Still picking tomatoes by the 5gal bucket here and making tomato powder by the quart jar via dehydrator. Also made a bunch of vidalia onion powder, some blueberry powder and have a batch of red onions and garlic going now to try those.
Rabbits ate everything but the eggplant, hot peppers and tomatoes. gah. Hopefully we’ll get some zucchini and late sweet corn planted this weekend. Cucumbers too. Fall tomatoes are about 2.5ft tall but their raised bed *really* needs weeding. Didn’t get around to papering and mulching it just yet. This weekend hopefully?
RH Shumway will get an order for pea seed and mmmmaybe some fava beans since those supposedly overwinter down to about 15F. We’ll be overplanting peas to have some for the chickens. It’s ‘crop insurance’ against the price of chicken feed. We also need to order garlic and onion seeds. Onion seeds from HPS and/or Johnny’s. Made the mistake of getting long day onions once, won’t do that again down here. Bulk turnip seed (for chickens, humans and bambis/rabbits) we’ll probably get at the local co-op. We’ll plant cabbages around labor day along with other brassicas like cauliflowers and broccoli.
My big winter squashes got planted late (july4th weekend) but they have gone nuts with all the rain and heat units we’ve gotten lately. Already had 2 to set and these look to be ginormous 50+lbs if everything goes swimmingly. We’ll put the little fence ‘cages’ on top of those this weekend to keep the bambis from getting ideas. Worked last year too. We just took about 3ft of 48” fencing, arched it and made a little tent over each squash and a foot or so of vine either side. When we had a frost we put plastic over that to make a little greenhouse. Picked our last ‘ripe’ squash (and it was ripe on the vine) sometime the week after Thanksgiving. Got about 5 or 6 more weeks on our season with these. We’ll definitely be doing THAT again.
My poor blighty tomatoes are still hanging on. Need to spray their bleach concoction this evening if I can. I’ve gotten about 50+ gallons of tomatoes *more* than I’d have gotten if I hadn’t sprayed.
Next experiment with the dehydrator will be shredded zucchini, carrot, and celery. I’m going to try to make vegetable stock using all powders from my garden. I’ve used canned stuff before and my mom has canned her own. But wow, for the space it takes up it’s kinda spendy on the shelf units.
I have gazillion red raspberry sets from tip layering. Ok, Gazillion might be a bit much. I have 3 ‘mother’ plants that have put off 20+ tip layers so far. And I think my bush cherry plants will survive another year.
It’s all good so far.
“tomato powder “
You mentioned tomato powder and other “powders”...please explain as I haven’t heard of “powders”
“My poor blighty tomatoes are still hanging on. Need to spray their bleach concoction this evening if I can. I’ve gotten about 50+ gallons of tomatoes *more* than I’d have gotten if I hadn’t sprayed.”
Would you be willing to share your bleach concoction recipe, and how do you know when to use it...and how much??? and on what? Sorry for my woeful ignorance. Thanks!