Yes, we have a garden!!

Hi Folks!!

We do, in fact, have a working garden!!  As you can see it's a real ugly, unkempt, one (more on that in a bit), but God has blessed our efforts and the harvest is coming in!   

That is one weedy looking garden!!

It has been very hot, very wet, and very humid here in NE Indiana this summer (95F/35C with 90ish %RH) and for the first time in many years, the green beans will likely have a poor showing.  We thought the tomatoes would never start turning red, but they seem to be coming on quickly now and we'll have a good tomato year.  Broccoli did well.  Peppers, zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers, and egg plant are doing very well.  Beets and sweet potatoes seem to be doing fine.  Cabbage was a total loss as was the brussel sprouts.   Today is the start of canning season for us, so we are "off to the races"!

We have had some hard times this summer, too, in a couple of ways.

On August 5th De's Mom fell in her apartment.  She shattered her shoulder joint, broke her knee cap, some bones in one hand, and maybe her hip.  Her lifelong heavy smoking habit had left her frail, and her kidneys, heart, and lungs could not tolerate the shock of her injuries.  On August 10th, early in the morning, she went to be with Jesus.  De and her other daughter were with her when she died.  Family, Church, and friends all pulled together to get us through this difficult time, and we held her funeral on the 14th.

To complicate matters a bit more, I seem to have developed a new 'thing' over the last few months.  The preliminary diagnosis is lupus, but we may not know for sure until November, which is the earliest available rheumatologist appointment.  I have the usual bone-crushing fatigue, joint and muscle pain, and funky rash across my nose and cheeks that comes and goes, as well as some balance, speech, and cognitive issues. (No stroke - they checked.)   I use a cane pretty much full-time now for balance, when I'm not in the house. (Thus the shoddy looking garden.  Harder to swing my beefy weed whacker when you need to use it to balance some, too.  It can be done, but it's slooowww.)  

Even with all that, we are still blessed.  The outpouring of caring we received when Mom B. passed was amazing.  Everyone has been great in accommodating me and my new limitations - well beyond what they need to.   I'm getting along OK with prayers, rest, and ibuprofen in equal abundance, and I'm praying for a cancellation that allows me to see the rheumatologist soon.  By God's grace I can do most of what I need to do (including the garden) and some of what I want to do.  He provides for what I can't do.  And we have some really good tasting bell peppers and tomatoes!!

Col. 1:9-12,

Mark

It's still coming in!

So with the kids and grandkids back home for Labor Day, it was time for Gramma and Papa to get hot on catching up on the garden chores.  'Hot' is really the operative word here.  Like some of the rest you we have had unseasonably warm temperatures with what I can only describe as brutally high humidity.  While it makes the trip to the garden a bit less pleasant than it might have been, the tropical-feeling combination has done wonders for turning my green tomatoes into red ones, keeping the pole bean plants cranking out beans, growing my late-planted beets, and coercing my one decent bell pepper plant to produce.  (Odd thing is, the jalapenos and banana peppers in the very same bed, are doing great.  Happens pretty much every year.  Strange...)

De had tomatoes and cabbage from a  previous garden visit to work up, and my job for the day was to collect up the next round.  So off to the garden I went.  Or perhaps I should say "we went".  Regular readers will know I never go the garden alone.  I have a constant cadre of helpers that always are right there with me whenever I'm outside, even if I'm not really in the garden.

The "Team" wanting to help me work on the truck.

Whoops! There are some limits to the kind of help I allow.  This 'help' was short lived.

 So back to the garden.  As I mentioned before, the brutal weather is helping to get the tomatoes finished up.  We're at the stage where some of the plants are 'giving their all for the cause', but I ended up with 1-1/2 five gallon buckets full.  This year we tried "sausage" tomatoes instead of "Roma" tomatoes for sauce and like them a lot better.  They are bigger, 'beefier', and equally prolific.

The tomatoes are still producing...

...and the helpers are still a bit miffed the don't get to help with the harvest.

They do get anything that is not up to 'human consumption' as a reward for their efforts on bug patrol.

The green beans are still going well.

 The green beans are still producing quite well for being this late in our season.  The question is "What does one do when you really don't need anymore?"  That little leading questions leads me to an aside, which will likely not get mentioned very often here.  I've started another blog called "Hoosier Country Christian".  I'm currently intending it to be a source of encouragement for Christians using examples from rural living as illustration points, but (literally) God only knows what it will end up being.  I just know I feel called to write it.  I'm going to address the "having more than I need" question in the new blog and will have that post up before bedtime tonight.  I'll get a link to the new blog from this one up, too.

Fred, my poor hen-pecked rooster, is there to supervise the harvest.

As are a couple of the hens.

The chickens get to come...

... and go through the middle of the trellises.  Other than snitching the occasional blossom, they seem to be focused on the bugs.

 There were also some potatoes to dig.  I had essentially given up on them assuming they had gotten choked out by weeds.  I mowed over the area where they were planted and wrote them off.  This morning I got the urge to take the potato fork and just 'go check'.  Sure enough, there were a few potatoes.  Not a lot, but enough to take the time to dig out of the ground.  There is another illustration here for the other blog.

There is ALWAYS a 'helper' around when there worms involved.

There are more to dig, but with the heat index approaching 100F, I decided they would be fine for a cooler day.  I'm past the point in my life where I'm ready to 'go to the mat' for a few potatoes I didn't even know were there.

All in all, we got a pretty decent harvest on this hot, humid day.

Canned tomato sauce with more in the slow cooker.  Freezer slaw ready for the freezer.

Green beans, banana peppers, and a few 'bonus' potatoes.

There is more increase to come from my weedy garden.  We are blessed!!

Col. 1:9-12,

Mark

Harvest from a "Weedy" Garden

As you may have noticed by my lack of posts, this has not been the wildly productive season I had hoped it would be.  It's not like there is any one, big disastrous event that kept me away from what I wanted to be doing, but there was a whole string of smaller things that kept me out of the garden and away from the computer when the garden really needed some "love" and the blog really needed some posts.  Some planting happened late and some not at all.  Posts were few and far between.  Mulching the beds, adding compost where needed, tilling up the plots, all the normal early garden maintenance just didn't get done and, as a result, we ended up with the weediest garden we have had in a lot of years.  Your blog posts came and went, occasionally unread. Obviously not "the end of the world as we know it", but still a bit disappointing.  And yet, yesterday De and I went to our weedy garden and picked green beans, harvested tomatoes, carefully plucked egg fruit plant off the spiny stalks, broke off cabbages, and pulled up onions.  And I'm posting again!  Even though the weeds are still everywhere, God has given De and I an abundant increase.

I couldn't help but think, as we were pulling our harvest out from among the weeds how similar the garden this year has been to our life this year.  Our lives, from winter on, have not gone as we had hoped.  There was no single 'big' thing that went bad, but it was a season (or two) full of "weeds": Illnesses major and minor, family and community obligations and challenges, lots of extra work at the 'day job', bad weather when the few 'free times' came along - all "weeds".

Lest I give the impression this has been a season of misery let me assure you we have not been miserable at all.  Frustrated at times perhaps, but never unhappy.  Some work was completed and some was not.  Some hopes were realized, and some were not.  A few goals were reached and many will wait until next year, or perhaps the year after that.  But when we stopped to look, we could see the growth in amongst the weeds.  Children and grandchildren alike are maturing even through, and perhaps because of, the tough times.  The 'day job' seems to be secure for as long as I want to work.  The church is growing, and our small group is growing closer.  De and I are both slowly finding physical healing.  There is produce coming in from the garden.

Through all the 'weeds' we see God's hands not only revealing the growth but providing an abundant increase.  As we sort down through all the 'weedy' things and look carefully, we see not a just a few meager things barely surviving, but an abundant harvest of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and occasionally a beautifully ripened, perfect red tomato. We are blessed.

Col. 1:9-12,

Mark

OK - So I was waaayyy wrong!

It's time for Mark to eat a bit more crow along with his sweet corn. You will recall a month or so ago I claimed that while the rest of garden was doing OK, the sweet corn was going to be pretty much a "total loss".  Ummm....  oops.

I few days ago I showed you what turned out be about 4 dozen ears we were able to"'salvage" out of the two corn plots, with more to come.  Then there was yesterday:

Yes Ma'am, that's about 8 dozen more ears of "total loss" in the wheelbarrow along with the Stripetti spaghetti squash, yellow summer squash, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, and enough potatoes for Sunday lunch.  There's probably another 8 to 10 dozen out there yet that will need to come out in a few days.  It seems I was (once again) wrong in a spectacular fashion.

As we were working through getting it all in the freezer, I thought it might be worth noting that De has come up with a somewhat unique way of keeping the usually corn processing mess down a bit.  I don't know if it's original to her, but it works well and is worth sharing.

The whole thing starts the way it does for everyone else, I suppose.   After husking there is cleaning, blanching and cooling.  Our 'assembly line' probably looks much like yours.

Blanching, Cooling and Drying

The interesting part comes when getting the kernels off the cobs.  She has a circular 'corn cutter' to shave the kernels off, but uses an angel food cake pan as a sort of 'catch basin'.  It looks like this:

The ear is perched on the center post of the pan with the cutter over the ear

The cutter gets pushed down along the ear

The kernels end up (mostly) in the cake pan!

She sets her canning funnel in a quart freezer bag

In goes the corn!

Somewhat smaller kernels than usual means about 1 quart of yummy goodness in the freezer for every dozen ears.

For De, this method is quite a bit less messy and considerably quicker than cutting the corn onto a cutting board then scooping it into the bag.  I thought it worth sharing.

Either way, more unexpected blessings out of the garden!  Anyone have a good recipe for crow?

Col. 1:9-12,

Mark