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Archive for 'Harvesting'

Canning season

I’ve been so busy canning lately. It’s that time of the year. Besides peach jam last week, this week I bought a bunch of tomatoes at the farm stand because I don’t have enough of my own yet, sadly. All those tomatoes turned into 10 jars of catsup and one pitcher of

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wang wong

Pretty, Busy fall weekend

It actually turned out to be quite nice today. Sure, it was windy, which makes it difficult when I am trying to rake leaves, but still, no snow except in the really shady spots like the front porch, no rain, pretty warm, and sunny. Not bad after two days of snow. We got outside pretty

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wang wong

Worm bin update

We’ve been going slow on adding garbage to give the worm population time to build up, but we seem to be okay now. We’ve got the second bin about half full of garbage, and it’s just squirming with worms. We also got a quart of worm tea for the houseplants. The first bin still has a bunch of worms in it, which is good because the coir bedding that came with the bin still has a lot of decomposing to do. I suspect we didn’t add enough garbage, because that seems to be gone. I’m taking this as meaning that we can now start putting all our garbage in there, which is great since it means I won’t have to go out to the compost pile in the snow. The downside seems to be the flies. They’re there there, and the manual for the composter pretty much implies they’re a normal feature. Oh well.

wang wong

Killing frost

A pretty day, but the Marlow Harvest festival and a desperately needed shopping trip kept us out of the garden until very late. The shopping trip did provide us with a decent bulb planter. Damn this fancy Japan/Taiwan engineered bent metal. It’s a cup on a stick, 1/8 inch Penna. steel, welded in Bangor, Maine.

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wang wong

Working in the Rain

It rained all day today. It was more than a drizzle, but it wasn’t that cold, and because we have so many things to do, we worked out in it anyway. Frank dealt with it far better than I did, because I got whiny and cold and complained a lot, and he seemed to have

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wang wong

First Frost

The first freeze of the season is promised for tonight, and Lisa is away, so much running around. I put blankets on the tomatoes, peppers and basil. Unfortunately the tomatoes looked like they’d already taken frost damage. I potted up the two coleus that had made it through the spring’s cold weather. They are gorgeous, and Lisa wants to try to make cuttings for next year. The Hawaiian stick, the amaryllis and the peace lily came in. I don’t think the peace lily will make it through the winter, but the other two seem to have adapted to out somewhat irregular pattern of care. Finally I harvested the one remaining basil plant out in the main window boxes, and grabbed a meals worth of honey mushrooms. (There are many more, but it was getting dark, and we hadn’t actually tried them yet.) The basil replaced the black trumpets in the dryer.

wang wong

Winecap Mushrooms, Firewood

We’re finally home on the weekend again, and worked ourselves until we were exhausted outside today. Marmalade kept us company no matter where we went outside. It was very cute. The first thing we did was get started again on the firewood. We heat with wood on the first floor of our house, and in

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wang wong

Taking a break

Whew, it’s hot out there. I am not, however, complaining. We’ve had so much rain (almost 8 inches so far this month alone) that I haven’t been able to really do much in the garden, so I’ll take hot over hot and raining any day. We went out into the garden pretty early this morning,

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wang wong

And so starts August

We’ve had pretty heavy rains all week this week, and the flowers in bloom in the garden are really starting to show the strain of all the water weight. The Shasta daisies in particular have mostly flopped over and started to rot, turning into a most unattractive slime heap. Ick. So I went out and

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wang wong

Dripping

One of the Lamer Landscapers semi-successful projects was installing irrigation for us. They actually got it running in the spring of 2001. As usual, they demonstrated that they are landscapers not gardeners. Also cheap. They finally got the stuff running June of 2001 (only 9 months behind schedule). Two valves failed that summer. In 2002,

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wang wong