nothing doin

 I found myself with less and less time as the summer went on and now that we're into the fall I don't seem to have any content to write about.  The garden obviously did pretty well this summer and we got lots of yummy veggies out of it.  The top picture was taken over a month ago and just shows another random day harvest.  The bottom was one of the last harvests.  We got tons and tons of Habanero and Serrano peppers. So many that I didn't know what to do with them. So neighbors and friends got a lot. 

One of the last harvests of the 2010 season

We made some awesome Jalapeno poppers, but unfortunately I started heating the oil too soon and we all got agitated lungs. They were indeed yummy, but next time I'll do the oil differently.  I remember one time we were deep frying some breaded eggplant and I did the same thing (started the oil too soon).  It was a teflon pan and it was well used (ie. damaged/scratched). Apparently previous foods and/or the teflon itself lets off some horrendous fumes and it had the four of us tearing and crying.  We had to leave the house and I won't use a teflon coated pan again...bad news.

The garden is done for the year. We pulled up the remaining plants and will start up again in the spring. Not sure what to do with the blog during the off season, so until next season...

homemade salsa

Our latest harvest... (not too shabby)

I've heard cherry tomatoes don't make the best salsa, but after experimenting I'd have to disagree. Unfortunately all of the ingredients are not from our garden. We didn't grow onion, garlic or cilantro....or the squeeze of lime juice I squirted in, but the tomatoes, jalapeno, serrano, and white pepper are all ours.

Homemade salsa with Pop's Rum/Tonic

All I have to say is this is what makes the garden worth it....that and YUM!!

Jalapeno peppers and cherry tomatoes

At the beginning of the season I planted more seeds than I can fit in the garden. My thinking is that if any of them don't take, I'll still have plenty to put in the ground.  However, I don't have the heart to just throw away/kill a healthy plant. So when they all "took" and were growing healthy, I squeezed them into the garden.  I've learned in past years that I can't go crazy and plant too many because the garden will just grow out of control and the plants will grow into each other and just make a mess.  So while our garden is bigger this year and the plants are spaced out better, I still have the problem of overcrowding and too many of certain veggies...namely jalapeno peppers and cherry tomatoes.

All of this is complicated by the life-sucking weeds that grew underneath my weed barrier.  They then rallied forces with mother nature and destroyed the weed barrier altogether.  I have since weeded out most of them and the veggie plants are doing well and yielding some yummy food.

I have so many jalapeno peppers I don't know what to do with them. I'm the only one in the house that eats them or likes spicy food.  I want to make salsa, but that won't use up all of my jalapenos.  So I've been experimenting.... slicing up the peppers and putting them on and in everything. They are not particularly hot this year, so I can almost eat them by themselves.  I had some last month on a burrito from a place called Tijuana Flats that were so hot I couldn't eat them. It's interesting that there could be so much variety within the same family of pepper.  In any case, I sliced mine up and ate them on a cracker with a slice of cherry tomato.  It wasn't bad, but there's only so much I want to eat.  Recently I chopped it up and threw it in my mac n cheese. It was surprisingly yummy and I'd do it again.

Weed-be-gone

The garden has been overwhelmed with weeds. As you can see, my sub-title of "daily write-up" is no longer accurate due to the fact that I've been weeding and harvesting and trying to keep the plants healthy.  We had a tremendous storm/wind come through last week.  Most of my tomato cages have been pulled out of the ground due to the growth of the plants and the storm knocked them all over.  I'm thinking the cages are not the best solution for keeping my tomatoes off the ground, so I'll try stakes next year and see how that goes.

I just did a google search for lettuce plants. Mine appears to be alien since there were no other images like mine.  I'm not sure what type of lettuce I planted as I ripped the entire top of the package off.  However, looking at it, it says "Crisp & Colorful" on the bottom. Going to Burpee's website I couldn't really find one that looked like mine.

Having been gone for 10 days or so, I've missed the opportunity to update the blog. But more importantly I've missed the opportunity to weed.  The garden obviously went through a growth spurt.  I like the layout I have here. There's a place for me to get into the garden and the big tomatoes are off to the sides. Unfortunately once I get in there the various squash plants make it difficult to move around.

Our yummy spaghetti squash escaped the fence, but it looks none the worse.  Reading around some sites, it doesn't seem to matter when I pull this off the vine, but some suggest waiting for the vine to turn brown or the shell of the squash turns hard.  Doubt I'll wait that long because just thinking about it makes me hungry.

Here's another view from the other side.  You can see the pepper plants and squash mixed in there, but mostly all you see are those nasty nutrient-sucking garden killers known as weeds.  The poor excuse of a weed barrier has all but disintegrated.  Each step I take tears a new hole, but it doesn't matter anyway because the weeds grew up under the barrier, and pushed it up high enough to find enough light to grow sideways. And now that it's being destroyed, I'm wondering why I even put it down in the first place.  Now I know they say weed barrier is used under a layer of mulch and whatnot, so I guess I can't totally blame it for disintegrating, but I've had success with it in the past.  I will recruit my family and start pulling up weeds the old fashioned way, but I think I'll have a chat with some fellow bloggers about what they do. Taking a look at Skippy's post-vacation garden is a lot different then mine. I don't see any weeds in her garden.

This is about our 2nd harvest from the garden this year. The squash are a big too large for my tastes, but I gave 2 away in the hopes that someone will enjoy them.  The lettuce plants grew up instead of out and look all weird now. I'll have a pic of that next time.  Our first cucumber and jalapeno peppers went to the family that watered our garden while I was away and peas got gobbled up when I turned my back.

Veggies-a-plenty

Here's an example of why tomato cages are the pits. I can't do a thing about this without hurting the plant or removing the cage.  Hopefully the cage can still support the rest of the plant because I'm looking forward to eating some yummy cherry tomatoes.

Here's one of the branches splitting off of the plant. I could just rip it off and be done with it, but I won't willingly rip off a part that's still growing and contains enough of a lifeline to produce those aforementioned yummy cherry tomatoes.

I believe we have our first spaghetti squash. These are my favorite. I've never let them grow up the fence before and I can only imagine the stress it will put on the vine as they get bigger, but you gain the benefit of my (soon-to-be) 1st hand experience to determine this method.

The butternut squash are also coming in. My wife's favorite. She makes fries out of them. Yummm!

And finally my first cucumber ever. It looks a bit puny, but I have high hopes for it and will nurse it along to the delicious veggies it is.

We haven't had much rain in CT lately. While I have been neglecting the lawn... or as I like to call it, the hay field, I've been pretty good about keeping the gardens watered.  Unfortunately, I did not consider our tree that's only been in the ground for 2 years. The neighbors trees seem to be doing well, but ours has dried up and the leaves are brown and wilted. I know this is bad, but I'm hoping it can survive with daily watering.  If anyone has any insight into this, please share.  I looked around a little online, but can't really find an answer. It was mentioned here, but I'm not sure how long "prolonged" means.

The garden is doing well and thriving. We've already eaten some lettuce and squash and the tomatoes are starting to show up. I've done my best trying to guide the tomato plants and keep them in their cages, but inevitably a branch will sprout out undetected and then grow so it pushes the cage up and out of the ground.  I'm not sure there's a fix for this other than to use a different method. This one looks cool, but I'm kind of lost at how the whole plant would stay up. I'm noticing mine have heavy branches that fall down and rip themselves off the main stalk. I've read they will form new root systems and survive and I know I have to keep them off the ground, so I'll probably start tying them off to stakes.

Good Eats!

Well, it's like I said... watching water boil and watching your garden grow is the same thing. I turned my attention to other things for a little bit and when I turned around, VOILA!! the garden is growing fast.  I thought I might be behind on the CT time table, but seeing as how we just had some lettuce and our first summer squash last night, I'd say we're doing pretty good.  I can see baby tomatoes on the cherry plants, but the big boys are still a bit small.

We didn't do anything fancy...just washed it and cut it up and tossed it in with our lettuce. Cutting the squash off the plant while it's still somewhat small was definitely a good choice... it tastes better and the seeds aren't all big and gross in my mouth. YUMMY!! 

This was the first time I've ever had fresh from the garden lettuce. It was the best lettuce ever. I have no idea what variety it is (so if you recognize it, lay it on me), but it tasted great and the whole "fresh" thing beats the grocery store any day. Oh and Yeah for no pesticides!!!!  My wife (via Grace-thank you) had the great idea to just tear off what we need for dinner and not rip the whole head up. I totally would have lopped the poor plants head off, but fortunately my wife is smarter than that.

squash stems revisited

After I posted about my squash stem splitting, I was really wondering why only 1 out of my 10 squash plants had split. So I lifted some leaves and looked a bit closer. I was mistaken.... 4 out of my 10 are split. They are all doing well so I won't be trying any fancy fixes like taping them or burying the stems in dirt. I'm going to let them go and keep an eye on them.  But this still begs the question, why only some of the plants are splitting and not all of them. There's too many variations in the garden to really nail down an answer, but my guess is:

But seriously folks, I think it's just a matter of placement in the garden and how much water they're each getting. Clearly they're not being treated equal, but they ones that are splitting are the ones that are growing faster (bigger) and getting more sunlight

split stem and cucumber beetle

I was checking out the garden and pulling the stray weeds and whatnot when I noticed this squash plant growing towards another. I went to redirect it when I noticed this split down the middle of the stem.  I thought: Hmmm, this can't be healthy. But looking around the internet I discovered that it's pretty common. While it's not an ideal situation for the plant, it can still survive.  Since I never rip anything out of the ground until it's brown and withered away, I'll keep an eye on this one and leave it be.

At first I suspected this little guy in the center of the picture (silly little cucumber beetle) but they destroy plants by eating roots and spreading their nasty little germs on the plants (not splitting the stems). Thus my cucumber:

I'm not a big insecticide fan so reading up a bit, I learned that I'll be picking these guys off my plants and chucking them deep into the woods.

Cukes

I'm not sure why I have so much trouble growing cucumbers.  It looks like it should be growing like my squash...it's all vine-like with blooms.  But for whatever reason the cucumber plant is not happy in my garden.  The leaves look half-eaten or half-dead and it's not growing as fast as the squash plants. So, here's a healthy looking one I found on the internet and my cucumber plant:

If we were to imagine the cucumber plants as humans, here's how they would compare:

The first is a normal person, the second is a person grown in the Chris Bantz Garden.  I'll find the cure for zombie and my plant shall thrive.

Chris Bantz Garden - Week 4

As you can see, there's not much going on in the veggie garden. The plants are growing, but as I mentioned in an earlier post; it's like watching water boil. The tomato plants are cruising along and all the plants seem pretty healthy (except the cucumber plant - looks a bit sickly).

Normally I talk about the bluebirds in the backyard in the Chris Bantz pumpkin blog, but since there's a lull in topics for the veggies, I thought I'd share a pic:

You can see the little babies in there waiting for the momma bird to come home with lunch. The little guys are still vying for that first morsel.

If gardening and birds isn't your thing, check out my game-related blogs at 1up.com.

Plant placement

Each year I vow to be more careful where I put the plants in the garden and each year it doesn't seem to matter since they grow all over the place anyway.  As you can see from the nice neat rows in the picture, I've learned a little about placing vines around the outside and the smaller plants toward the middle. Having a little helper while setting up my rows ensured that plants not be placed perfectly. But that's not really a big deal for our backyard garden. I love having help and we'll see how they grow as they get older.

Here's a picture of the garden from a different angle. I chose this angle because of the wascilly wabbit drooling over the delicious looking plants just out of reach.  Botch mentioned something about Fort Knox or keeping a herd of buffalo out of my garden with my over-the-top fence, but here we see why I have the fence.  What I don't understand is while this little bunny is eye-ballin our yummy vegetables, why doesn't he hop a few yards over to the neighbors non-fenced garden and eat it up?  Don't get me wrong, I don't want my neighbors garden to get eaten any more than I want ours to get gobbled up. I still wonder why I need a fence and my neighbors do not. Perhaps they use Bloodmeal?  Maybe it's the type of vegetable. When the little guys were getting into my garden they ate up all the pepper plants and beans (can't remember what else I had out there), but they left the tomato plants alone.

I want to try a blowgun. They're illegal in CA and MA, but I found no such law for CT.  I wouldn't use it with deadly force and skewer the hapless Lagomorpha (it's not a rodent), but instead would opt for the stun darts or practice darts.  They're not harmful...they just give a sting to the surprised animal and hopefully teach them that this yard is no longer safe for its garden-viewing pleasure.  One problem with this idea is that if the offending mammal sees me, then it associates the pain with me and not the yard (at least that's what I read) and I can't really get close enough to reach it with my garden being so far away from the house.  Maybe some practice?  Then I just have to contend with embarrassing my wife as my neighbors observe me slithering through the grass with a 4' tube. Click the picture to see it in action:

Squash grows up, squash falls down?

It was suggested to lead the squash plants to the fence so they can climb along it and not take over the garden. Last year the squash dominated the garden and there was nowhere to walk because the vines ran into everything.  But now my question is what happens when a big ole butternut squash starts growing 3' off the ground?  Will the vine support its weight or will it eventually get big enough to pull the vine off the fence. Any thoughts on that?

Chris Bantz Garden - Week 3

I love drastic changes in the weather. I love how in the winter you can go to sleep and the sky is clear, but when you wake up there's 4 inches of snow on the ground. I love thunderstorms that come out of nowhere and shake your house with giant eye-opening BOOOMs.  I love heavy rains and I love strong winds.  What I don't like, is when that strong wind tears up my young garden.  Now I may be exaggerating a little, but the picture above clearly shows what can happen if you don't protect the wee babies.  This is all that's left of one of my two cucumber plants.  This is the one that was pinched in the stem. I thought it was going to pull through because the leaves on it looked healthy and green and it had a flower.  Apparently the wind was strong enough to turn that pinch into an amputation as the entire plant was ripped clean. Arg, why do I have so much trouble growing cukes?

grass-be-gone

There's nothing I can really do to stop the grass from growing underground right this second, so I just lifted the euonymus branches up and grabbed the grass as low as I could and started pulling it out.  One of these days I will install the black edging but for now it looks pretty good.

The Chris Bantz Vegetable Garden is doing well. The little thunderstorm that rolled through yesterday seems to have yielded enough water so I don't have to hose it down.  I noticed one of the cucumber plants was bent in the main stem.  It looks pinched, but I'm hoping it's not so damaged that it can't recover.  Aside from the one squash plant that shriveled up, most of the other plants look great. Even the shriveled up squash has new growth on it, so I'm not giving up hope on it.  I would like to thank Grace for her generous addition to our garden:

Peas!! Unfortunately one of the peas shriveled up already, but the others made it into the garden. This is our first attempt at peas, so wish us luck. 

When they get a little bigger, I'll put in some support poles for them to climb.

Chris Bantz Garden - Week 2

I'm typically not going to write on the weekends, so I'm either going to have to start skipping days with my current naming scheme or switch to the easier method of weekly titles.  I'll try a few things out and see what sticks.

Since there's not much activity in the garden right now, I thought I'd talk about one of our other plant beds.  The grass growing up inside our shrubs drive me insane.  There was no grass in the pot when we bought the shrub, so where the heck did it come from?  Well, I learned some new words today in trying to answer that very question. Here's two words you've probably never heard of before because frankly, when would they ever come up in conversation?  Stolons (a stem that grows sideways along the ground and spawns new grass)  and Rhizomes (a stem that grows underground to spawn new grass). Now I want you to try and work that into a conversation soon:

Hey Suzy, how are the kids doing?
Good Helen, except little Timmy discovered a whole series of Stolons out back. You would think we only have to worry about Rhizomes, but sheesh!!! Two methods of reproducing....ARGGG!!!
(Helen nods her head and slowly backs away....)

Anyway, now I know why people use that black plastic edging...it keeps the plant beds nice & neat and keeps new grass out of your beds.

too late with the lechuga

Each year, we try a new vegetable in the garden. Last year was the first time we tried squash we were quite successful.  This year, it's lettuce.  Having done some simple research (ie. asked my dad) about lettuce, I learned that's it prefers the colder months.  So it should have been put in the ground sometime in March (I think), but it didn't happen. It's in the garden now and its leaves look healthy, but I'm not sure what the future holds for our 3 lettuce plants.  Can you imagine seeing this lettuce at your local grocery store? I imagine it would look like the picture above (click it for a larger image) Yummmm! :)

Day 6

The weekend brought our first casualty upon us.  I have no idea why this squash plant died, but its leaves shriveled up and does not look as if it will pull through.  The squash plants next to it all appear to be healthy and growing.