And so comes the end of summer

I know, haven't posted in a month... but there is a reason for this. We had a blazing hot Labor day weekend, and with the breaking of summer so did a beloved friend break and leave us- and when he left, he took summer with him. And so comes the end of summer, and Autumn has already made her debut known. I've been kind of lost since Labor day, and overly busy trying not to be lost. Been overly nostolgic- this companion represents 20 years of my life, and with the way and timing of his death, and a lot of other things... I'm just totally fucked up, and have been for weeks. I've lost track of what I've done or not, when what has happened or not... I'm lost without my sister here too.. I'm just a hot mess.

And now has come the end of summer, and it's time for me to move on, and get back to everything.

A lot of my busy has been food processing, especially tomatoes. This has been for real a bumper year for tomatoes- mostly due to my heavy planting of those this year. Let's compare the plantings first.

For whites...
In the top picks are Snow White cherry- super productive, so much so I plan on growing it in following years to compare against other cherry tomatoes as the tomato to beat.
Jack White, White Beauty, and White Queen are all rather nice- didn't get to save any Jack White seed, the bagging just kept failing. Which is a shame, because Jack White was the favorite of the bigger whites. White Beauty is iffy, I got one tomato that I hope will grow to seed. White Queen is secure, I got at least three tomatoes from two plants to carry on seed stock. Which is good, because I really liked White Queen. White Tomesol was nixed, a nice plant but in the end a meh plant. Great White is nixed too- really, really long season, monster plant, and produced the least tomatoes out of the whole bunch.

And for everything else...
All the greens got nixed. They were meh, low producers, nothing to shout about flavor wise. Good small growth habits, but a total pass for the future.
Yellow in, Red out got a seed save- it has a nice growth habit and tasty tomatoes, a decent bi-color. Seed save is for trading and selling rather than growing again. A lovely tomato, but not a repeat here. The other bicolor, Copper River.. now that one I'm trying to repeat. Seed bagging failed, so right now I've taken a cutting to try to clone it- yes, it was that good, despite it being a new hybrid and not normally my kind of growth.
The sole black, Dwarf Wild Fred.. that one is a keeper for sure. Surprising, considering it's one of the newest of the hybrids. But it's growth is wonderful, the plum tomatoes keep coming along all season from early to late, and the tomatoes are beautiful meaty bloody inside- and utterly delicious. I've got two rounds of seed curing, and another two rounds on a couple plants outside that I hope mature before seasons end.
Beaver Lodge slicer- a lovely and rather nice salad sized red, the growth habit is excellent and it produces yields early... of rather average tasting fruit. I got a couple of fruits that hopefully will mature for seed stock, and I took three cuttings for clones to help ensure seed stock. Not for here, I won't really grow it again for us with so many other reds available- but this will become a serious core stock for seeds and plants to sell for years to come.
Patio pretty much sucked, but seed stock got saved for trading and sale. Tumbling Tom Yellow was pretty decent, and seed stock is saved for trade and sale, and for selling plants- and probably to have a basket tomato or two around here most summers because of it's nice tiny growth habit.
Silvery Fir Tree is so beautiful that it makes me weep that I haven't been able to try a tomato yet to see if it tastes as good as it looks- I brought it inside weeks ago when the weather broke to hopefully get it to give me a fruit or few for seed stock.
Totem is beautiful, tiny, and has good fruits- those too came inside early for hopeful seed saving.

All these tomatoes have yielded me bushels of tomatoes... so many I've had to come up with new stuff to preserve! I dehydrated them of course. And smoked them dry. Canned up crushed tomatoes. And moved on to cases of enchilada sauce, some sloppy joe sauce, Fatali White HOT salsa, Not so hot garlic salsa, tomato juice, tomato sauce, Italian stewed tomatoes, frozen cold pressed tomato pulp cubes, condensed cold pressed tomato juice. Rotel style tomatoes, chili sauce, creole sauce, and Indian chutney are done too, now I'm getting down to the last bushel or three of tomatoes, lol.

Been up to my ears in peppers too, with go and nix of course. The number one champion is Black Hungarian pepper. Absolutely beautiful, sweet and hot, prolific as hell.. I've pulled all the peppers from one side of the garage except these to insure the isolation so I can have a shitton of seed, and this one is going to be a regular in the garden every year. I'll do up a whole pepper report at a later date once the peppers are really done.

But since it's been too long since I've last posted, and I should just let this one go.. I'm hitting the publish button now.

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes...

9/1....

This year has been a banner year at Growbox Hill for tomatoes!!

We have had a not so great season- wet and chilly, then dry and hot, then wet and hot, then dry and chilly, and now wet and chilly again. I have had some serious toppling over of some of the tomato cages- the ground is too rich and soft and those tall plants in tall cages require much tougher staking.

But hot damn the season has been good too. I've put up a couple gallons of tomato product in pints so far, and have about three more gallons to go, maybe more. Got a couple of quarts of dehydrated tomatoes. Got some Italian stewed tomatoes in the freezer. Got to smoke up a couple smokers full of tomatoes. And now I'm doing up a large amount of canned tomato juice. And I still have a lot of tomatoes on the plants! So it's likely that I will end up doing up a nice lil batch of extra hot white salsa.

With the way the weather is going, I might end up with a heap of green tomatoes at the end of the season as well- which would be fine by me, we could stand to have some fresh eating tomatoes for a while into the chillier months if possible.

The Patio and Tumbling Tom tomatoes have done well in their containers. The rest of the tomato containers not so much, I think the growing medium just wasn't quite right. But that's ok,  most of them were odd off hybrids I was just testing anyway.

So far beans are not too bad either. Got a big bag in the freezer, several jars of spicy and dilly beans canned up, and a quart of fridge pickled beans. The Top Crops I put in for fall are coming along right fine, I need to get on it with how to rig up frost framing for them soon. But they should see me into a nice fall crop of beans. The Mexican bean beetles really did a job on my summer crop, but I still have a plant or two that is chugging along for seed. The winner of the year so far is the Succotash bean. A couple pounds of beans so far off just a dozen plants, and some of those got pretty beat out by the tomato plants. I've been picking the pods off as they leather up so I don't have to shuck a big ole crop at the end of the year. Mayflower is still going along too, I'm hoping that barring something happening, I will end up with at least seed stock off of the one plant that survived the spring. The Tiger Eye is totally done for the season- enough for seed stock, but the volunteer gourd just simply smothered the few plants I had out of existence pretty early. I did choose the Succotash and Tiger Eye because of the difference in days to maturity, but I didn't think it would have played out quite as it did.
The fall pea crop is popping up. Dunno just what I will get off of them before I need to bring them inside for the winter to finish up their season, but we shall see how it goes. This is the first time I'm trying out a fall crop of beans and peas so I'm hoping for the best.

Peppers are still chugging along, some better than others. Some are kind of not right though, like they are not growing according to the original descriptions- like the Bulgarian Carrot that has two different kinds of plants that came from the same seed stock and the Costeno Amirillo that is supposed to be a green to red pepper but so far is a green to black pepper..... so, I'm saving seed anyway, and taking pictures, and going to ask questions about it. The ones I really know are right, are dead on and beautiful. I'm especially pleased with the fish peppers, they are astonishingly lovely. And the Black Hungarians are as tasty as they are pretty- I have a huge crop of them all in the black stage that I'm just chomping at the bit for them to get to their bright red stage so I can pick them and dry them out for the spice cabinet. Alma Paprika is pretty meh, I think it's getting lost in the bed- and I will need to dedicate some different space to it next year if I want to grow it again.

Squash was a really sad year this year. I lost half the plantings early on. What survived was Futzu Black that is yielding two squash, and the Italian Tondo- the round zuke- and that is getting decimated by squash bugs. Right now I left the last two Tondo's that were getting big on the plants to hopefully ripen up enough to make for some seed stock at the end of the season. I got to pick two small yellow zukes- and those were killed off by squash bugs and by the stupid straw bale- I am just not doing that shit right. Because lo, my buttercup squash died off the same way. The bushel gourds are growing great- but won't have any ripe gourds before the end of the season because of several die offs early on that made their planting out date waaaay later than it should be. And of course, the volunteer gourd that swallowed up the garden is doing beautifully and I should have at least a couple dozen beautiful little gourds at the end of season.

Something that has done exceptionally well this year is the Lemon Scented Pelargonium. Geez for the 5 bucks investment this spring.. I got a mom plant, three junior moms, and now I have about a dozen babies that should be well rooted by the time they need to come in with the frosts. Scented Geraniums hate the cold. But boy oh boy, do these plants fetch top dollars everywhere they are sold because of their bug repelling qualities. So if I get any luck on (and yep the cats seem to utterly ignore these plants so far), I will have a nice pile of these babies that I can sell in the spring along with other plants. Tomatoes and peppers did ok this year, I think the white tomatoes kind of freaked people out. Next year will be blacks, and those are currently raging popular. I'm thinking perhaps if I get some good gumption up, I'll build a more permanent kind of selling table before spring so I can just leave plants and stuff out and not have to haul it all in and out of the pole barn every day- that royally sucked ass.

Anywho, lol. Back to the garden and such. Herbs have done well, I have several cuttings of Rosemary that I need to repot. And marjoram, parsley, and thyme are all good. The mint plantings of this spring are now a huge weedy mass that I don't even want to contemplate. Picked the first flowers of the toothache plant for this winters medicine. Didn't pick a single blossom of chamomile dang it. Chamomile needs a new growing spot, and something else needs to help keep filling in that damn troublesome hill spot.

9/2...

Hot as shit yesterday.. even hotter today.. this hot streak should be lasting well into Sunday and perhaps a day or two beyond.. which means that all those peppers and tomatoes just sitting around will really be ripening up fast. Too bad we did not get this weather a month ago, but hell, it's all good, bring it on now. I'll endeavor to keep up with it all :)

So been checking into how to use up all those dang tomatoes. Gonna go with some hot salsa for sure, and need to freeze up a heap of the smaller tomatoes to do canned quartered tomatoes with. Then I got to thinking about it, we don't do a lot of ketchup or bbq sauce, but we do love sloppy joes.. so now a gallon or two of tomatoes is going to get used up to make sloppy joe sauce. I don't like canned sauce, but I do love to do it up from scratch, but I hate the time consumption that doing it from scratch takes, because tomato product always takes some time, and sloppy joes should be just about instant gratification, lol. 
I'm also looking into getting a fresh propane tank so I can do up some bigger canning outside. If I can can up a gallon at a time in quarts or pint and a halves, that would help things right along. Amazingly enough, I'm running out of canning jars again. I think I might have to invest in a few new rolls of vacuum sealing bags and seal up several quarts or gallons of tomato product to put into the bottom of the freezer, lol.

In some super sad news.. went this morning to feed Glugg. Turned on the light to the aquarium and he had passed away sometime over the night. So I took him out to the sanctuary and buried him on top of Moon- figured both of them would be happier for the companionship and I just didn't feel right flushing him or just leaving him outside for any ole critter to pick apart.
So now I will tear down the aquarium and pack it away for another day when I get another fishie in. Right now I'm kind of not so bummed to be packing the aquarium away... but now I'm thinking about maybe unpacking the hermit crab habitat instead :)

And interesting news.. might be able to go home and visit with family this weekend.. ain't really counting my chickens yet with that one, but I'm utterly dying to visit everyone. If I really get the weekend off, it's a day of faire, and a day of time to hang with my younger sister.. maybe I can squeak in a visit to my older brother too, but not too sure about that, he's a busy boy. So maybe I will get a second vacation this year, how frigging exciting is that?

BeesNeeds Etsy shop is open again!!!

Yep, the etsy shop is back up and running again. It has just been crazy enough of a summer with a lot of other things going on that I kind of had to let the listings just go out and take a deep breath and get through this time.

So now there is jewelry, hand knitted and croched slippers, and some really cook 3D printed stuff. Soon up I will get some more beaded goodness completed for the store, plus I'm starting to do up germination trials on the earliest of my harvested seed. And of course with Halloween coming up, I'm trying to squeeze in a round of getting some good stuff out.

The weather has been pretty wet- so I've been popping outside between the rain drops to do some harvesting and tending to gardens- but mostly cleaning and re-arranging the solarium. It has desperately been needing some care and clean up. It still needs a bunch of hours of work- hauling stuff to where it needs to be hauled off to and general cleaning. Sorting some stuff. But now that I'm thinking about it, it really is my entire workshop- art and craft stuff, gardening, and food stuff. So it's past time I take a bit of tending to that and get it squared up and useable.

I've been a good kid and keeping up with my putting up list- some of my dehydrating is stacking up- I got heaps of stuff in the freezer and the fresh is accumulating slowly...  and canning for real is accumulating. Bummer, another burner is no longer functional on the stove, so I'm down to using two burners very carefully and one electric hot plate. Good thing I've gotten good with small batch processing.

In cooking.. now that I have perfected the Southern Style Squash Casserole.. and I think I'm almost got it set with the Baked White Jambalya casserole... and want something else to do with squash. I'm testing out a Squash Enchilada casserole. I'm thinking about firing up the smoker this weekend to smoke up a bunch and then dehydrating it- the squash might suck up the smoking great then become some incredible smoked powder.

So now it's the 22nd, the weekend. I got the smoker running right now, filled with peppers and black tomatoes. Some of the bean seed in containers never popped, so I planted in some Sugar Pod 2 and Dwarf Grey Sugar peas for fall harvesting, well, hopefully harvesting. Top Crop beans down in the raised bed look great! Which is good because the other bean bed is starting to get shot. Squash plants are starting to crap out too, and it's time to leave a few on the plants to fully mature for future seed stock. The cukes are kind of crapping out too. Tomato cages have fallen over again, and been put back up again. Finally got some tomatoes for seed- a yellow in red out, and one lone snow white.

Got the solarium completely cleaned up, and wow, it looks nice. Actually makes me want to work out there again. I rearranged the counters and boards into one whopping big hutch along the south windows.

Now I have counter space- and the counters can be removed if needed to use elsewhere, say perhaps to make a halloween village? Plus the two shelves up top- obviously Nova decided I set that up just for him, lol. The top shelf currently has all my seed starting stuff stacked across it, but if I need to, I can use that for plants, or to hang lights up high for seed starting.

And I picked the biggest tomato in the garden...

Jack Whites really do grow huge!

But anywho, I got dinner to make and gardens to tend.. and everything else, lol.

Trying to keep up...

Gonna try doing a few days worth of entries at a crack to see if that helps me keep up with the blog more, lol.


So, today is 8/13. I got all the water out of it's catch tubs and bottled up. Planted in the rest of the asparagus plants on the back 40. Watered in containers and the new green bean bed. Moved the Martins Carrot pepper and Silvery Fir tree buckets to the kitchen porch side of the garden so they can get some extra TLC.

Got more tomatoes coming in.. right now I have on the table Beaver Lodge, Copper River, Wild Fred, Snow White, White Queen, Jack White, Tomesol, Totem, and Yellow Out, Red In. I'm trying out some picking at first blush and letting the fruits ripen on the counter to see how well or not that goes.

Right now the freezer and fridge are stuffed stupidly full. Local market had a buy two, get three free on cheeses and meats, and yep, super stocked up on that. Been putting in some serious cooking too- had to put moms ribs in the freezer today in a squeak in space, lol. So no putting tomatoes in the freezer to keep for now, bummer.

Yesterday and today have been cucumber slices on my new dehydrator... Oh, didn't I mention my new dehydrator? Belated birthday present. I made a note of it in my preservation list. Yes, this year I'm being a good kid and keeping track of everything I'm putting up in one blog post. The list is pretty long so far and I'm just starting to swing into the season. Sometime shortly after New Years I'll post it up.

And just a couple random pics.. one of the thirteen pounds of garlic I harvested this year, and just a nice pic of random produce that was sitting on the table tonight.

It's 8/16.. got a smidge of a catch up... On Friday, I worked then it was an evening of socialization with family.. an aunt and uncle in law that I hadn't met yet, then dinner with the inlaws. Mum of course made a smashing dinner, and my FIL served up some lovely wines. The company was wonderful :)
 Then on the ride home, we got a nasty but brief storm. How brief? About 30 minutes. How nasty? enough to topple over three of my tomato cages entirely, and it would have been four if the cage hadn't been caught by the webbing on the trellis. So it was a holy shit morning of getting the cages back upright again.

In a way, I think the cages were both the fault and the save. The tomatoes are really filling up the cages, making them columns of tippyness... but the cages saved the tomatoes from the super crush that a smaller cage would have suffered. Just resetting the tent stakes sufficed for two of the cages, but the one closest in this pic, a Snow White, needed a few re-enforcement rods and a pitchfork stuck in on it's lean side- the cage was really ganked up on the bottom. I think in future years I will be smarter to use 6 stakes instead of 4 in each cage. And keep on it with the inside trimming to help prevent top heaviness, though really, of the bigger whites the primary crop is down low from when the rains were great. Then there is a center section that don't have much, and now I'm getting serious topsets.

Rest of the day was spent tinkering around with jugging up water, and trimming some plants, bla bla bla. Made a chowder of all sorts of dried veggies, fresh taters, and ham. It was frigging good.. but with all the other cooking I've been doing in the last few days, we have a few days worth of leftovers to eat up or freeze soon..  and not much room in the freezer either. Hurry up and shuffle, eat it up, freeze it- vacuum seal for the fridge- eat it up, dehydrate it.. lol.

I know I'm a farmer year round- well almost, I get a winter break for a couple months like teachers do for summer. But hoo-boy this time of year really packs the days in for what to do with it all. I want to get a second chest freezer to sit down in the pole barn for "seriously deep freeze" kind of action so I can do up all the seasons produce, make ahead meals, plus be able to get a side of beef, or pork, or both and have room for hens once we get that going on too. Sometimes I just need prep room in a freezer that I don't have. Sometimes I need to mega put aside stuff. Sometimes we lose power and... shit, I need a pressure canner too, for a lot of other food preservation. It never ends :)

Today was more of the same. Fussy early morning tinking around in the garden picking and such. Afternoon spent in the kitchen frying up a ton of bacon that got pulled out of the freezer and forgotten about- so hours later I had to fry it up or lose it all. Boiled up a dozen eggs for lunches this week, I got a lot of work. Prepped up four trays of sliced tomatoes for the dehydrator- Wild Freds, Tumbling Toms, Beaver Lodge, and Yellow out Red in. Diced up a gallon of various white tomatoes for canning in the morning- the earliest of the blushes have indeed broken and it was time to get on it. And a gallon of dice is pretty good for a couple small batches of canning up pints. Tomatoes take longer to process than pickles, so I would rather go smaller than bigger. Or go really fucking big and hook up the outdoor brewing kettle- but I don't have enough tomatoes for that.. yet.

But it's time to post and get on with more stuff, lol.

Long time, no see....

Yeah, I did that disappearing thing again.. been busy, really busy.

My etsy shop has expired, I need to post up stuff again and get it running again. Maybe this time sell some stuff :)

Quit my morning job cooking. It was too much stress, and I mean STRESS to do the grill, and my sister is going to be away for a while and I need to be home for the morning hours to make sure everything runs ok around here. So it's back to more regular hours at CB, and looking for another, better job again. Ah well.

Adventure mowing has paid off.. there is now a circuit all the way around the perimeter of the property. Sis busted a tire and screwed the deck with a rope, but I got that fixed and now we can mow again. I just need to get some tree trimmings cleaned up off the yard first. The asparagus is looking good on the back 40, I feel I can go ahead and plant in the rest of it back there. The blackberries got wiped out this year by Crazytown- all I got was a mere pint. But I also have a bunch of other fruit in the freezers, so it will be enough to make a pie or something.

The gardens are doing well... and not. The tomatoes are growing like crazy, and we have even had a couple of the earliest ones, Copper River, Wild Fred, Beaver Lodge, and Snow White. Right now Snow White is a for sure keeper, it is one of the tastiest cherry tomatoes I've ever had. I caught and killed my first hornworm the other day... this is a hornworm, gross.

Giant sucker, ain't he?

I also had to pull the small bed of yellow beans- have a Mexican Bean Beetle infestation. Sucktacular.

I didn't find any adults, but found loads of the yellow larve you see on the bottom left in this pic, and a few of the egg clusters. Found them all over when I got back from Gen-con. And ain't nothing to do but pull up the whole plants and dispose of them. Bummer. So a couple days ago I pre-sprouted some Top Crop beans, and yesterday I planted them into one of the raised beds that didn't sprout the beets like I was hoping.

After a great flush of zukes that I picked after getting home from Gen-con, haven't had any new zukes :( Pickled a TON of zukes. But there will be more, keeping my fingers crossed. The succotash beans have been prolific, I'm hoping prolific enough that I can eat and seed with them :)

Need to get a LOT done out in the yard too.

And while I was gone... Gen-con. Holy shit. I haven't been in years and years, and it was mind-boggling. Huge, crazy huge. We did crazy sales. I got a brain in a jar for Nightvale, and a bunch of cool swag. It was a great road trip, I really needed the "vaca", even though it was a working one. And it was extra cool because this is the first road trip sis and I took in a really long time, and it felt really good to have a good adventure with her :)

But it's already 9 AM and all I got done so far is setting up a dehydrator of cuke slices, so I better be off. I will try to get some pics taken today so I can post a bunch :)