September 2019, Week 4
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
4 years ago
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farmgardener
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Week of September 4th- Garden Photos
Comments (27)Lovely pictures everyone..Sharon your "arizona sun" gaillardia looks taller then mine..I was disappointed on how short mine are...Pudge your grass bed is wonderful. After poking along all summer my polish spirit clematis is finally blooming most of the annuals in my flowerbeds paid no attention to the frost Last year the annual Hollyhocks were outstanding...this year they have just began to bloom and the flowers are really weirdly shaped It hasn't happened before but my rugosa cabbage type rose decided to put on a few blooms on this years new growth..second time around for it and smells just as lovely.. ---savona---...See MoreRecipes for Dried Beans - Week 4 September 2013
Comments (13)BLACK BEANS Serves: 8 1 lb dry black beans 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil 1 large Spanish onion, diced 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped 1 green bell pepper, seeded and cut in quarters or diced 1 tsp dried oregano 2 bay leaves salt to taste Wash beans well and remove any bad beans and debris. Place beans in glass bowl and cover with water and soak overnight. Wash and seed bell pepper and cut in quarters. (You can chop it if you prefer, if you donâÂÂt like to eat it, but do like the flavor it lends, pull the quarters out before eating.). Dice onion and garlic (I use a garlic press). Place the beans with the water in which they soaked in 6 Qt pressure cooker. Add extra water if needed to have 1" over beans. Add the rest of the ingredients. Cook on high pressure for 20 minutes. Cool cooker quickly and check consistency of beans. If not tender enough close cooker and do another 10 minutes and check again. If there is too much liquid, leave cover off and boil to reduce some of the liquid. There should be some liquid, but it should not be thin and soupy. Some family members like to add a tablespoon of sherry vinegar before serving. Beans can be successfully frozen for a long time. Some cooks prefer to make a sofrito in the pressure cooker first, with the olive oil, onion, garlic. pepper and oregano before adding the beans and the bay leaf. It turns out well done either way ��" do whatever you prefer. If you like, remove about half of soup from pot and puree with a blender, and then return to pressure cooker. Adjust seasoning as needed. Add water if needed for desired consistency. Black bean soup may be served over rice and garnished with your choice of lime juice, sour cream, avocado, chopped onions, grated cheese, parsley or cilantro, tortilla chips or cornbread. For Crockpot: Soak beans overnight in crockpot, add veggies to the crock or sauté the veggies, then add to the crock. Add oregano, bay leaves, and salt and pepper. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for 3 hours on high or 6 hours on low or until beans are tender but not mushy. For Stovetop: Soak beans overnight in saucepan. Add veggies to the saucepan or sauté the veggies first, then add to the pan. Add oregano, bay leaves, and salt and pepper. Simmer 2 to 2 1/2 hours until beans are tender but not mushy. Stir several times each hour....See MoreSeptember Week 4: The Month Draws To A Close
Comments (54)I am so far behind on this week's news that I feel like I cannot catch up. First, the mudroom report. Knocking out the north wall so we could expand into former sunroom space was very hard. Amy, if you'd been sitting and watching, I believe you would have heard a curse word here and there. Apparently when Tim and Chris sectioned off the mudroom from the sunroom about 4 years ago, they built that wall to last forever. It had a gazillion nails and screws to hold it all in place forever, and there was a thick wall there. From the mudroom side, we had to remove the following materials in the order listed: beadboard wainscotting, drywall, 1/2 inch plywood, insulation and then, on the sunroom side, more drywall....and all the framing to which all of that was attached. Tim started demo while I was cooking a big breakfast of bacon, eggs and grain-free pancakes (made with almond meal and I think I like them better than regular pancakes, too). After we ate breakfast, he continued demo while I cleaned up the kitchen, did laundry, etc. I think the demo alone took until a little after 12 noon. Oh, and he removed the flooring from the part of the sunroom that is becoming part of the enlarged mudroom. Then, in the afternoon, we built the new west wall of the mudroom, getting the framing up, the internal window put in (it will allow the sunlight from the sunroom to enter the mudroom and help keep it light in there), the drywall put up on the sunroom side of the wall, and a new light fixture installed. I love the new light----it is a gooseneck style barn light. Then the fire pagers went off (for three grass fires) and that was it for Saturday's mudroom work. On Sunday, we put up the insulation and the drywall on the mudroom side of the wall and framed in the closet and cubbie storage area at the north end of the new mudroom area. We tried to intermittently watch part of the Dallas Cowboys game---we had the TV on in the living room so we could walk into the house and check on the game periodically. After the Cowboys seemingly gave up in the second half, we quit trying to watch the game and just tried to work on the room. We stopped for dinner around 5 pm after cleaning up all our construction mess, and put the mudroom furniture back into the mudroom so the room is functional, though nowhere close to being done and it is a good thing we did because about as soon as we had finished eating, our fire pagers went off for back-to-back wrecks on the interstate. I was hoping the mudroom would be a 2 or 3 weekend project, but based on how busy the fire pagers are all of a sudden, I fear it may be a 4 or 5 weekend project. That's okay. We'll get it done in October and will have a much more useful space. Part of the storage area is a garden closet where I can store my seed box, which doesn't really have its own spot inside the house so it tends to float from room to room, and my garden tool bucket, which I tend to leave in the mudroom year round. At least now I'll be able to hide it away behind a closet door. Nancy, We have gazillions of deer here along the river. They come to the compost pile daily to eat whatever I've tossed on it that they find edible. I probably see 8 or 10 visit at a time, multiple times daily (not necessarily the same ones in the afternoon or evening as we had in the morning). They often cruise along the fencelines of the two enclosed gardens and eat bean vines and such growing on the outside of the fence. However, they don't like to go inside an enclosed area if they cannot see what is inside of it, so they tend to not step foot in the garden at this time of year, even if I leave the gate open, because they cannot see beyond the plants growing on the garden fences. They'll go into the garden as soon as frost (or lack of rain) kills the plants growing on the garden fences. I put out deer corn and other goodies for them in winter, and every day/night of the year, they scarf up any hen scratch or sunflower seeds that the wild birds and chickens don't devour during the course of the day. During canning season (they know exactly when canning season is) they often stand out by the compost pile waiting for me to bring my compost bucket out to empty out all the waste product so they can gobble i t up, I have to yell at them to go away just so I can walk out to the compost pile safely, It is a wonder I get any compost at all because the deer and other wild critters love to feast on stuff that I think I am going to compost. One reason we moved here was that we wanted to live surrounded by wildlife, and we have almost everything imaginable here---whitetail deer, cottontail rabbits, skunks (striped and spotted), possums, raccoons, armadillos, snakes, turtles, frogs, skinks, lizards, coyotes, beaver, bobcats, ringtail cats, ferrets, feral hogs, squirrels, moles, voles, field mice, pack rats, all kinds of birds--including eagles (which is the coolest thing!), and an occasional cougar (they stalk the garden a lot when they are around), and more. I think we got more wildlife than we bargained for, but you learn to coexist with them and to avoid the dangerous ones. Occasionally there is an alligator spotted in the area, usually in a farm pond when the Red River is low during drought, but we've never had one on our property, as far as we know, The nearest one we know of was in a farm pond about a half-mile from us. We don't have ground hogs this far south or bears either, though they've been seen this year as close to us as Pontotoc County. which is closer than usual. Kim, I am sorry for all your troubles and especially for your poor head. I hope you don't have a concussion. Take care of yourself. Your tomatoes would be growing fine here as we have abundant sunshine and mostly a lack of moisture. Yesterday was hot, today is supposed to be even hotter, and then I think we cool down again, though the heavy rainfall in the forecast this week is expected to miss us for the most part. I think we might get a half-inch or inch. We'll see. I'd say the autumn fire season started up here this past weekend, despite most areas getting close to an inch of rain last week. Sadly, an inch of rain is not much when you have waist-high dried, cured grasses filling pastures---the August rainfall caused rampant growth of grasses and brush, but the almost total lack of rain in the month of September allowed everything to dry out and become fuel for fires. Tomatoes, peppers and beans are exceptionally happy thought. My squash plants died suddenly over the weekend---not sure if it is SVBs (I'll look for signs of them next time I step foot into the garden) or if disease hit them along with last week's rain. Amy, I hope you can just take it easy this week and recover from the draining effects of your mom's surgery last week. Dealing with aging and ill parents can be so exhausting, and I think the strain is every bit as much mental/psychological as it is physical too. You just need some down time to chill and relax and not feel so stressed and worried. Nancy, When sweet potatoes fail to form tubers, there can be several different reasons. One is that the soil is too rich and they plow all their growth into foliage. Similarly, too much fertilizer can cause the same issue even in poor soil. Another is too much shade. It also can be a variety thing---there's a few varieties that need really, really long growing seasons, but in my garden, even those will produce tubers by October if I planted them in May. Sometimes if you let the long runners root into the ground, that can prevent you from getting large tubers---I believe it diverts the energy from forming tubers and keeps the plants overly vegetative. One way to prevent that is to use a stick or garden tool to move around the rambling foliage every few days so it does not root into the ground all over the place. Rebecca, Where Tim is from in Pennsylvania, those brown marmorated stink bugs have been invading homes in the autumn for years now, and they show up by the hundreds and by the thousands. (I hopt that is not what you are starting to see up there now.) They do sell traps with scent baits to draw them in so that people can (hopefully) trap them outdoors before they find a way indoors. Kim, Roselles usually bloom most heavily in October here (sometimes they start blooming in late September) but it can depend on exactly which type you have. Some bloom later than others, and all the ones I've grown have been daylength sensitive. I seem to have more blooms from the ones I grow at the shady west end of the garden as the afternoon shade may trick them into thinking daylength is shortening a bit more than it actually is. Some years, when I have had tons and tons of calyxes on the plants in October or early November as the first frost approaches, I have had to cut off the limbs (the plants are too huge and too deeply rooted to pull up) and take them into the garage or the house to keep them from freezing. Then, as the calyxes dry out a bit indoors and the blossoms fall, I can harvest and use the calyxes. If frost threatens before you can harvest enough roselles, since you don't have a lot of indoor storage space, you might be able to cover the plants with frost blankets or even regular blankets to keep them alive long enough for you to harvest an ample supply of calyxes. Not only are the great for tea but they also make a wonderful jelly---I like it better than any other fruity jelly I've ever made. The rat snake in the camper is horrifying. It is that time of the year when they are looking for places to den up for winter, and also looking for food to gobble up before they hibernate. I am so very careful in October to not leave a garage or shed door open because I don't want unwelcome residents. I do leave the greenhouse doors open so that cool nights will push snakes out of the greenhouse just in case they are thinking of overwintering there...poor Ryder! His daddy played such a mean trick on him. Nancy, To fill up raised beds, use anything and everything you can get your hands on---logs (preferably partially rotted ones, a la hugelkulture style), chopped/shredded autumn leaves, twigs, grass clippings, animal manure (local farms or rabbit raisers often offer it on Craig's List or Freecycle), hay, straw, wood bark, mushroom compost from eastern OK, etc. If you fill up the beds with all that stuff from now throughout winter, then by Spring you'll have a surprising amount of decomposition and it will be ready for planting. I have built our garden bed soil the same way the woodland builds its own soil----by piling up organic matter of all kinds and just letting it decay in place. I raked up and used lots of leaf mold from our woodland in the early years here because it is so good for the soil, but I can only collect stuff in the woods after we've had several very hard freezes. Otherwise, I have snake encounters even in winter (I learned that years ago with a pygmy rattler encounter during what should have been the snake-free season). You can add layers of cardboard to attract earthworms. Earthworms love cardboard. They'll come to eat it and stick around to devour everything else. I have to go now---Jet is demanding his morning walk whether I'm ready to go now or not. Dawn...See MoreOctober 2019, Week 4
Comments (40)Being stuck inside with a big puppy who cannot run around outside is driving me almost as crazy as it is driving him. He is smart, he is learning all the standard commands like No, Come, Sit, Stay, etc. but he seems determined to engage the cat, Lucky, in a battle of the wills every single day. The lesson he has not yet learned is that her claws are going to win every single time. I am on the verge of losing my sanity here. I need a vacation from the big puppy. He is a bundle of love, but a very energetic bundle. Jennifer, It always is challenging the first time a person processes something new from the garden---new to them---and sometimes the sheer quantity of whatever needs to be processed is quite daunting. I'm glad you're making progress on the Seminoles. You do need a root cellar! I've always wanted one but never have been able to convince Tim that building one would be worthwhile. If our clay wasn't so impossible to dig, maybe we would have one by now. We started digging out a spot for one once and simply gave up---digging that dense red clay is like trying to dig concrete. After decades of trying to raise as much of our food as possible and spending far too much time canning, freezing and dehydrating it, I'm sort of over it and really, really wanting to cut back more and more. I no longer can 600-800 jars a year and I don't miss all those long hours in the kitchen. I don't think my body can physically tolerate being on my feet all day every day in the summer any more either. I'll always can some stuff, but more and more I focus on food that can be root-cellared (or maybe I should just say kept in dry storage since I don't have a root cellar) or frozen. Nothing makes a person appreciate things like onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes and winter squash like the fact that you can harvest them, cure them, and put them in dry storage as needed until you use them. This summer I processed and froze all the excess tomatoes in 8-cup batches for salsa back when we were harvesting tomatoes, telling myself that when the weather cooled down, I'd spend October-November turning them into salsa. So far, I haven't done that. If everyone is going to get salsa for Christmas as planned, I need to get busy canning salsa. After all, October is almost over. I think I'll do a few batches of salsa next week, and I haven't yet decided whether to make apple pie jam, candied jalapenos or Habanero Gold to go in the gift bags as well. I need to decide on that and get it done because it seems like once Halloween arrives, Christmas is here in the blink of an eye. I dread doing all this canning for the holiday gifts. I know I'll enjoy it once I start doing it, but I'm so burned out from doing so much for so many years that I don't absolutely love doing it the way that I once did. I wish I did absolutely adore doing it as I did 10, 15 or 20 (or longer) years ago, but I just don't. There's probably a lesson in here somewhere about pacing one's self better over the years so you don't burn out, but I didn't learn that lesson in time. I wish I had a nickel for every night I stayed up canning and cleaning up until midnight, and then got up at 6 am to go out to the garden, harvest tomatoes, and do it all over again....until midnight again.....and again, and again. I used to feel shocked when my older friends here gave up canning in their 60s or 70s after a lifetime of doing it, but now what I'm thinking is that I'm surprised they didn't retire from canning sooner than they did. I may can a lot more after Tim retires---he'd be here to help lift that heavy canner filled with water and filled jars, for example. On the other hand, I may decide that I completely retire from food processing when he retires from his job, though I really don't think I will. I am not sure he wants to help with the canning, because every time he walks into the kitchen now and I'm canning away like a mad woman, he sort of gets that deer-in-headlights look in his eyes and cannot get out of the kitchen, and the house, quickly enough, like he's afraid I might put him to work in the kitchen. lol I'd like to point out that I never once have asked him to help me can, dehydrate or freeze anything, so I don't know why he gets so twitchy when he thinks it might happen. Nancy, I hope the new faucet works out. I hate plumbing work. Tim can do it, and he does do it, but it always requires at least 3 trips to the store to get all the right parts, as if it is impossible to buy all the right parts the first time. I realize that when you start taking apart old plumbing, sometimes you find a part in there that you didn't expect and have to go get one, but it drives me nuts...partly because it is such a long drive to get to a store that has what we need. I hate having to go out in the rain anywhere for any thing at all. Nobody here can drive in the rain and we have a lot of motor vehicle accidents everywhere when it rains, particularly on I-35. We joke that people here cannot drive in the rain because rain is so rare they lack experience in driving in it. Yesterday, within 5 minutes of the rain starting to fall, we were paged out to an auto accident in town. It boggles my mind how common this is. Jen, I love dogs but couldn't have that many of them underfoot all the time. It would drive me crazy. There is a really nice pet boarding facility north of Marietta and some friends of mine who love animals worked there for quite for a while (several years, I think), and it was a tremendous amount of work. We needed the rain and I'm grateful we received it, and now I'm ready for it to end and be over already. We've got about 2.5" in the rain gauge, with light rain expected to continue falling today and tonight. I'd be happy if no more rain fell, but it still would be very wet, chilly and miserable out there even without any more rain. At least we aren't getting snow like those folks in western OK and northwestern OK. I am not getting one single thing done with this dog in the house. He just has too much energy, and I am too kind-hearted to send him out to play in the rain. I'm going plant shopping tomorrow, come hell or high water, because being stuck indoors is driving me almost as crazy as it is driving the dog. Next week's cold looks discouraging. It looks like summer held on forever, and winter is coming early. I miss the long, pleasant autumns we used to have. Dawn...See Morehazelinok
4 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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4 years agolast modified: 4 years agoRebecca (7a)
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