Ilene,

Like you, I try to salvage the usable parts of veggies that the critters have gotten!

My beans are like yours....finally giving us a good harvest. I think the rain and cool weekend helped as they seem to have perked up.

Determinate tomatoes make a lot of ripe tomatoes all at once, but most of them WILL make more after that initial flush. Usually, after I pick a ton of tomatoes that are mostly all ripe at once, the determinates put out a whole new round of blooms and make a new bunch of tomatoes. I don't know if anyone else has had that same experience or not. I usually leave mine in the ground until I've had a least 3 big flushes of ripe tomatoes from them. Every determinate tomato variety I have ever grown seems to do its own thing....as if there are no "rules", so I just go with the flow and let them keep going if that's what they are doing, or yank them out if they just sit there and do nothing after the first initial flush of tomatoes ripens.

And, I agree that gardening can be discouraging, and this has been a pretty rough year. Sometimes I just stand and look at the plants and think to myself "Y'all need to get with it and do something!" They ARE growing just fine, but some of them haven't been producing much.....and then the deer got a lot of it too. Finally, though, my main season harvest seems to have kicked in and I am starting to get tons of tomatoes and quit a bit of everything else.

Today, I noticed that the Ramapo F-1 and Supersonic tomatoes, which were some of the last ones to go into the ground....and then they sulked and didn't grow an inch for several weeks...all have teeny-tiny baby tomatoes, which probably set last week or even last weekend. All I can say is that it is about time! The deer-devoured peppers have rebounded and regrown and are blooming, and so are the cukes and okra. Mr. Deer, by the way, still comes and noses around the garden daily, but so far he can't get inside that fence.

Dawn

Ilene,
Thanks for the recipe. I too have a plum tree with the same problems. I have been bringing mine in and cutting out the bad spots and eating them. Mine are not freestone either and I wished it was. They are timely to cut up. I only have a few at a time. My green beans are doing the same thing. I have kentucky wonders and usually grow them on hog panels. Today I need to go through and search for green beans cause last week they had a few little ones but they are so thick!!(Can you see the cloud of skeeters coming out?) Hubbie and I were sitting in our favorite spot in the garden and noticed a few corn stalks that somehow grew here and there. (I just let them grow) They looked pretty neat and I think next year I might try putting them in as accent pieces. Right now my volunteer watermelon/cantalope patch also has volunteer zinnas, lamb's ears, texas bluebonnets, basil and a few other flowers covering it. All the neighbors are coming by just to see it and can't believe it came up all on it's own. I also have townpeople bring their visitors and relatives by my garden because they think it is so neat. I guess I am a tourist spot on their map! LOL.

That's just too cool, kiddo! I think that's a good idea about planting corn here and there as accent pieces. I might do that too, next year, maybe with some beans!

I picked a yard long bean yesterday and it really WAS a yard long! So far it's the longest one I've picked, most have been only a little over a foot long, but still lots of bean for the space. It was hilarious, I was so excited about the bean that I took it to show my husband. He's just had knee surgery and the home health nurse was with him, changing his bandage. When I came in dangling the bean, the nurse jumped. She thought it was a snake! LOL we all had a good laugh, she was really glad to know it was only a bean.

The people who walk the park along my back fence just love to stop and chat and ask questions about the garden. I have met so many people that way. Even the guys who run the mowers for the City will stop and take their breaks at our fence.

I just love volunteers! It's like a little present from Mother Nature. LOL I always let them grow if I can. Last year, I had several cantaloupe from volunteer plants. I had never grown them before, the seeds were from a supermarket cantaloupe that I had put in the compost bin. This year, I had a couple of plants come up in the compost bin, they look like a cucumber or squash plant. I haven't bought a cantaloupe in awhile so not sure what they are. I transplanted them someplace where they will grow better and we'll see, eventually, what they are. I can't remember putting cukes or squash out there either, so it might even be something the birds planted. In that case, it could be most anything.

If there was no such thing as stock panels, I wouldn't know what to do! DH made a grape arbor and a trellis out of pipe, and we put pieces of stock panels up the sides and on the tops of them to support the things that grow there. Besides my two stock panel arches, I also have put a hog panel along the side of one raised bed because the asparagus keeps flopping out into the walkway if I don't. Normally I would use tomato cages, but I used all I had on other things and can't seem to buy any more, everyone's sold out and not ordering any more for the season.

Beans are hard to see, to get every one of them. Pretty often, there will be ones I miss and they will have gotten too big to eat. I just let them go ahead and "ripen" on the vine and I use those beans for seed.

If you "stew" your plums, you can use lots of the under-ripe ones, especially if you're going to make jam out of them. If you're sure the plum has no worms in it, you can put it into the pot, pit and all, and take the pit out after it has stewed (use only enough water with the plums to keep from sticking, and stew on low heat). The presence of the under-ripe ones makes it jell better. Use 6 C. stewed plums, 5 C sugar, a pat of butter, cook to the jell point and you will have nice jam. --Ilene