then saw a small metal dressing-table chair I'd been meaning to spray paint and put in a garden. There was another chair I wanted to paint too. I fetched the paints and got them done pretty quickly. As I put away tools I saw that bindweed and gill-over-the-ground was taking over the daylilies in one spot, so I pulled those vines.  Then did a tidy-up of the porch of the root cellar, where I have a potting bench, and lots of garden tools and organic fertilizers. 

The cellar porch. Tools hang on the left in the photo, and there's an old corn sheller that could still work with a little repair done. On the right is my potting bench, with fertilizers, flower pots, etc etc. 

About this time Larry showed up with a bench I'd said I wanted in the cellar, to have a place to put things down when we took them in the cellar to store. Often we carry in large numbers of jars at once and have no place to put them down before we stash them on the shelves. Larry had put new, small gravel on the cellar floor, over top of the big gravel we'd had in there, and it makes it so much nicer to walk in the cellar. He also finished those shelves he'd been building the other day, so it's looking really nice in there.

The bench looked too small and it was too low. So we hauled it out and put a porcelain-topped table in there. Perfect. Well, a little too big, but it will work fine.

This table will really be handy, if we don't just park stuff there and not put it away. You know, a flat, blank surface seems to attract stuff. On the left are jars of old food that need to be dumped. These and the ones to the left in the back are the new shelves. They're very deep, honestly deeper than I wanted but that's okay. The plastic jugs are for when we make cider, and after I process the cider into jars, the jugs will be filled with emergency water for when the power goes off in the winter.

All of that, just because I went out to plant a few plants. I'm glad to have all those miscellaneous things done, though, and it does look nice.

I spent several hours in here the other day, sorting out jars of old food and cleaning the shelves. We have lots of space now, with plenty of room to store the empty jars. Top shelf is vegetable soup, next is jams, jellies and mincemeat, then applesauce, a little pepper mustard, and black beans, next is salsa and pasta sauce, bottom shelf is whole tomatoes. The further back shelves hold peaches, apple cider, LOTS of pickles, pickled beets, more tomatoes and green beans on the bottom shelf.  Apple butter is on a shelf on the back wall. I was surprised to find only about 5 pints of apple butter, but we didn't keep any of last year's batch, letting our sons take it all home with them. 

Meals: breakfast--eggs over easy, homemade sausage patty, sliced tomatoes, homemade bread and jam. Snack--banana. No lunch. Dinner: leftover mac & cheese (three-cheese), broccoli, sliced tomatoes, and peaches from the cellar.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Garden Update

What's going on in my gardens? Here's an update: 
I have no pics because I'm away from home right now. But I can tell you we've had better years. The gardens look good, especially considering we're at mid-July when the weeds are usually taking over. But production? Not so much.

I've canned about 20 quarts of beans and frozen five of the Roma Flat Beans because I like them better frozen. The bean plants look great but they're not setting on the beans like they usually do. It's a mystery. The potato vines were killed by the Colorado potato beetle and those bugs were even down in the soil, eating the potatoes! We tried hand-picking them, using wood ash on them, dusting with hydrated lime--nothing slowed them down. They moved from the potatoes all the way across the yard to the tomato patch and were even on my flowers. We finally gave in and bought some spray that killed them off before they killed the tomato plants too. Greedy little things.

The tomatoes are just starting to ripen. They have a lot of green ones on the vines, but they are not making much size because it is so dry and hot. Still, we're getting some tomatoes now and that's always exciting--first tomatoes, is there anything like them? The squash is producing like crazy. I've been cooking a lot of it, and this week I tried drying some. I don't like it frozen and canned is aawful. Years ago I dried it and it was great for soups, etc. Then recently I saw recipes for making dried squash "chips" that can be eaten for a snack. The recipes I saw called for coating the chips with olive oil, and one called for using some grated cheesse sprinkled on them too. I decided to just blanch them then sprinkle them lightly with salt and dry in the dehydrator. The result? They're more chewy than crispy, but they're very flavorful and I plan to make more because I like them very well as a snack. I may try the oil version, though, and see if those get crisp. This winter I'll be using them in soups as well.

The onions are pulled now and we replanted with carrots. We pulled the carrots recently and cut them up for the freezer. They did well, not as well as past years but given the weather I'm satisfied with the yield. The corn is just starting to come in and I am worried that the kernels will not fill out with ths heat and lack of rain. The melons look great so far, and the punpkin vines look vigorous. I have broccoli and Stonehead cabbage seeds started and hope to set gthem out for a fall crop in mid-August. I've also got lettuce seed waiting to go in as soon as the heat lets up, and spinach too. Turnip seeds are waiting for the potatoes to be dug, which should happen in the next couple weeks.

The herb garden is thriving, one bright spot in this mixed-bag of a garden season. Some of trhe basil is ready to harvest, as is the thyme, winter savory, rosemary and a few other things. The parsley I seeded last month is growing very well and I think I saw a few lavender seedlings too.

The peaches are ripening, but they are really small compared to past years. The blackberries pretty well burned up on their vines this year; we did get a nice bit of blueberries earlier on, and thank goodness I was able to make jeams in June because there won't be much to make it from the rest of the summer, from the look of things.

We cleaned out the root cellar this week (way late, I know) so that I could get a better idea of what we have and what we need. There is plenty of jams and jellies, so that's not a worry. Green beans are plentiful as well, as is the apple butter (we'll probably make more anyway), canned pears,beets and some kinds of pickles. I need more tomatoes, salsa (always!), dill pickles, and applesauce. In the freezer we need more corn, onions, celery (it's doing so-so in the garden), and blackberries if we can find any.

That about sums it up, I think. It's been a disappointing year, with too much rain in March, April and May, and too much heat and not enough rain in June and July. We'll still have plenty, and for that I'm thankful. But it's been a hard slog.