Gardener's Log : Keyhole Garden date 569. Now that we're several weeks into fall, the temperatures are making their annual wobble between hot and cold. The days are still in the 80's with the occasional tip into the low 90's, but the nights are now dipping into the mid-50's and flirting with the upper 40's a couple days a week. For most of the plants here, those big temperature swings and longer nights are a signal to wrap things up [keep reading...]
Just for giggles I strung a couple of cheap solar-power light strands in the hanging gourd garden and this is the result. Sometimes I surprise even myself.
Last week's heat wave fried & dried the pole beans so fast the pods didn't have time to split. Now I've got a couple pounds of beans waiting for chili season.
After 521 days of continuous production, the early summer veggies in the keyhole garden are all played out, but the mid-summer crops--beans, squash, and pumpkins--are doing just fine. The second half of summer and most of early fall is brutally hot and dry, so I'm going to give part of the bed a couple week's rest before transplanting the late summer and early fall stuff.
The hanging gourd garden is doing well in the heat. A couple of weeks ago I wasn't sure which gourds were growing, but now I can see it's birdhouse, bowl and bottle.
We're 2/3rds of the way through summer, the heat is brutal and it hasn't rained since mid-April. The garden looks tired, but not done yet. Here's photos of how it looked on June 18th and today.
This isn't an apple, it's a bell pepper. The parents, a California Wonder and a Chocolate Bell pepper, made these big, beautiful red peppers with a little deep purple blush. Thick walled and sweet, it's a great pepper for stuffing as well as eating fresh. Thick walled and very sweet. A good pepper for stuffing and in sauces.
Earlier this summer I trellised the gourds to keep them from invading the vegetable garden. Now I have a hanging gourd garden that's filling in beautifully and providing shade for lettuce in an area that usually bakes in the summertime.
We're trying to not let any of the garden produce go to waste this year (much to the chicken's disappointment), so we've been canning, drying, pickling and preserving everything possible.
Sweet peppers are ripe so we're pickling and roasting today so we can preserve them for later. Pickled peppers are delicious and super easy to make with this recipe.
