Gardening, Potato Buckets & Roses

Our squash and cucumbers are producing well. Maybe a bit too well.
Our onions have grown well too. The onion patch is almost ready for a complete harvest.
Despite the critters, our beans are trying to produce. Luckily, we had enough for a small cooking of them.
We’re happy to have our first tomatoes, even though they need to sit a few days to completely ripen.
Yep, we are quickly becoming squash poor…  😀
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Our corn is tasseling and getting silky ears. I can hardly wait for the first sweet harvest and cooking.
Our garden is at that special point where it’s not pretty and clean anymore. But it’s producing and that’s the important thing.
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We went ahead and dumped the wilty potato plant bucket out. The plant was rotten down in the bucket. I guess there was something about it that made it fail to thrive.The potato plant in the bucket that we have left is gorgeous. It’s healthy and green and has little buds ready to bloom. Hopefully it’s well on the way to growing a potato or two.
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Recently, we bought a couple of rose bushes.
We haven’t had any in years and thought it might be fun to have some.
Plus they might attract a few more butterflies.
The ‘yellow hybrid tea rose’ is attracting japanese beetles and insects, but the red ‘knock out’ rose is bug free. I reckon the yellow rose must be sweeter than the red one. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen a few japanese beetles in our corn. But now that we have the roses, the corn is beetle free. Honestly, we’re glad the japanese beetles are attracted to the rose and leaving our corn alone. I use the old stomp & squish method to control the japanese beetles. Hopefully, I won’t have to resort to pesticides.~*~
There’s never a dull moment with gardening. It’s a lot of work, but it’s enjoyable work and the rewards are a beautiful bounty.

I hope you all have a pest free week full of beauty and goodness.

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Garden 2017

We decided on a small garden this year. Yesterday afternoon we planted onions, green beans and sweet corn.
We left a large enough space to plant a few other things sometime soon.

My husband figured it up and our garden has cost about $8.00 so far.  Hopefully, It’ll more than pay for itself a few times over if the weather cooperates.



Wishing you all a productive garden season.

 

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Green Beans packed & Frozen

IMG_4109T’is the season to began storing food for the winter. I’m happy that we got 10 packages of green beans packaged and put in the freezer. That’s a lot of good eats. 😉

If you want to know how I package my beans, here’s a link to a website that has a method like we use.  Pick Your Own: How to Freeze Green Beans

0-frebnThe things we do different from pickyourown.org is, we break our beans by hand instead of using a knife
and we use Ziploc Vacuum bags. This has been our favorite vacuum pump for many many years.

I look forward to putting on a pot of green beans in the winter time, cooking them down and reminisce about growing them. lol

I hope you all have a nice rest of the week of enjoyable reminiscing.

 

.madveggie

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Garden Update – 6-23-2014

6-22-2014We got our first harvest of green beans yesterday. I can hardly wait to cook them. I’m going to put new potatoes and some herbs in with the beans and let them cook down. Yum! The rest of the beans will be snapped, blanched, vacuum packed and put in the freezer for winter.

We got our first harvest of cucumbers too.  They’ll be sliced and put in a bowl of icy water with just a sprinkle of lite salt.

A few more squash needed picking, so I picked them. We don’t really need them. I have a huge pile of squash on my counter right now. I’ll post a photo of them someday soon.

The leafy vegetable with the bright color leaf stems is Chard. It’s an interesting veggie. The stems has a celery-like taste to them and the green leafy part taste similar to spinach. This year is our first experience with it and we like it a lot.

I dug up a few potatoes to cook in with my beans.
I picked a few onions to have on hand for cooking or if my husband want to eat them raw.

Thankfully this update is a positive one.

I hope your gardening season is a productive one.
gardeningcouple
Here’s a few photos of our garden that show it’s progress.
Our crops are growing well (and so are the weeds. lol)


🙂
spgrnbgln