Begining of September pictures

 I will fully admit we have been a bit busy. In fact, we have been swamped with real life. I completely forgot the first of the month pictures for August. This just means that there will be more of a noticeable difference in the garden. That's it, I wanted to show more of a difference.

Pooka's pollinator garden

Pooka's polinator garden is filling out. The plant I left there not knowing if it was a weed or a plant was actully milkweed, so its a good thing I left it. I will admit I need to weed it bit, but its filled out on one side. A few of the last plants we put in didn't seem to do well, so we will wait till next spring and if they do not come back (Since everything in there is a perennial) then we will replace them. Pooka and her friend K go play in her little flower bed daily and pick flowers for butterflies or the birds. Even if it adds more work, its been worth it to see the girls have so much fun.

Garlic bed

The garlic was pulled in July and we replaced it with annual herbs and veggies again this year. We have dill (that is going to seed) celery, parsley and Pooka's black eyed susan sitting in the corner. The living chair has done much better in this spot, however, I think I will need to get another pot of mint to really fill it out for next year. However, in a few weeks we will rip out all of these plants and plant next years garlic. Keeping other plants in this bed after the garlic has been pulled also keeps the weeds down.

Front bed

 The explosion that is the herb bed is out of hand. I dry and I dry herbs, and I cannot keep up. The tarrogon will be divided next spring and sent to new homes, and I will probably get rid of all but one thyme plant. With all the wet weather this year we didn't water as much, and I noticed the top tier was dying from lack of water. This means next year it either needs to be hardier OR I need to remember to water it even when its been raining. One or the other.

Peppers and basil

All of the basil plants are quite happy having flowered completely. Its gotten to the point you can't pull the flowers off. Pooka and I did not put as much energy into that this year and you can tell. The plants still did well, but they are a bit spindly and starting to die back a bit. At least we got our basil jelly this year. More on that another day. The chinese 5 color peppers AKA Death peppers are very happy in their spot. We had to stake them up so they didn't fall over with all their bounty. Daddy is a very happy man as we are drying our own hot pepper flakes and hes begun his talk of siracha-cha again.

Sunflowers

The sunflowers are doing very well. We did have a couple that fell over due to being too big, but for the most part, they do not seem to mind having been started straight into the ground. However, not all of the seeds seemed to start, and the plants themselves do seem to be much further behind in producing seeds. This was our last year of using store bought seeds so I am hoping they will produce enough seeds to continue for next year. I do still have some seeds from last year, but I know Pooka loves being able to save her seeds and have Pooka sunflowers. The leaves on the first sunflower are bigger than not only mine or Pooka's hands, but Daddy's as well. Hopefully we can continue saving at least a few seeds.

Corner of nothing

 This is a very sad picture. It had been raining so I pulled everything off the corner stand and put them on the table to get watered. As you can see, the musculin lettuce bolted horrible and our squash in this pot is still fairly small. It doesn't seem to be doing well. The rainbow char just needed a good water. As pretty as char is, we don't seem to eat it, so it will probably be pulled from the garden never to be seen again. We don't plant for pretty around here. Pooka's humming bird hanger is doing well. The flowers just keep getting bigger, however, the cold weather is causing it some issues since it does not have any ground to keep it warm. The lemon tree has a few more lemons about to finish riping and some new ones starting. Although it may need a bigger pot next year.

Long view of the messy deck

Oh the mess that is my back deck. We have lettuce and spinach that has bolted, the tomatoes on the end of the deck by the table have decided to eat the chairs. No one can say I only show the pretty shots. The blueberry bushes and lilac are doing well in their little pots, Although Audrey the morning glory never did do well this year. We got a couple of flowers, but for the most part it has just been a few leaves. I will admit this area looks better today then when I took these pictures at the begining of the month because I started to clear out most of the dead/dying plants for fall. You can't really see from this view, but the lime tree actually has limes that are getting bigger on it, so now I wait and see if we have fresh limes at Christmas.

Onion bed

 As you can tell, 99% of our onions have been harvested. I should of planted something here, but there are a few bulbs we missed. I just recently heard of a variety of onion I can plant in the fall. Our onion crop is generally fairly small onions and we need to expand this crop. I am hoping the fall variety (once I order them) will help with that. These guys will be put in the same bed for 2 years just so I can see if it works and how well. This is where Pooka yells "FOR SCIENCE" . We admit we are learning new things and experimenting on what works.

Brandywine, Rainbow cherry and fireball tomatoes

Tomatoes and more tomatoes. These are the brandywine, fireball and rainbow cherry tomatoes. I swear you should start calling Pooka Dr. Mendel. Somehow in this section grows what we are calling the Pooka tomato which is a purple/black roma. I didn't plant anything like that in the entire yard, so I have no idea where it is coming from. Also, we have fallen in love with the Brandywine tomato. Its a nice meaty tomato but we have pulled some off the plant that are a lb a piece. While it is more a paste tomato, we have used it as slicer, and are considering getting rid of all the Beefsteaks once we run out of seeds.

Tomatoes, Basil, Carnival, long sweets and cubanelle peppers

The tomatoes are rather imposing and eating my deck. The pea plants were eaten by the tomatoes and pulled fairly early. The basil has held its own, but is still fairly small. We still cannot grow a bell pepper to save our lives. I don't know what it is, but they never seem to produce. The long sweets are loving this spot, as are the cubanelle peppers. But the bell peppers we may just give up on for our friendly peppers. The purple peas are very dead in this picture, and should of been ripped out by now. They did not restart when I reseeded them.

Beefsteak, Roma and Blueberry tomatoes with pots

The rest of the tomato jungle. I have had a couple of tomato leaves get singed by the grill, but all in all the tomatoes like this spot. I don't think this is the tomatoes favorite spot, but it works. The beefsteak and romas are doing well but the blueberry tomatoes are exploding, and Pooka loves all the colors they come in. I guess its another time to call her Dr. Mendel since they have grown to multiple colors. We have 2 little watermelons growing in the pots and the raspberries are doing well.

Failure

Another year, another failure with corn. It seemed to be doing well in the pot and then a windstorm came through and it was done. I think next year we will try this in a small section of the yard. But unless something changes, I will not be buying more seeds of it. So we have until this packet of seeds dies to figure out what we are doing wrong. Where we live, you go a couple miles in almost any direction and all you see is corn. Really makes you wonder what we are doing wrong we can't grow it around here.

Tomatoillos

 The tomatillos are doing wonderfully. We are getting a ton to cook with. However, the purple ones only turn purple when they are left on the plant after they split their lantern. They don't seem to last on the plant long enough to do so. This is another plant that will be sticking around, and we may increase what we are planting of it. We will have to see how much room is in the garden next year.

Hot Peppers and Eggplant

The hot peppers and eggplants are doing well. After they got big enough to hold off mr. Bunny. Daddy loves this variety of jalapeno since it grows a large amount very quickly. However, they have been very mild this year (As well as the poblanos). Hot peppers do require hot dry weather to get hotter peppers that we just haven't had. The poblanos make a good substitute for green peppers in most of our dishes, so they will be sticking around for a long time.

Broccoli and Cucumbers

The broccolli has done well. The geometric broccoli is still not producing (So much for that one) but the standard broccoli has done well, even if every single broccoli plant has decided to fall over. I should stake them up, but for now they are okay where they are at. The cucumbers had done okay. They did loads better than last year but not as well as the first year. This location they get some sort of pest that ate just the skin off the cucumbers, but if you peeled them they were fine and maybe some squash beetles because the plant is suddenly dying back. But in the end, we got our cucumbers for lunches and salads and some pickles so we are happy.

Like every year, we have some successes and some failures. But that is what happens in science. Not everything works the way you think, so you keep trying until you figure out what does work.

Siracha-cha-cha

We made siracha from our 5 color Chinese peppers the other night. This was a trial batch to see if we even like it before we invest into making more of it. Before I tell you how we made it, I do want to admit that we no longer call siracha well, siracha. Pooka decided that every time someone says the word siracha, then she breaks out dancing while saying "siracha-cha-cha." It is a very elegant little dance, which does remind me of some of my professional dancer friends. To start we took about 4 oz of hot peppers, which made about a 1/4 batch from a recipe I found here.

5 color Chinese Peppers

These peppers were chopped and mostly seeded and placed in a pot with some vinegar, salt and garlic. I will say the smell was a bit strong. Not too bad, but it did remind us to be careful. Also, please remember when using hot peppers to wear gloves.  

Cooking it down

Once they had cooked a bit, we tried using our immersion blender. The liquid level was a bit low for this, so instead we put it in the blender/grinder attachment for the stick blender. This worked quite well, but make sure when your done blending, you give it a few minutes after blending to allow everything to settle again before removing it from the blender.

Peppers all blended up

Then it was pour into a jar. Daddy said it tasted like siracha-cha-cha if it is a bit orange. Had we waited till we had enough red peppers, it would be more of a red color. However, we decided to try it before all the peppers were red, so our siracha-cha-cha is more of an orange color. If Daddy likes this, we may be planting more 5 color chinese peppers next year to give Daddy a whole year worth of siracha-cha-cha.

Finished Siracha-cha-cha

Rainbow Salsa

Recently we had to clean out the fridge. The garden had produced some much that we really needed to do something. We had tomatoes, but we had so many peppers and onions we decided to make salsa. But none of the recipes we found really encompassed everything we had, so we decided to make Pooka's Rainbow Salsa. It got its name from the rainbow of colors that went into it and Pooka loves making things colorful.

Tomatoes, onion, purple, sweet and Jalapenos all in the pot.

Into it went:
19 cups of tomatoes (including Roma, Beefsteak, Betterboy, Fireball and colored Cherry tomatoes)
6 cups onion (red and white)
9 1/2 Jalapenos
3 cups Bell peppers (Red peppers, Sweet peppers and cubanelles)
3 purple 5 color peppers
1 bulb of garlic
3 cups of Cilantro

Rainbow salsa all ready to go

We ended up making 11 pints of Rainbow Salsa. They look so good, we are only hoping it is not too hot with all the purple peppers in it. We will see, but it definitely looks pretty good. It looks a bit less colorful in the jars, but it should taste good.

Close up of the salsa

Colors

Pooka has always loved her pretty purple peppers. She knows she is not allowed to eat them, but she loves the vibrant purple color of them.She has waited and wondered what other colors they may have.

Purple peppers

Her wait is over. Yesterday she was walking through the garden and screamed "It's red Mommy, The pepper turned red." Sure enough, one of her peppers had finally turned red. The rest of the bush shows all the other colors the peppers turned. Now to see if the when they turn red if they get any milder. That is a test for Daddy

Lots of colors

Purple Peppers

The purple peppers are very pretty looking, and are fairly small, so they look innocent. They are not. In fact, we tried these recently and Pooka is not allowed to try them. I swear I think my tongue started bleeding. Daddy on the other hand loves hot peppers, and he admitted they are a bit hot to eat by themselves. We have been subjecting them to people we know who keep saying they love spicy things. At least it is a good laugh.

 

I will admit we picked them when the peppers are purple. They eventually turn red, so we are waiting to see if they get hotter or milder when they mature, so we are waiting for one to turn red and Daddy will try it again then. Until then, the Purple, to cream, to yellow, to orange to red makes a great coloring in the front yard, if you could see them around the basil plants.

 

We have found that Daddy likes them put in a refrigerator Garlic Dill pickle we make. He said they gave them a bit of a tang, but could actually use a 3rd one into a 1/2 pint jar. That jar barely lasted an hour before Daddy and Uncle M had eaten them all. We also just put them in some salsa, so hopefully they are good like that. We may even try making our own hot pepper flakes with the dehydrator. Nothing will go to waste if I can help it.

 

 

Purple Peppers

Pooka has some purple peppers going from the Chinese 5 color peppers. She is so happy to see such a pretty purple color on her pepper plants. I found them while she was playing and all thoughts of her game were forgotten as she went running to the garden.

Hello purple pepper

When we went outside today there were multiple pepper starting as well as some other peppers that seemed to look a bit yellow. It looks like once these get started, they will be pretty heavy producers.

Multiple peppers

Daddy just wants to see how hot they get. He is hoping we can dehydrate them to make our own hot pepper flakes. He has held off on trying them yet, but he keeps saying he can't wait to try them. 

5 color pepper plant

I will say they are adding a nice pop of color to the front bed, but color is not exactly what we are striving for here. Hopefully they taste good as well.