The carrots are ready!

Just in time for my kitchen remodel, too. Fortunately, I should be able leave these in the ground until it freezes and they will keep on growing, and be just fine. I think carrot soup (in a crock pot) would be an easy meal to make without a kitchen – though that requires a food processor and I’m just not sure if I’m up for washing that in the laundry tub.

We have about one full month without a kitchen sink (or countertops). Cooking is going to get very creative now… and I think I’ll be taking some veggies over to my mom’s house to prepare for freezing!

I brought in about 15 fruits that had fallen off the vines. They are much smaller than the cantaloupe you typically find at a grocery store – some just the size of a softball. But they taste so much better, and they are ripe all the way to the skin – hardly any melon rind at all. The perfect size to eat a half (or a whole!) with a spoon for breakfast. Chris has been enjoying them every morning with some Wildwood Soyogurt.

We have honeydew as well – though I’m not quite sure when to tell of those are ripe. They seem a bit green still, but I bet we will be enjoying them next week!

The Prize of the Trials Cherry Tomato is probably my favorite tomato to grow… and to eat. Even our terribly blighted tomato plants have been producing these like crazy this summer. They are perfect little sweet orange tomatoes, and we’ve never had a problem with blossom end rot or cracks. They are quite a bit larger than a standard cherry tomato. Wonderful halved or quartered in a salad, or – my favorite – two of them sliced on a sandwich.

We had so many of them this year, and so I cut a bunch in half and threw them in the dehydrator overnight. We are just now finishing our sundried tomatoes from last summer, so it’s time to stock up again.

You can pick up Prize of the Trials tomato seeds at Seeds of Change.

I am 90% certain that most of the peppers pictured above are Jimmy Nardello’s Sweet Italian Frying Pepper. If I’m wrong, someone please correct me!

I decided not to label my peppers this year because I figured by the looks of them, I’d know which was which when they were ready. Silly me. I know they aren’t Ancho, Czechoslovakian Black, Cayenne, Purira, Szegedi, Banana, or a bell variety. So that leaves the Nardello family heirloom.

Sweet Refrigerator Pickles

• 4 wide mouth pint mason jars
• 1 head of dill per pint
• 3-4 slicing cucumbers
• 1 large onion
• 2 banana peppers (or hot peppers)
• 4 cloves garlic
• 2 cups white vinegar
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tsp mustard seeds
• 1 tsp salt

Place a bunch of dill (we used the heads, with immature seeds – but the leaves work well too) in each pint jar.  Thinly slice cucumbers, onion, peppers, and garlic and pack jars tightly.  Bring vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds, and salt to a boil. Fill jars with liquid, cover, and refrigerate 2-4 days.  Enjoy!

I ordered three varieties of luffa (sponge gourds) this year. The one above, Rama F1 (hybrid), is supposed to be edible. Maybe we’ll try that next year. I wanted to grow them on our deck in pots, to see if they would vine out and cover the railing. They did a pretty good job, but our deck only gets sunshine for half of the day, and there is a large maple tree in back blocking out a chunk of sun too.

Also, I do not have the patience to water potted plants every day once the temperatures hit 90º. So, part of the reason they aren’t thriving and producing more fruit is probably my fault.

They are fruiting, though! I think I have about 10 luffas total (out of the 20 plants on the deck … not such a good ratio). Luffa has a really long growing season – about 120 days from seedling to maturity. Not optimal for Minnesota summers, but I have always had a desire to grow plants that aren’t supposed to be grown here. The papayas fell victim to an ambitions neighbor’s over-watering (seriously!) but my five-year-old grapefruit tree is still hanging in there!

To prepare for the long growing season, I started a bunch of luffa seeds inside small pots in March. None of them survived the transplant shock and so I had to start over from scratch in May. Fortunately, we had a really warm spring this year; I just hope that the frost holds off long enough so the ones on the vine now can ripen before the season is over.

Here’s what the young fruits look like:

Once these are mature, the skin is supposed to harden and you can peel it off to reveal the sponge. Then you wash the sponge (I’ve read you are supposed to wash it in a bleach solution – I’m guessing this is to prevent mold… I may try one without bleach to see) and leave it in the sun to dry. And then you have a homegrown sponge!

Unlike summer squash and winter squash, the flowers don’t open until the late afternoon. They are quite a bit smaller than other squash flowers, too. The plants are also loaded with ants – it looks like the ants are attracted to the flowers and may be the ones doing a lot of the pollinating.

The deck is a nice place to sit and try to photograph bumblebees… though I don’t think I’ll ever master that skill. Here are a few photos to leave you with, just for fun:

Last weekend I was getting kind of sick of our composting system (piling up compost behind the garden and blocking it off with skids so that Puck won’t eat it), and so I built this. It is made out of untreated 1×4 and 1×6 pine boards. Chris treated it with linseed oil after it was built. I picked up the boards in the standard/less than perfect pile for next to nothing at Menard’s last Saturday.

I’ve been neglecting our blog a bit because I’ve been very busy working… and also, we are planning a kitchen remodel this month! This means that during prime canning and freezing time, we won’t have a working kitchen in our house. Hmm. Not sure if that will be an issue or not.

I finally ripped out all of my zucchini plants, and planted peas where they were. Hopefully we’ll have sugar snap peas in September and October, if the frost holds off long enough!

I had some extra garden space this spring, and decided to pick up some cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon seeds when I was out running errands one afternoon. We tried a couple of melon plants last year, but they didn’t produce any sizable fruit.

These are doing really well, and are quite healthy. They don’t appear to be touched by any type of pest. We do have a woodchuck who lives under the shed though … hopefully Puck will do a good job patrolling the garden and keep him away from these!

I’ve been incredibly busy with work, and the garden seems to change faster than I have time to spend in it!

We have cauliflower, broccoli, turnips, potatoes, beans … and by the time 5:00 roles around, all I want to do is crack open a cold beer and not think about making dinner. I’m going to try and make scalloped turnips tonight – but I think we might be out of soy milk. I’ll take some pictures and post the recipe when I do!

The gladiolas (purple flowers below) are opening up – I did some reading about overwintering the bulbs and separating the corms … I don’t know if I’ll have the patience for that! Any local flower enthusiasts interested in some gladiola bulbs this fall?

That’s my arbor last week – and it’s already changed a lot since then! The cukes are starting to grow on the sides, and I’ve had more than enough daisies for picking this year One thing I did learn this year is that I don’t have the attention span to grow things in pots. We have actually had pretty consistent rain this summer – but those sunflowers in the front dry out after just one day without being watered. I’m surprised they even flowered – compared to the same flowers inside the garden, they are pretty sad.