Pounds of Peppers

Today I picked 8.5 pounds of peppers from the garden. That is many more than my small garden basket could hold.



So I had to use a laundry basket to get them all in the house--now that must be a sign of a successful harvest!



No pictures, but over about 2 hours I washed, cored, seeded, and sliced the peppers. Lucky for me, I remembered to wear gloves. Not so lucky for me, one of the glove fingers ripped open and I did not replace it. After steeping in capscacium for 2 hours, my hands are on fire!

The good news is that I have 7 pounds of prepared peppers ready for pickling as soon as hubby gets home and can help me.



I am thinking these will be surprise pickled peppers because about 10% of them are burning hot. I could feel it burn my eyes and lungs just from the air around the pepper as it was sliced. Most were sweet, but some were hot. Should make for a fun mix in the jars!

October 29, 2009

Finally, I see some evidence that we have a bee hive in our yard. The bees totally ignore all of my blooming landscape plants but were swarming the weeds!





Here is the garden in late October. The Hyacinth bean over the trellis did half way well, only the right side really grew great. I did not take the time this year to tend to the vine and make sure it grew over the top. This is what happens when it is allowed to just go crazy. If I don't go to the garden enough, the vines have a way of closing off the entrance and I have had to cut my way through the arbor.


The squash did not do so great this fall. Probably because right after they were planted, we replaced the fence and the garden got trampled repeatidly.

Here are a few small yellow squash. They are about the size of my thumb.

The peppers are doing great!

Mint has spread to 10x its original size (it was a 4" pot size in April).



Stevia has bloomed, but remained fairly short.



The pineapple sage is so pretty when it blooms, too bad bees can't see red!

Hill of Beans

With all the rain we have had this fall, I have not been able to get out into hte garden much. Yesterday, a rare sunny day, I decided the beans probably needed picking.



Boy did they ever! My quick stroll to the garden turned into 30 minutes of bean picking. The beans overflowed the basket I had brought. It totaled 6.5 pounds of beans, hooray!



I washed the beans by filling the sink with cool water and letting them float.



I then cut the ends off and sliced into 1-2 inch sections.





I blanched the beans in a large pot of boiling water for 3 minutes, then 3 minutes in an ice water bath before bagging, labeling and freezing. I found that about six hand fulls fills a 1 quart freezer bag perfectly.



I did four batches of beans and ended up with 3.5 quarts of frozen beans.



Notes:
-Beans were tri-color bush bean mix from NorthHaven gardens
-the purple beans were very hard to see growing against the black soil
-only 4 beans were bug eaten out of the whole batch of 6.5 lbs
-the purple beans turn green when blanched.
-I found it easiest to work in batches of about 8 beans when cutting
-I had to drain the excess water out of the bags before sealing and freezing

Less Lawn, Less Water... action 1

On Satuday, September 19th, I took Calloway's nursery at their word and returned some dead shrubs from our landscape. Despite a rather gruff greeting when I walked up with a cart full of dead bushes, they were super nice about refunding my money and even gave me MORE than I paid for most of the plants. I'm not sure why they did this, but I think it had something to do with the fact that my receipts were over 3 years old and they had a totally new register system now. Either way, I expected to get about $50 bucks back and I ended up getting $125 back!! Woo Hoo! Definitely worth the gruff welcome.

It was in their favor because I promptly spent $75 of that refund money on new plants. On the sale rack they had 4 3-gallon sized pots of White Buddliea, 5 3-gallon pots of Coral Honeysuckle, a 1-gallon purple buddlia, and 3 1-gallon Sedge (new one to me) all for the great deal of 75% off. Even after my shopping spree, Calloways still had to credit $50 back to my card. Very nice.

Hubby conveniently had an allergy attack so I ended up planting all of this all by myself. Poor me. I also had the 'great' idea of running up to the soil store and buying a cubic yard of landscape mix (ie, one very full truck load of dirt). I pretty much slept and dug all weekend. I have bruises on my feet from the shovel. My typing is terrible because my hands are sore. But, it looks great and falls well into our plan of.... less lawn, less water. These are all drought tolerant plants and should exist well with just normal rainfall once established. Plus, they are all bee friendly plants. The only drawback (as hubby pointed out) is that none of them are edible. Too bad guess I need to buy more edible plants next time.

Fall Garden Update--September

As I write this, it is not a 'real' September in Texas at all. It is 61 degrees and raining... what?!? Nonsense you say, it is supposed to be 40 degrees hotter and you are supposed to be whining about not getting any rain for the past decade or so (I do whine about the lack of rain a lot). Have we been magically transported to some other (less miserably hot) part of the world? No, just a really odd weather pattern for Texas. We've had cooler temps, regular drenching rains, it is craziness.

The garden is going bonkers with this boon of great weather. The beans I planted on Aug 9th (check that date) are up and vining and a few have bloomed. I'm not sure why they are vining, they are supposed to be bush varieties.

Here they are on Aug 31st, before the rains came

The peppers have enjoyed a second bloom and fruiting period They are mostly still small, but considering they have never been watered by me, that is acceptable.

And the tomatoes... the miserable, scrawny, ugly fall tomatoes... two of the three are dead. Victims of the hot early August weather and the tomato horn worm attack. One is struggling along. I don't expect to eat any fall tomatoes this year. The mess behind the plant is because we replaced our fence and I have yet to get in and replace the pavers along the fence row.

The sweet potatoes are doing pretty well. I can't tell if there are any actual potatoes on there, but the vine is pretty.

The Okra has produced well, for only having 5 plants. My problem is I always get out there the day AFTER they are ready to be picked and I end up with woody yucky okra. Here are some tender too-young-to-pick yet okra. I can almost guarantee by the time I turn around they will be woody and past their prime. Perhaps next year I'll plant more okra and then I can harvest daily instead of always missing it by a day.

The garlic chives are so pretty, they bloomed and look great. The onion chives are gone, I can't even see where the plant was.

While my update says September, the photos were all taken on August 31st.

Less lawn, less water...

Hubby and I have been batting back and forth on the idea of ripping out the lawn. I hate to waste water to keep it happy and healthy and the lawn has really suffered the last few years. Hubby hates to mow and that is motivation enough for him.

I can't imagine we will get rid of the whole lawn, our suburban Dallas neighborhood is very traditional in the "house, lawn, sidewalk, accent tree, and flagpole" styling. There are a few homes on our block--maybe 2 or 3 out of 40 homes--that have non-grass front yards. They have heavily shaded yards and creeping jasmine ground cover with a few accent shrubs. They look okay, but not great. City code allows for non-grass yards as long as there is no bare dirt (must be covered with mulch) or dead plants.

Our plan now is to just start increasing the size of the landscaping in the yard and slowly decreasing the lawn size. This will have the benefit of no big giant expensive change all at once, and also give us time to see if we really like the idea once it is in practice. This will also give me more places to plant bee-friendly flowers and plants, and maybe some more edibles for the humans too.

My google research wanderings and notes are below.

http://www.hotgardens.net/replacing_your_lawn.htm

Lantana, acacia redonlens (?), creeping rosemary (good for bees in early spring)
Mexican bush sage
trumpet creeper (already got it!)
Bird of Paradise (Caesalpinia gilliesii or Poinciana pulcherrima)--a neighbor has this and it looks amazing. The one I saw at Home Depot was covered with bees.
Trees:
Fig tree (need two for pollination)
Pomegranate (MIL has one and it has done very well)

Welcome Bees!

Hubby and a friend captured a swarm of bees in Collin County on September 4th. The swarm had settled into a play house and the owners put out a plea on Craig's list to help evict the bees. Our guys used a modified shop vac and two industrial trash cans to extract the bees. The bees had only been in place for a few days, but in that time they had started to build a small palm sized comb and the queen was laying eggs.

Hubby arrived home late that night grinning ear to ear, stinking like smoke, and holding a humming cardboard box... our bee adventure has begun.



Saturday morning we put together some bee hives parts borrowed from a bee-keeping friend. As hubby worked to reassemble the broken frames, the humming from the box in the garage got louder and louder.
Then a few bees started to escape and buzz around. Hubby finally got the box all put together and set up behind our garage.

He put on his borrowed bee hat and gloves and used a squirt bottle full of sugar water to spray down the bees in the box. He then tapped the box hard (to knock all the bees to the bottom of the box) then dumped the buzzing mass into the waiting hive. He plugged up the exit with a kitchen towel so they would not take off right away.

After about an hour, we pulled the kitchen towel and the bees seemed happy enough. They have not swarmed and left our hive, so I guess they are happy. In the first 3 days they sucked down the entire quart sized jar of sugar water from the feeder. Since then, they have barely touched the replacement sugar water. I'm not sure if I got the concentration wrong or if they just prefer to get 'real' food from the flowers in our neighborhood--this is our big hope