I am Blessed by bounty

The beans and tomatoes have been keeping me busy these past few weeks.  To add to that, I went and bought a bushel of sweet corn and just finished canning it.  I got 20 pints, yippee!  :)

I now have equal to 9 quarts of canned tomatoes, approximately 30 dried and powdered tomatoes, 26 quarts of canned green beans and 20 pints of canned corn.

I have been looking through the ball canning book at the recipes.  This has made me want to make some of the yummy recipes I see in there so this winter I will be using the recipes that I pick out as a guideline for what I plant next year.

Yes I will plant corn.  Buying corn is the costly way to do it even though they only charge $3 per dozen or $17 per bushel and give you extra in case some are not good.  A 10X 10 plot will give me more than I bought this year so I might plant a 10 x 20 plot of corn next year.  That will give me some to eat fresh, give away and still be able to can more than there was this year.  It will definitely be an open pollinated variety, probably my old favorite, golden bantam, not to be confused with golden cross bantam which is a hybrid.  No hybrids in my garden if I can find an OP alternative.  I was planting golden bantam back in the 70's and 80's.

I am in the process of expanding the garden now by putting down cardboard and mulching it with grass clippings, mowed leaves, and old hay.  This makes the ground super fertile for next year as well as nicely killing the grass and weeds that are growing there.  I need to go to the dollar store and get some more of their boxes.  They break them down flat before they dispose of them anyhow so that is a great convenience for me.  All I have to do is be there on a day when they are stocking from boxes and have a lot of empty ones already on the cart.  They let me sort through them and take what I want.  I choose the ones that have only black lettering on them so there won't be any bad poisonous ink going on my garden.

That's all for today, there are more beans to break and can.  :)

Sweet potatoes

Today I dug under two plants and this is what I found by just digging with my hands, wearing gloves of course.  They weighed 4.8625 pounds.  The little one I found a couple of weeks ago would probably have tipped the scale to 5 pounds but I ate it last night.  It was soooo yummy :)  by far the best sweet potato I have ever eaten.

Using 8 foot long X 1" bamboo poles for trellises

I am very happy with the bamboo poles, they are strong and resilient.  At first I was skeptical when the slightest breeze knocked over my bamboo teepees.  But it turns out that after there is some weight pulling downward on them, they will not go anywhere.  We have had a few good windy storms since the trellises have been covered by beans and peas.  Every one of them were still standing after the storms.

Two of the trellises I built have a large load on them and they are still standing same as when I put them up.  They are the Italian beans/peas.  They look kind of wild, like pictures I have seen of kudzu in the south that has covered old buildings, automobiles, trees, etc.   These two rows were planted 3 feet apart and there is barely enough room between them to get in there and pick peas.  There is a canopy over the top between the two rows, made by tendrils from the two rows meeting and grabbing onto each other. 

Update:  First, I may have already added some of this information.  Forgive me if some of this is a repeat.  I have compared pictures of pea and bean varieties and have discovered that these are probably a variety of cow pea.  They look the same as pictures of cow peas I found on google images.

I wasn't going to plant these next year but I have changed my mind.  I picked all of them after they dried, then shelled them and they gave me about 4 pounds of shelled peas. An easy thing to do while watching TV.  And they are delicious.  

With the minimal amount of work involved in planting, harvesting and shelling these peas, I would say they are worth it in addition to all of the produce I gathered from my garden.  These are great for the occasional small pot of bean soup in the winter months.  With them in my diet, it is less boring.  What a treat they are.

Here are my Italian Fagolina cow peas in a gallon freezer bag.  As you can see, comparing them to the dime, they are very small.

Harvesting

It's awesome!  I started picking beans Friday.  I had a nice soup made from green beans, red skinned potatoes and carrots, all from my garden.

Pole beans behind 2 tomato plants

Yesterday I picked more beans and some chard.  There was also some banana peppers, half a green bell pepper, and some okra that a friend gave me.  I cooked it all together and added a little wine and some curry spice.  Oh yummmm it was wonderful.  It made a large pan full so there is more for today and tomorrow too.  I would feel like I was in heaven if I lived somewhere tropical so I could eat fresh from the garden every day like this.

bad pic of my strawberry patch, I was using my phone and couldn't see where it was pointed.  You can see that I have a crab grass problem.

There were also some more strawberries to pick yesterday.  They are almost done producing.  There are no more new blossoms.  They are now putting out runners.  I was picking them off but now I will let them grow so I can expand the number of plants for next year.  They are ever bearers so they won't last for more than 2 or 3 years before their production declines so every year I will let some plants set runners in order to replenish the strawberry patch. 

I took this picture to show all the blossoms on the beans, you will have to click to enlarge it to see the blossoms

I pulled up all the remaining carrots yesterday and am preparing that patch for planting collards, spinach, and kale for fall/winter.  I hope the winter holds off long enough for me to get some greens from them.  I am thinking about using the pvc trellis I made for the squash as a cover for the greens.  By the time the greens need the cover, the squash will no longer need the trellis. 

Here is my Italian fagiolina beans that I think are peas because the blossoms look like sweet peas.  I went to google images and found some plants that look like this and they are called cow peas.  The peas in the pod are very tiny and the pods are half as thin as a pencil.  They are delicious eaten as a young pod or left to mature and eaten as soup beans/peas.  Whatever they are lol.  In the foreground is the squash that I finally was able to save from being destroyed by the birds.  I had to replant them twice.  They may not have time to mature since they got such a late start.  I won't have half the number of squash that I had last year.  Hopefully the sweet potatoes will make up for that.  See the pic of them below.

A bird must have dropped a seed and a corn stalk grew between my sweet potatoes and pole beans.  So I let it grow for visual interest.  I can't wait for the sweet potatoes to be finished.  I want to dig under one plant to see what, if anything is growing.  I bought these as Georgia Jets.  Then I read somewhere online that some companies sell a different variety as Jets and that Jets should get red blossoms and if they don't, they are not true Georgia Jets.  Hmm, that deserves further investigation.

Yesterday I also got 2 pints of roma tomatoes canned.  LOL, yes only 2 pints, but it is a start.  Last year there were hardly any red tomatoes.  This year it looks like the plants will be overrun with nice ripe red tomatoes.  I have a slug problem so I pick the tomatoes a little early and let them ripen in the house.  I am using a product called escar-go by gardens alive.  It works, is organic, but needs to be spread every 2 weeks.  It goes a long way because it is spread very thin.  I think I will put out a few saucers of beer tonight and see if it lives up to what is claims. 

The red tomatoes you see here are beefsteak variety, I forget what it is called.  Maybe beefsteak LOL.  The plant to the right is an unknown.  It was a volunteer from last year so I transplanted it because there was space for it.  It is either a Rutgers or another OP variety that gets huge, I mean huge tomatoes on it.  We will see if/when they grow, this plant got a late start.