The Apple of My Eye

Greetings!

Well, September is certainly flying along, isn't it?  I've been a busy little bee and even did some traveling in early September.  I went down to the Mother Land (aka Texas) to place my mom's ashes next to my dad's in the Ft. Bliss National Cemetery in El Paso.

It was a beautiful "ceremony," with just the four siblings, my brother's ex-wife (who I think of as a sister) and my significant other.  Each of us took a handful of dirt from the shovel and sprinkled it into the grave, then watched as they covered it up and raked the red gravel back into place.   Those of us who wanted to, said our goodbyes, shed lots of tears and went back to the hotel for a swim and to relax for a bit before heading out for a late lunch at L&J's Cafe (best Mexican food in El Paso, in my opinion) and some sightseeing.

El Paso is an interesting place, full of western history and one of the places we visited was Concordia cemetery.  John Wesley Hardin is buried there, but there is also a section for some of the Buffalo soldiers.  JWH was an unsavory character for sure, and met his end in much the same way as he meted out his peculiar form of "justice" - with bullets.

We also took a trip to Mesilla, New Mexico for dinner at La Posta on Thursday night.  Mostly for old times sake, since the food certainly was "eh" at best.  Still, it was fun being back there and seeing how much of a tourist destination Mesilla has become.  The best part of the meal were the sopapillas. Perfection.   Billy the Kid was captured in Mesilla, but apparently got away before they could dispatch him properly.

Dinner the next night was at Cattleman's Steakhouse.  It's a dude ranch and is as tacky as you would expect, but the steaks were awesome and the sunset was just breathtaking.

Back home again with lots to deal with.  We cleaned out my mom's house so that our tenant can move in on the 15th and put everything into storage.  We will have to deal with all of that when we have a bit more money to do so.

Next on the agenda was dealing with my garden.  I have to say over all, most of it was a bust.  Not sure what happened to my tomatoes.  They were off to such a great start, but petered out and I didn't get nearly as many tomatoes as I had hoped.  I ended up buying tomatoes to make sauce and spaghetti sauce.  There is a pot of homemade ketchup simmering on the stove as I write this and man, does it smell good!

The potatoes did okay.  I did get some nice ones, but it was kind of silly.  I planted three seed potatoes in each pot and most of them yielded three or four potatoes.  Not exactly cost effective.  I think next year, I am going to plant them in 55 gallon trash cans and see if I get a better crop.  They were really tasty, though.

Green beans did pretty well - but again, not nearly what I had hoped for.  I did end up with some for the freezer, but mostly we just ate what I picked.  The real bust was the peppers and squash.  They just sat there.  I think they are all pretty much the same size as when I planted them.  It's pretty weird.
The sweet potatoes are still going.  I did harvest the smaller container and there were a lot of tubers in it, but I should have let it go for another month because they are all real skinny.  I think they would have fattened up nicely if I had let them go until the first frost.  Now I know and I will surely let the big container sit until the end of October or the first frost, which ever comes first.

The big surprise and star of the show was the apple tree, which is a McIntosh.  Usually, it has a crop of inedible apples and early drop takes most of them.  Scab and insect damage galore took care of the rest.  Last fall, I dumped a whole bunch of cow manure, sprinkled in a couple cups of epsom salts around it and added a thick layer of mulch.  I also was religious about raking up and disposing of the leaves, as scab over winters there.  The tree has rewarded me this year with an amazing crop of beautiful apples.  There's still some insect damage and Jordan, if you're reading this, you should stop now.  I looked it up and it appears to be wasp damage.  Next year, I will place plenty of traps out for them and negate some of that too.

So far, I have four bags of quartered apples in the freezer which I will take down to my SO's place because he has a fruit press and come home with cider.  I also have 8 half pints of apple butter and six half pints of apple sauce put up already.  This was this morning's harvest for which I had to crawl out of my daughter's bedroom window and pick them from the porch roof because I don't have a ladder tall enough to reach even with the fruit harvester's telescoping handle.

These are destined for apple pies.  One for the freezer and one for dessert tonight.

In recap, the crops that did the best for me this year was the lettuce, which we enjoyed well into July, the green beans and the beets and carrots.  I planted a second crop of carrots and they are just about ready to harvest now.  The kale, collards, brussels sprouts, and cabbage were all victims of cabbage worms.  Next year, I will use row covers to negate that.

All in all, it has been a fun gardening season, even with the disappointments and I have plans for some improvements next year.  The little fruit trees I planted are all doing really well, as is the fig tree, so I have hopes that I might get a tiny crop from them next year.

That's it, folks - until next time!  Enjoy the season!

Another bed and some ideas for next Spring

I've wanted to get back out in the backyard last week, but laboring in a sauna is not something I was willing to do, so I did other things this week.  Mostly sitting on the couch looking up stuff on the internet.  Productive stuff.  No, really.  It was.  Scout's honor.

See, I found this youtube channel by a guy named  Larry Hall.  Basically, you take some vinyl rain gutters and some two by fours, some containers, net cups and some potting mix and you create a self-watering system in which you can grow amazing vegetables in containers.  Since I have an entire driveway that extends all the way into my backyard that gets sun all day long, I've wanted to do a container garden there forever.  These are cool, because it will eliminate me having to water those containers to keep everything alive.  The nutrients go right into the water, which is pretty efficient, sort of borrowing from hydroponics.  I'd probably use compost tea in mine, as I don't want to use chemical fertilizer.  The other thing is that here where I live, I would have to take steps to prevent creating a mosquito breeding ground.  Still, I love the idea - it's simple as can be, inexpensive and I can use grow bags, which are better than buckets or plastic totes since the roots self-prune instead going round and round and eventually killing the plants.

Then, in my travels, I found this guy.  Another thing I've wanted to do again is to grow potatoes in containers.  Besides having a great accent, I love what he is doing with the potatoes, even if he does use chemical fertilizers.  That's easy enough to bypass and again, watering with compost tea would work wonders.  So again, I'm filing this away for next year and in fact, I think I would combine the two ideas and grow potatoes with the rain gutter self-watering system.  I wish I found this in the spring, because I would have done it this year, but oh well.  The possibilities for next season abound!

In the meantime, I decided to start another permaculture-type garden bed with sheet mulching.  I surveyed the backyard this morning and narrowed down two possible sites.

The first site is near the fence and at the moment is a tangle of pachysandra, ivy and thistles.  Probably a few dandelions there too.  You can see the last of the phlox flowering and there is a rose bush struggling to the left.  Sterling, I think.  It doesn't get sun in the morning, because its close to the back steps of the house, but I knew I wanted to put one of the fruit trees I've ordered there.  Possibly the apple, since it would be fairly close to my existing apple tree and cross-pollination, ya know.



The second site gets a good amount of sun every day and would be a great place for tomatoes, peppers and possibly another fruit tree.  Right now, there is a type of perennial sunflower/daisy thingy I purchased at Fordhooks on a whim and it is much, much too big for that space.  I keep it cut back, but if I didn't, it would get over 8 feet tall.  This is actually what grew back after I dug it up and replanted it toward the back of the yard where the size made sense.  So, yeah... this one is going to have to go.

After mulling over both possible sites for the new bed, I ended up choosing the first one for a very simple reason.  (and this is where my youngest daughter should stop reading)  Bees.  Those yellow flowers are a bee/moth/butterfly magnet and I figured I would give them a few more weeks of luscious pollen before tackling this bed.

Decision made, I hauled out the weed whacker and discovered several new curse word combinations.  I hate that darn thing.  It's inexpensive (cheap) and the strings don't advance automatically like they are supposed to and most of the time, whirl back onto the spool.  

At any rate, a short vocabulary building exercise time later I had this

Chop and drop.  

I spread some newspapers I purchased this morning (I should have read them first, I suppose), wet them down and added a layer of cow manure and wet that down too.

Then I mixed a five gallon bucket of my compost with ten gallons of peat moss, about 3 gallons of vermiculite, two big handfuls of pulverized lime and a handful of Epsom salts.  

I spread half of that mixture over the manure, wet it down, then another layer of manure and topped that off with the remaining soil mixture, wetting each layer down.  Once I got that smoothed out to my liking, I spread a layer of pine shavings over the whole thing and gave it a good soaking.  

Here's the finished bed.  I would like to get another couple inches of pine shavings on top before winter hits, but I'm pretty happy with it so far.  No digging is always a good thing.  Time will tell whether or not the pachysandra and ivy actually succumb to this method or not.  They may just rear their heads, look in my direction and say, "Thanks for the manure, lady."  I'm also wondering if the poor little rose bush will benefit from this sudden glut of nutrients.  Hope so.

For those of you who may be wondering about the addition of lime and epsom salts, the lime is for the calcium and the salts are for the magnesium, both of which prevent blossom end rot in tomatoes, melons, peppers, etc.  It's not enough to neutralize the acid that the manure adds, but will make a difference to the plants.  The peat moss and vermiculite were added because I have a fairly dense clay soil and I wanted to aid in drainage, especially at this particular bed site, since it sits pretty close to my downspout.  

After everything was said and done, I weed whacked the walk again and then decided to take a few pics of my backyard as it is now to share with all of you, plus one of the tree well bed I finished a couple of weeks ago.

New bed and walkway  

Coral Bells in flower

Creeping Charlie.  Someday, I'll make beer with it.

Bed I did a couple of weeks ago.  I ended up planting Russian sage, lavender, Greek oregano and English thyme on this side.  The other side is all seeded with garlic, which has not made an appearance yet.

Well, gentle readers... that is as they say, that.  At least for now.