Harvest Photos from 8-23, 9-13, and 9-24

Potatoes harvested on 8-23-14

We harvested the last of our potatoes today.  Red, white, and blue.  Plus 3 more yellow that escaped the last harvest.  Hubby sprayed the soil off with the sprayer hooked to the hose and you can see the spots of skin missing on the Russet potatoes.  The skins are so soft on newly dug potatoes that you can rub the skins off with your hands.


Pictures of things from my harvest on 9-13-14

Orange bell peppers

and orange tomatoes.  These were used in my orange spaghetti sauce.  You can see pictures and get the recipe HERE.

We Be Little pumpkins.  The smallest one is in my hand.  The vine was dead, but the littlest one wasn't ready to harvest.  It is getting soft now (10-6-14).

Pulled a lot of the wandering onions. I left them outside on the patio overnight to dry.  They are one of the few things I can dig and leave outside and still find the next day after the squirrels have visited. They are now trimmed and in the refrigerator.


9-24-14 harvest

Three boxes of apples.  The birds were eating them and the tree didn't get sprayed with dormant oil last winter, so there are a lot of worm holes.

The fourth box of apples.  Pears and tomatoes.  The bright red in the left front section of the left blue tote are hot cherry peppers.

 The largest pears.  The one on the left is an Asian pear and the one on the right is a Bartlett.

The smallest pears.  I think these are both Asian.  The one on the right definitely is.

This is how I have been storing the orange tomatoes.  The are soft and I can't stack them in the drawer.  Two layers seem to be OK, but not three or more.

Growing Celery from a Store Bought Bunch

There has been so much on Pinterest with growing your own produce from store bought produce that I have been starting some on my own to show what happens for me.

Here is the end of some celery I bought at the store and put into water on 9-6.  This picture was taken on 9-13.

On 9-16 I planted it in soil to see what would happen.  There are no roots. The lettuce core I put into water turned soggy while I was out of town (see August 5, 2014 post) for two weeks.  I didn't want the same to happen to the celery.  We will see if it roots.
NOTE: As of 10-6-14 there are no roots.  The original celery piece is drying up. It lifted out of the pot since it was smaller than it was originally.  There was an air pocket between the celery and soil.  I pushed it a little deeper into the soil and moved the soil next to the celery too.

Moonflower

I cut the huge Moonflower plant down to just a couple of branches this Summer.  I is back to being huge again.  Here are some pictures.

I took this picture with with the flash and the front porch light on. That is the tomato plant on the left that is talked about in the previous post.

This is with the front porch light on, but the flash is off.  This is more like what you see when you walk outside at night with just the porch light on.

One last picture with the porch light off and the flash on.  The middle picture is my favorite.

Tomato Horned Worms

Do you know what this moth is?

This moth that was at my front door on 8-8-14.  It is what a tomato horned worm turns into.  This moth stayed here for about a day or a day and a half.

Here is the picture that Hubby took.

Here is an even closer view that he took.

This morning I went outside and this is want I saw on the ground.

Here is a close-up.  I sent these pictures to my husband and asked him if he thought it was from the squirrels.  It is much smaller than what I see in the backyard, but I didn't know what else had left it.

We started talking about the droppings in the front yard again.  Hubby forgot to look when he got home from work.  He went outside to look and found more that was green.  He started looking closely at the plant:

This is what he found.  These are the first tomato horned worms I have seen at my house.  After realizing what the dropping on the ground were I think I saw the same droppings 4 or 5 years ago.

Oh look another one.

Now there are three.

A close look at the plant shows the leaves are gone.

Several branches have all the leaves stripped off.

He put them in the center of the cul-de-sac to see what they would do.

I am at one side of the cul-de-sac and I zoomed in a little.  I can see them wandering around, but the camera didn't show them without zooming in some.  We watched them for about 10 minutes and they seemed to be pacing around in circles and back and forth.  The grandkids got here about 40 minutes later and we went outside right away so the kids could see them.  We couldn't find them anywhere.

Here is the only tomato they were feasting on.  While looking for another tomato that may have been eaten I found:

This little guy.  It looks like a baby Grasshopper.  I was hoping it was a Praying Mantis, but I couldn't tell until I got a look at the picture.  It kept running down the plant and we tried to get a picture.

Here is an overhead view of the tomato plants.

See the lost Hydrangea in the center?  This is what can happen when you plant in compost that has uncooked tomato seeds in it.  Tomato seeds are hard to kill in compost.  It doesn't get hot enough usually.  The seeds will germinate when they get a good amount of water.  I left them growing just to see what they would look like.  I don't know if they came from store bought tomatoes or home grown tomatoes last year.

Lettuce Core Update and garden Update 8-5-14

Well here is the lettuce core.  I have been gone for two weeks and this is what it looks like now.

Pretty disgusting isn't it.  I will try another one in soil and see what happens to it.

The Yukon Gold potato plants were completely dead, so we harvested them Monday.  Here is what we got.  I put a regular sized canning lid in the picture to show the potato sizes better.

I brought home tomatoes and Larry made salsa.  He needed two bell peppers and was able to go pick them out of the garden.  I didn't think to take a picture before he cut them up, here is one still in the garden.  Nice and big this year.

The greens from Bangladesh are starting to germinate.  The grass is growing great in with them.

The Little Freckles lettuce is doing great.

Radishes are looking good too.  The front few leaves are from a turnip.  A few of them germinated and are doing good.

Only a few beets are coming up.  Hope more germinate soon.

The asparagus patch looks like a weed farm. I had all the weeds gone almost three weeks ago. The parsley plant has turned yellow.

Apples are growing nicely.  Still need to get them covered.

Picked a few peaches this morning.  You can see that the birds are eating them.  There are a few more to pick that I can't reach and a few more that have been eaten by the birds and aren't worth picking.  As soon as all the peaches are gone they will move to the apples.
Monday we had waffles with peaches and whipped cream on top for breakfast with our company.  YUMMY!

Garden and Yard Updates 7-20-14

Here are pictures of what is happening in my garden and yard.

The Champion radishes I planted Thursday are starting to germinate.

Little Freckles Lettuce planted the same day is starting to germinate also.

The strawberry plants are are going to survive the transplant are growing now.

This group has a lot of runners.  I am happy to see them.  On some of the runners I put dirt over the stem, just behind the new plant, so the runner will stay in place and the new plant will root.

I didn't put cages around my tomatoes, so you have to look around in the plants.  I found a few Sun Sugar tomatoes today.  Sun Sugar are the sweetest tomatoes I have ever eaten.

More are in the tomato plant jungle.

Even more hiding.

More on the last side.  It is too bad that Sun Sugar tomatoes are a hybrid.

 This fatty is heading to his summer home.

Under this giant grapevine is the summer home.  It is cool, big, and comes with food.  The baby quail have a hard time getting up over the cement block.

Lots of orange bell peppers in the making.  I picked off all of the flowers until the plants got bigger this year.

Here they are from the other side of the plant.

These are Red Hot Cherry.  One of Hubby's choices.  He likes hot peppers.  There are a few round green balls in there.

Another hot pepper he chose.  These are Mucho Nacho Jalapeno peppers.  These are hard to see too.  Mostly they are in the center.

My Soapwort is starting to bloom.  I will have to make some soap from it.  I looked on-line for directions and it looks easy enough to do.

This is the bed where the squirrel ate all of the Grape Hyacinthe.  All of the Morning Glories growing here are seeds that dropped last year.

If the middle of the Morning Glories is a We Be Little pumpkin plant.  I didn't know flowers would be coming up when I planted the pumpkin there.

This is the view out of my kitchen window.  I enjoy doing dishes when I can look out at my view.  This is slightly to the left.

Looking almost straight out the kitchen window.

Looking slightly to the right out the kitchen window.