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A Book From Your Small Kitchen Garden
A book about preserving food from Your Small Kitchen Garden! Buy it at Yes, You Can
Yard Birds
Adorable, handcrafted, folk art. Yard Birds add whimsical flare to any garden, yard, or entranceway. Click here to find a Yard Bird for your kitchen garden.
Links to planters at selected vendors:
Sprouts
Amazon.com is a terrific source for certified organic seeds intended for home sprouting. Dress up salads, stir-fry, sandwiches, spreads, and other dishes with homegrown sprouts of all kinds. Follow this link to order your sampler or to find home sprouting kits.
Small Kitchen Garden Store
Find the perfect gift for any kitchen gardener--or find products to help get the best from your own small kitchen garden. To save you time, we've selected products from Amazon.com that received the best customer reviews. Click here to visit our store and pick up the perfect gifts for any small kitchen garden enthusiast.
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Yes, You Can! Holiday Giveaway
November 30, 2011 | 
Author
Use Amazon.com’s Look Inside feature to see the terrific job the art director did in designing and laying out Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too. Oh… and to get a good look at the book you might win if you enter this Holiday Giveaway!
Thank you for visiting Your Small Kitchen Garden! I love writing this blog, and I love that at least some people actually read it. In that spirit I’m giving away a copy of my book, Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too from Cool Springs Press.
I wrote Yes, You Can! last summer for people who are just starting to preserve produce—whether from their own gardens, from farmers’ markets and farm stands, or from grocery stores. Reviewers have been very kind to Yes, You Can! and (of course) I’d love to see it coach tens of thousands of gardening-, food-, and green-enthusiasts into more responsible relationships with the food chain.
Win a Signed Copy of Yes, You Can!
This giveaway has an ulterior motive: to introduce more people to Yard Birds. Here’s how it works:
I’m giving away one copy of Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too. The book’s retail value is $19.95, and I’ll cover the cost of shipping to the winner.
This is a judged contest. To enter, do the following:
1. Visit the Yard Birds store (this is a link to it)
2. Note the serial number (item number) of a Yard Bird that tickles your fancy
3. Return here and leave a comment that…
- …includes the Yard Bird’s serial number
- …proposes a name for the Yard Bird
- …explains why you would give the Yard Bird that name
I was lucky to capture a photo of this small flock of Yard Birds in the artist’s yard before he sold off most of them at an annual arts festival here in Lewisburg..
How We’ll Pick the Winner
My wife and kids will select one winning entry from all the entries posted. They will read all the entries and select the one they agree is the most entertaining. Use humor, pathos, irony, wordplay… if you want to play to the audience, keep in mind that some of the judges are seriously geeky.
Our judges will not know the identities of the entrants; this is a blind judging. I’ll announce the winner on this blog as soon as the judges finish their task—probably within a day or two of the close of the contest.
Enter Now, Enter Once, Enter Again!
The Yes, You Can! Holiday Giveaway ends at midnight on December 7, 2011. We will consider only one entry per participant; if you enter more than one time, we’ll include only your LAST entry in the judging. Last entry? Sure. This contest includes an opportunity for a do-over. If, after you post your entry a much better idea pops into your head, go ahead and post another entry. We’ll enjoy all your entries, but only the very last one you post before midnight on December 7th will go to the judges… so make the last one your best!
The Prize
To be clear: I’m not giving away a Yard Bird. The prize for this giveaway is a single signed copy of my book, Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too from Cool Springs Press.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | 
Tags: contest, free book, garden art, garden tool sculpture, giveaway, lawn sculpture, yard birds, yes you can | 
12 Comments »
Pepper Freaks from My Small Kitchen Garden
When I cut open this perfectly ripe California Wonder pepper from my small kitchen garden, I found several pepper-like fruits inside of it.
For the first 49 or so years of my life, bell peppers held no surprises. Even after I’d established my small kitchen garden in rural Pennsylvania, peppers were peppers. But then, last season, I grew and gutted a pepper that was full of surprises… and since then I’ve discovered three or four of these gems.
This Year’s Red Pepper Freak
When I cut open one of the few stunted but well-ripened California Wonders from my kitchen garden a month or so back, I found it packed with what might pass for pepper babies.
Have you ever found these in your peppers? Each is a hollow shape, apparently grown of bell pepper flesh. While the pepper babies are entirely inside the parent pepper, they fall out easily (once you cut the pepper open)—as if not attached to the parent in any way. Of course, these oddly-shaped gems must grow connected in some way, so I imagine a tiny bell pepper umbilical chord that connects each one to the inside of the parent pepper.
Please let me know whether you’ve ever cut open a pregnant pepper. I’m curious to know how common is this little phenomenon.
The pepper freaks shook out of their parent easily as if they weren’t attached in any way. Each seemed to be a small “pepper fruit” having the same texture as the flesh of a typical bell pepper.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: bell pepper, california wonder, red pepper | 8 Comments »
Small Kitchen Garden Bloom Day 11/11
This lone pink blossom is on a plant my wife set in one of her ornamental beds. A clump of buds just behind the blossom looks ready to pop. Forecast temperatures suggest the buds have a chance.
It was a challenging Garden Bloggers Bloom Day for this kitchen gardener. Mainly, my small kitchen garden was finished by late summer. Rain, blight, rain, mud, rain, rot, rain, insects, rain, and rain conspired to shut things down well earlier than in any previous year. After all that, we had a significant snow storm in late October when peak fall colors were just starting to fade. Oh, and guess how the weather was when I went out to take photos? Yep, it was raining and overcast.
It impresses me that anything is in bloom around here, so I stepped out of my small kitchen garden and scavenged blossoms wherever I found them in the yard. Most of what’s in bloom is in ornamental beds or containers, and it’s all barely holding on. Please enjoy what’s left of summer in my wet little chunk of central Pennsylvania.
A diaphanous puff of white clings tenuously to a stem just a few feet from the pink blossom in the preceding photo. The two blossoms are all that remain on annuals my wife planted in late spring.
There are four potted plants on our front porch. They might have served as centerpieces at some banquet during the summer. Two have wilted back to their roots (one I recognized as a begonia). The other two show signs of stress, but they continue to put out blossoms resembling asters; the ornamental-savvy among you will have to ID them.
The second of two potted plants on our front porch that continues to produce blossoms despite many overnight lows in the twenties and a significant snowfall in late October.
Somehow, this makes sense to me: the holly bush that came with the house is in bloom, though it has more buds than it has blossoms. Still, if it’s just blooming now, will berries form within the month? Come to think of it, in 18 years, I don’t recall ever seeing berries on this plant.
Rain stunted my broccoli this year, but one plant continues to taunt me by putting out tablespoon-sized florets.
In the department of confused, a forsythia in a back corner of the yard is in bloom. Is it because an unseasonable warm spell followed a cold spell? Is it because the rain paused for two weeks after the freak October snow? Perhaps this branch of blossoms thinks winter ought to be just four days long?
Nutmeg provided drama on this month’s Bloom Day. She happily accompanied me on my photo shoot and discovered poop in the grass when I paused to photograph the broccoli. If my dog is going to roll in something stinky, I choose carrion. Sadly, today she chose poop. She’s damp in this photo because I dragged her straight to the shower where she had the lather, rinse, and repeat treatment twice! I’m pretty sure the camera captured a smirk; Nutmeg has a lot of attitude for several hours after a shower.
Don’t Forget to Post Product Next Week!!!
Your Small Kitchen Garden blog hosts Post Produce on the 22nd of every month. Create a blog entry that shares what you’re eating from your garden-what you’re harvesting, what’s ripening, what you’re cooking or preserving, or even what you’re taking out of your larder for an off-season meal. Then find my Post Produce post and create a link back to yours. Follow the link here for find more information about Post Produce.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: bloom day, blossoms, broccoli, flowers, garden bloggers bloom day, nutmeg | 5 Comments »
Raisins for Pie at Your Small Kitchen Garden
My entry in October’s Post Produce is about pie. The pie involves pears and homemade raisins–both visible in this photo. I hope you’ll join me and bloggers everywhere on Saturday, the 22nd to share whatever you’re consuming from your own garden.
My small kitchen garden still has a few winter squashes, green beans, peppers, and carrots holding on against interminable rain and increasing cold. There’s not much out there, so I’ve put more and more attention on what’s available at the local farmers’ markets. Recently, I bought several pounds of seedless grapes and used my dehydrator to convert them into raisins. I posted about the procedure over at Food Dryer Home. Have a look if you need encouragement to make your own raisins. Please trust me: homemade raisins are so worth the trouble to make them.
What Pie has to do With It
I made raisins because I’ve been developing a recipe—a pie recipe rooted in about seven years of experimentation with pears. The recipe uses stuff from my small kitchen garden, and I plan to present it presently in my pending Post Produce post.
Post Produce? Pear Pie? All will become clear before I go to bed on Friday, October 21 (tomorrow).
Join Post Produce!
Saturday the 22nd is Post Produce day. The idea of Post Produce is to encourage bloggers everywhere to share with the world whatever they’re consuming from their gardens. Are you harvesting citrus fruit? Post about it! Are you opening home-canned produce for dinner? Post about it! Do you have awesome vegetables fresh from the garden? Post!
Follow this link to find more details at the Post Produce page. On Saturday, show or tell us about your produce, and then return to Your Small Kitchen Garden, and create a link back to your post. If you’re so inclined, visit all the Post Produce posts to see what bloggers are growing to eat all over the world.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: dehydrator, food dryer, pears, pie, post produce, raisins | No Comments »
Small Kitchen Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, Oct 2011: Butterflies
Before I left for the meadow, I photographed zinnias that grow within four feet of my small kitchen garden. Actually, I planted the zinnias (please don’t tell anyone). When I expressed frustration with how moisture was killing bean plants in my vegetable bed, my wife offered up one of the ornamental beds for an auxiliary bean garden. I planted a row of climbing beans in the back of the bed, and several types of annual flowers in front of them. Zinnias took over, but there’s a decent crop of green beans as well.
I wasn’t anywhere near my small kitchen garden for yesterday’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, but I tried to post. Unfortunately, I ran out of time and energy before I started writing (I chose and cropped photos before I went to bed).
Not only don’t my photos feature my kitchen garden this month, they only barely feature any garden. Rather, I stepped into the meadow across the street and down the road and captured photos of what’s in bloom because nature wants it to be.
From Meadow to Forest
Few gardens are as sustainable as those that start themselves, and these meadows emerged from abandoned farmland. Left to their own devices, in 70 to 100 years the meadows will be young climax forests of native hardwoods. If you pull up a lawn chair and watch for a few dozen years, you’ll see a diverse assortment of organisms at every stage of the forest’s development.
I tried to capture some of the diversity in my photos. It’s not hard to recognize a theme other than just blooms in my Bloom Day post. A healthy wild meadow teams with insects, arachnids, birds, reptiles, and mammals. On a recent sunny day (or two), I captured photos of dozens of meadow creatures. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
I don’t know flowers—particularly wild flowers. Perhaps you can tell me what these are. (My guess: Heath Asters.) Wherever I see stands of these happy blossoms, there is a swarm of winged critters flitting among them.
In case the previous photo lacked detail you need to identify the flowers, I include this for another look. What are those plants?
Are these purple flowers wild asters? I love seeing a clump of these in the meadow—particularly mixed in with goldenrod. Nature knows which plants to pair up for brilliant displays.
Speaking of goldenrod, it’s passing its prime, but it has been spectacular this year. I like to make huge bouquets of goldenrod for our dining table, but we’ve been so busy that I haven’t gotten to it. Fortunately, I have found some time to get out in the meadow and enjoy the goldenrod with bunches of other critters who also enjoy it.
Invitation to Post Produce
In a similar vein to Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, I invite the blogging community to join me on the 22nd of each month to Post Produce. On Saturday, October 22, create a blog post that reveals whatever you’re eating from your garden. Then return to Your Small Kitchen Garden and link to your post. There are more details on my Post Produce page. I hope you’ll share your kitchen gardening successes on October 22, and Post Produce.
Barbeque Sauce from Your Small Kitchen Garden
My pear-and-tomato barbeque sauce begins with equal parts of tomato sauce and pear mash. I created it because I hated composting the mash left over from juicing pears when I made jelly. It will be very satisfying to use tomato sauce cooked down from tomatoes that grew in my own small kitchen garden (didn’t happen this year because I lost my tomato plants to late blight). The sauce has a curious balance of sugar, fruit, and sour so it works well with savory dishes and with sweet ones.
While Your Small Kitchen Garden blog may have seemed quiet for the last few weeks, I have posted! First, I created a new page on the site that lists all the articles I’ve posted—on my web sites or on friends’ sites—about preserving produce. Some of the posts are about things you can find in my book, Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too. Others are recipes or techniques that didn’t make the book or that I’ve only learned about (or created) since the book came out.
Click the Preserving option on this site’s menu to find the list of articles. Once there, scroll down and you’ll also find a few videos about preserving produce.
Where’s the BBQ Sauce?
As I add more articles to Your Small Kitchen Garden, I’ll choose some longer, photo-heavy pieces to place on pages rather than within the blog. I did that recently with an article about canning tomato chunks, and even more recently I added an article about making and canning pear-and-tomato barbeque sauce.
This is a classic tomato and molasses BBQ sauce but with a whole lot of pears included. It’s fruity and sweet, but with noticeable sour. It has no heat, though I once mixed some with cayenne pepper and decided the heat didn’t improve the flavor; it just changed it.
Check out the recipe and procedures on the Pear and Tomato Barbeque Sauce page. Once you make your own sauce, make pizza using the BBQ sauce in place of standard pizza sauce. Then leave a note with your reactions; I’d love to hear you gave it a try—even if you don’t care for it once it’s done.
Posted in home kitchen garden | Tags: barbeque, bbq, canning, pears, preserving, tomatoes | 1 Comment »
Adam Guerrero, Compassion Farm, Urban Farming
I’d bet a big old stucco or brick house covered with clinging vines wouldn’t cause any problems in Memphis or Lantzville UNLESS THEY WERE GRAPE VINES! Someone might notice you were growing contraband food in your yard!
My July 11 post on Your Small Kitchen Garden expressed dismay and annoyance at the way people in Oak Park, Michigan were treating Julie Bass for growing vegetables in her front yard. Poor Julie was just one in a line of abused citizens drawing grief for growing their own food. This must stop!
Adam Guerrero in Memphis
Math teacher Adam Guerrero in Memphis, Tennessee has been told to remove his home kitchen garden from his yard. He tutors several children in all things gardening and has support of many neighbors. But apparently, one of his neighbors deems his garden a public nuisance, and that’s all the city needs take action.
Compassion Farm in Lantzville, British Columbia, Canada
No doubt both Memphis and Lantzville are OK with homeowners who have tall shade trees in their yards. But what if, one day, your gorgeous shade tree drops some of these terrors on your lawn? Yes, it’s food! Black walnut trees, hickory trees, pecan trees, apple trees, pear trees, even crabapple trees all represent the dreaded public nuisance: a food source growing in your yard.
This one is a bit more complicated than Adam’s and Julie’s situations. Apparently, Compassion Farm is a fairly large property on which Dirk Becker and Nicole Shaw grow produce to sell. At least one neighbor has hassled Compassion Farm for some time, and the city government is insisting that the farm cease operations.
At the same time, the city council is working to rewrite code to allow urban farming—though it’s not clear how that’s developing or how it might affect Compassion Farm. Apparently, the committee working on these code changes includes people known to oppose the existence of Compassion Farm.
Preference for Poison
A section of Memphis’s code provides for the city to remove personal property: …if such personal property is dangerous to the public health, safety, or welfare; or creates an unsightly condition… …tending to reduce the value…of the property. This seems to be the basis for rationale to act against Adam Guerrero.
Do you see the craziness? Growing grass in a yard in Memphis is a code violation but the government doesn’t even know it! Homeowners treat lawns with toxic chemicals to make them grow and to kill insects and funguses. Then they run lawnmowers and weed whackers that spew noise and air pollution. Poisoning the soil and groundwater and spewing carbon monoxide and noise into the air is dangerous to public health, safety, and welfare. Every lawn-conformist in Memphis should receive a cease-and-desist order.
If the electrical grid goes down or our petroleum supply drops abruptly and hampers transportation, the city of Memphis can expect to run out of food in three days. You know who I want as my neighbor in the event such a catastrophe occurs? I want the person who has a yard like this one! This person has food even when the rest of the city has none! How can any human think that having a lawn is a better option than having a kitchen garden? Of course, all the neighbors will suddenly support urban farming when it’s their only source of food.
Despite the obvious code violations, the city thinks citizens should toil for an hour or more each week growing gorgeous green grass so they can cut it down and THROW IT AWAY! If the city required people to grow something useful like food, they’d be laughing stocks. The absurdity is mind-boggling.
Save Some Kitchen Gardens
Please help these and all kitchen gardeners save their yards; help them gain the right to use their yards in socially-responsible ways. I’ve included links below to petitions you can sign, and links to other web sites with more information about Adam Guerrero and Compassion Farm. Some of the information in this post came from those web sites.
Adam Guerrero petition: change.org
Where I first read about Adam Guerrero: Mister Brown Thumb
Adam Guerrero article: Tree Hugger
Compassion Farm petition: change.org
Compassion Farm web site: Ways to help
Posted in home kitchen garden | Tags: urban farm, urban farming, urban garden, urban gardens | 2 Comments »
Touch Me Not on Bloom Day
The flowers of Jewel Weed are small but quite pretty and they attract all kinds of native pollinators. Jewel Weed prefers damp soil, so look for it along stream banks.
This Garden Bloggers Bloom Day in my Small Kitchen Garden is a real downer. 8 inches of rain last week drowned roots of my climbing beans and my chili peppers… and I must believe the winter squash isn’t happy. The rhubarb is also looking pretty bad which is especially distressing because rhubarb should be building up stores to help it through the winter.
Stepping out of My Small Kitchen Garden
To escape the ugliness, I stepped out of the garden for September’s Bloom Day post. I found one of my favorite common plants, the Touch Me Not, which many people know as Jewel Weed, and shot a few photos.
What I Know About Jewel Weed
I know Touch Me Nots from when I was a kid. It grew in thickets at the summer camp I attended. There were three things I loved about the plant then… and I still love those things:
Jewel Weed produces small pods that contain one or more seeds. As the pods mature, they become plump, and you can eventually see dark spots through their skins. The spots are seeds which are ripe when they turn dark.
1. The flowers are gorgeous
2. The seeds are edible and they taste pretty good
3. The seed pods explode
I’ve since learned a few other tidbits about Jewel Weed:
1. The sap is a cure for itchiness—particularly for poison ivy. Supposedly, if you crumple up and crush a leaf and rub it on a rash, the itchiness will diminish for several hours.
2. The flowers attract butterflies and hummingbirds.
What’s not to like?
When you bump a ripe seed pod, it explodes and sends its seeds up to several feet away from the parent plant. I contained the explosion of this under ripe pod to capture the seeds and provide a look at the springy parts. Find a stand of Touch Me Nots, gently harvest a bunch of ripe pods, and contain them when they explode. Then snack on the dark-brown seeds. The flavor may remind you of wild hickory nuts.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: bloom day, blossoms, flowers, garden bloggers bloom day, jewel weed, touch me not | 4 Comments »
Canning Tomatoes at Your Small Kitchen Garden
On my way to canning, I peeled nearly a peck of tomatoes on Sunday. This is the first batch: about 23 tomatoes stacked in a one-gallon food-storage container
Late blight has wiped out the tomato plants in my small kitchen garden. I managed to serve up about six tomato salads and can eleven and a half pints of cut-up tomatoes before the blight shut things down. This wasn’t enough.
I have planted more than 50 plants, hoping to harvest enough fruits to put up three or four dozen pints of cut-up tomatoes along with a dozen or more pints of tomato sauce. Had the plants survived until frost, they’d have produced way more tomatoes than necessary to fill those jars.
Farmers’ Market to Assuage a Kitchen Gardener
I use a lot of cut-up tomatoes in my cooking. So, at the famers’ market last Wednesday, I shopped for tomatoes. I found three options:
- Kobe Beefsteaks—Gorgeous and super-expensive, these tomatoes must have been hand-fed and massaged daily… absolutely perfect-looking and priced way beyond the budgets of mere mortals.
- Romas—Several vendors offered pecks of Roma tomatoes that would be decent for saucing, but sauce is a secondary concern this year. I still have about 24 pint jars of sauce from last season, so this season I want to put up more pints of tomato chunks.
- Canning tomatoes—What, I wondered, is a “canning tomato?” One vendor offered a peck of canning tomatoes for $20 while another offered a peck for $8. The tomatoes looked identical but it didn’t occur to me to ask what variety these were.
After paying $8 and dragging my canning tomatoes home, I decided that they were locally-grown “Vine Ripe” tomatoes. There are, apparently, many tomato varieties the industry calls “vine ripe,” but you’re probably most familiar with the ones you find year-round in grocery stores. They never get soft and they taste bland. My canning tomatoes were firm and they looked perfect—exactly what you’d want to display in a grocery store to impress your customers.
I spent half the day on Sunday canning tomato chunks. Please follow this link for the step-by-step of how to can tomato chunks.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: canning, preserving, tomatoes | No Comments »
Painful Return to my Small Kitchen Garden
My artichoke plants are a semi-satisfying success in my small kitchen garden this year. I started several plants from seed indoors in February, and transplanted four into my garden in June. These plants clearly have no intention of making chokes this year, so I’ll devise cold frames or other cover to protect them from deep-freezing during the winter. Perhaps next year I’ll harvest some artichokes.
The growing season had already been tough on my small kitchen garden, and then I really let it go. I spent a week at the annual symposium of the Garden Writers Association, and left my garden to fend for itself. Things were pretty sketchy when I left, but they were downright distressing when I returned.
When I left, I had been collecting tomatoes but things had just gotten started. Plants were topping out at seven feet, and I’d harvested about three gallons of fruit. While there appeared to be many more fruits setting, some type of infection was spreading among the plants. Lesions that looked like late blight had started low on stems and leaves and they were working their way up the plants.
Small Kitchen Garden on the Brink
When I left, climbing beans were just starting to put out flowers. There were three distinct clusters of bean vines growing among the tomatoes. A too-small trellis in an ornamental bed supported too many healthy-looking, crowded bean plants,
Finding a fence panel out of position makes me a little uneasy: how long has it been this way? What classes of rodents have noticed? Is anyone now inside my kitchen garden? What might already be dying because critters have come-and-gone through this huge opening in the garden’s defenses?
When I left, a stand of sweet corn held the promise of, perhaps, two dozen ears for meals—assuming anyone harvested them as they became ripe.
When I left, my cucumber plants formed a bush of healthy green on my deck and they were flowering like nobody’s business.
When I left, my bush wax bean plants were bereft of mature beans, but there were many young beans starting, and plenty of bean flowers were open.
When I left, my winter squashes were putting out blossoms every morning. I hand pollinate my winter squash, so I dreaded missing so many days; no one in my family would be willing to pollinate the squash flowers.
The Sad State of My Small Kitchen Garden
The photos show and explain what I found when I returned to my small kitchen garden. For the most part, the garden’s situation is grim. There are some bright spots, and I’m confident things would be little different had I stayed home… sometimes the elements simply don’t cooperate with a kitchen gardener. It makes me unhappy for a bit, but eventually I shrug and look ahead to next season.
When I returned from the Garden Writers Association conference, my wife asked, “Where are your bean plants?” She had, apparently, looked for them so she could harvest beans, but she hadn’t found them. Sure enough, plenty of beans had matured beyond tender while I was away; I sorted through them to find young beans my family would be willing to eat… but it gets worse: When several of my tomato seedlings had failed in late summer, I had planted climbing beans in their places. The bean plants were healthy and poised to bloom when I left, but two plants were wilting badly when I returned. Those particular bean plants have since died.
Sure, most of my corn plants tipped during a big storm, but kitchen gardeners lament that corn always falls over. My sadness related to corn is that no one harvested any while I was away. There are, perhaps, two dozen ears that should have been eaten but that will, at best, be old and tough if I harvest them now.
I pick tomatoes when they just start to blush. These tomatoes are nearly fully-ripe. I found many overly-ripe tomatoes in my small kitchen garden after my weeklong trip… the green shoulders and cracks illustrate why I pick tomatoes at the first sign of pink and let them ripen indoors.
As sad as I was to find nearly-ripe tomatoes on my plants, this discovery made me much sadder: there’s no question my tomatoes have late blight; all my tomatoes. Many look healthy, but the plants they’re on are in horrible shape. My tomato harvest is done for this season—far too early.
The cucumbers also misbehaved in my absence. In fairness, had I stayed home they’d have been no different. Several oddly-shaped cucumbers developed, but none are compelling enough that I’d harvest and eat them. For this, I’ll concede I didn’t give them the best chance to succeed. I planted too many seeds in deck planters and they performed as if stressed. I’ll grow cukes in planters again, but I’ll set far fewer seeds per gallon than I did this season.
There is a bright spot in my small kitchen garden. Actually, it’s all over the garden: My winter squashes are in decent shape. On the left: a small neck pumpkin. In the center, two small butternut squashes next to a huge butternut; the rear-most squash (only partially visible) is at least five times the size of the one in front of it. On the right: a Blue Hubbard squash that doesn’t seem interested in becoming a giant. Still, it’s great to have several Blue Hubbards that have survived past the typical onslaught of Squash Vine Borers… I hope they survive this more than double the average rainfall for August and September.
This may be the champion squash in my small kitchen garden. It’s a neck pumpkin hanging on what I usually use as a pea trellis. The squash was about 22 inches long in this photo, and it has grown about three inches longer since I took the shot. I’ve seen neck pumpkins weighing more than 25 pounds!
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: beans, cucumbers, garden problems, late blight, neck pumpkin, winter squash | 1 Comment »
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