We love our technology, but in some ways we are taking the old road.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Harvest

At the beginning of September, I already had to harvest my carrots, because they were HUGE:



I got a shopping bag full. I eventually put a bunch of them in a bin filled with sand in the garage, but now they're sprouting new stems. That can't be good, but I don't know what to do about it.

I got hardly any tomatoes this year. Maybe it was too cold, maybe it was something else. I should say that tomatoes did grow in my garden, but almost all of them had blossom rot and were spoiled. The night I picked the carrots, I found my first sound tomato:



Remember when the potato beetles ate my potato plants? Well, we had tried to save just a few plants, but they did die. But when I went to pull up the dead plants, I found some good-sized Yukon Golds:



That was a fun find.

My yellow onions did alright. I've never had success with onions before, since the rabbits at our old house would eat them (weird rabbits). But these grew nice and big. My husband built me a little screen-topped table quickly out of some scraps so that the onions could dry properly:



My garden really wasn't very successful this year, and I was a poor gardener. I need to get in the habit of getting out there regularly. Once I get in the garden, I see all kinds of things I want to take care of, and I actually enjoy the work, for the most part. But I tend to put off going out to work in it, and things got out of hand on many fronts this year. Next year, there's always next year... Maybe next year the weather will be better for growing things. But this summer sure was beautiful.

2 comments:

  1. I can so relate to this post about gardening. I had good intentions this year but I didn't spend much time out there. I hope next year will be a better year. We got a ton of our Sungold (cherry) tomatoes and only two of the larger Better Boy variety. I picked a handful of Romas recently, too. But we have a ton of green ones on the vines on all four varieties we planted and I don't think there will be much time for them to get red.

    I need to find a sunnier spot for my tomatoes next year. Kind of hard in the woods, though! And, I don't think the cooler weather helped much either. :)

    ~ Jennifer

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  2. Blossom end rot is caused by not enough calcium in the soil. Back in Oregon I had to add lime to the soil. A friend's father buried fish heads and fish bones under the soil were he planted tomatoes. (He also threw in handfuls of hair.) He had huge plants and wonderful tomatoes. I tried that but must not have buried the fish deep enough the first time because the dog dug it up. I had to rebury it! Looks like a great harvest to me! Our tomatoes plants burned in the sun this year.

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