Posted on 10/01/2025 5:23:58 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
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SESAME DRESSING / Serve over chicken w/ Oriental vegetables.
Whisk or proc/pulse 1 c ea peanut oil, rice vinegar 1/4 c soy sauce 3 tsp dry mustard 2 tsp ea p/butter, grated gingeroot 1 trimmed lge scallion, minced 2 Tbl + 2 tsp sugar 2 tsp ea salt, toasted sesame oil pinch grnd pepper.
That looks pretty good too. And, I like sesame chicken once in a while. :-)
I gotta dig into our range (kitchen electric stove). One burner had quit sometime back, and another has now gone wildly erratic — turn it up past “half”, and it will randomly / suddenly go full up, maybe after 2 minutes, and maybe after 25 minutes. Yesterday I scorched the bottom of some (free range) chicken soup my wife had made. Boy, was she mad! Me too: I see our chickens as an egg source and “emergency reserve” in case the New Madrid Fault decides to go wild again. Butchering one just because she wants some soup like “back home” isn’t part of that plan. And then I ruined the “leftover” soup...
(I would try again to just get her to buy a whole bird @ the grocery store, but I don’t know who has whole free range chickens at a reasonable price.)
Anyway, both “small” burners are ok, and I “think” the large burner that is “out” has had the element itself control go bad. So, I might be able to swap what is hopefully a good control to the burner with the erratic control... It’s an old Frigidaire & parts are hard to find. :-(
“element itself, NOT the control go bad”
(That’s what I get for posting right after I get up!)
Did you tell Beau “Ok. Just don’t shoot toward the house?” :-)
Tonight & tomorrow night, looks like a hard freeze 28-29° in low spots (we are not low!) but there will be widespread frost & I expect we will get that. I’ll put the ferns in the garage for the next 2 days & get the hoses off the faucets, drained & put away. It looks like overnight temps will be above freezing for the following week after the 2 very cold nights & daytime temps are mostly mid-50’s.
I have been & will continue to keep watering my newly planted bushes weekly (we are not getting much rain, certainly less than an inch a week) until the ground freezes (if it does). The boxwoods & helleborus look great - the Rose of Sharons, lilac & rose are losing leaves for the winter so I am keeping my fingers crossed they’re doing ok. Aside from the work involved to get them in the ground, the plants were expensive, so of course I want them to survive. I give them a ‘pep talk’ while I’m watering :-)
This is the recipe I am going to use for canning cinnamon apples:
https://redfeatherfarmohio.com/sliced-and-spiced-fried-apples-canning-recipe/
Many of the recipes I looked at were for pint jars - I wanted quarts. I also like the ingredients for one quart at a time - that way I’ll know each quart has the right amount, rather than making up a batch & dividing between quarts.
I have been making cinnamon apples in the slow cooker each time I want them for a side dish. It takes forever in the slow cooker to get them really soft. I’ll still do it that way if I have time, but I want canned apples for when I am short on time & can empty a jar in a pot & heat them up. Depending on how many jars I can get out of my 3/4 bushel of apples, I may even gift a couple of jars.
It’s an embarrassment to me, but he has a few old toilets down in the pasture that he uses for target practice!
They’re mostly destroyed now, thank goodness! Our toilets in the house have been replaced, so unless he finds one curbside to drag home, this SHOULD be over with!
“Let me take you on a tour of our property...to your right is The Shootin’ Gallery...”
If anyone asks, there’s also a Port-a-Potty on the edge of the woods along the farm lane that he drags to and from remote hunting events, ‘for the ladies.’
*Rolleyes*
I do the best I can with him, but I’m only one woman! In his defense he cleans up nice, has very good manners and is a crack shot and a good dancer! :)
You are blessed for sure.
Thanks for the apple recipe!
Looks like tonight will be our first hard freeze. Today will hit 50, but much less wind than we’re been having, so maybe I can get some straw mulch down in cleaned-out beds? Beau still needs to bring me 5 bales from Farmer Dan.
Beautiful Sunrise today, so there’s that! :)
More cleaning and some cooking for tomorrow to do.
Midwest Lunch Menu is:
Sloppy Joes w/Buns
Relishes (most homemade!)
German Potato Salad
Amish Macaroni Salad
Gooey, thick, chocolate Brownies
Water, Milk, Apple Cider, Coffee
I’m doing a Brisket (Thanks, ‘Chuck’) and veggies in the crock pot for supper. Should be smelling really good in the kitchen later this morning! :)
You know it! I’d take him, free-ranging toilets or not, LOL!
Dad had some old toilets stashed in a shed after he switched them out for taller toilets. I’m glad he never thought to use them for target practice LOL! Once we dug them out of the shed, I took them straight to the dump!
Lucked out - found faucet covers & insulation at the Farm Bureau today (bought the last 2 of the better quality ones) ... no frozen faucets at our house the next 2 nights!
So I just invited 4 people (extended family) over for Thanksgiving dinner on the 27th. There could be an additional 4, depending on if they’ll be in town or not. Our family meal will be the 29th. I just couldn’t stand the thought of nothing going on the 27th, just mom & me, so I invited a cousin & her family, plus her mom, if she’s out of hospital/rehab by then.. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday so this year, I’ll have two!!
While waiting for the sausage making book, I bought some Johnsonville bun sized andouille sausage. It’s a salt bomb with 750 mg, 33% DV of sodium. Ate a few and will be tossing the rest. Even boiled with holes poked in them were overly salty. I’ll stick with brats if buying from the store.
Book is USPS and out for delivery as is the ground Korean Red Pepper for kimchi. Coarse powder. Ought to be here any time now.
I put those cooking grates in the vertical smoker chamber. Now I need some hooks and twine to hang sausage from the racks. Might have to rig something up in the horizontal chamber too since the vertical doesn’t get very hot. It does get plenty smokey though.
Gotta get some gloves too. BBQ guys all wear white knit cotton gloves with food grade nitrile gloves over them. That way they can do pulled pork with the meat still hot. Will help to prevent frozen hands too while hand mixing spices into ground meat.
Mail lady was just here.
Wow, a 1 lb bag of ground Korean red pepper is bigger than what I imagined and I bought two of them. I could fill bunch of spice bottles. Will have to put it in canning jars and store in a cool dark place.
Andouille recipe is hot smoked a single time like many other smoked sausages. No mention of pre-smoked pork roast mixed with raw pork and then smoked again. That’s just weird anyway.
Can also be cold smoked instead. I’ll probably do what lets-make-sausage website says and start with low heat and then increase the temp for the longest possible smoke time without going too long at a low temp where bacteria can form.
Spices in book recipe are garlic, black pepper, kosher salt, cayenne and thyme, same as lets-make-sausage recipe. Traditional wood is pecan and sugarcane. Hickory is another option and is what I’ll do until towards the end when I want it hotter and then I’ll add oak.
Our electric co-op puts out a monthly magazine and in this month’s, they highlight a small business called Hermann Wurst Haus. https://hermannwursthaus.com/
It is October as in Octoberfest. Brats, wursts and beer.
Off to do a little food shopping and pick up my chain saw from the shop.
Here's to a midwestern winter with mild temps, timely rainfall, and none of that nasty white stuff. I'm not a big fan. lol
Speaking of “cleaning up”, I’d better shave B4 I go get my driver’s license renewed tomorrow!!
Question (would have been a good one for my Dad*):
Why are the “breeders” able to come up with, really, fantastic tasting apple hybrids that seem to ship well and store at least fairly well. I’m eating a “sweet tango” apple (Aldi still has them on sale, at least in my neck of the woods), and it is REALLY good. But, when it comes to tomatoes, the breeders can’t seem to come up with good taste to put in the stores.
???
Anybody have a guess?
*Dad was a Forestry prof who did a lot of work in forest genetics - particularly improved Walnut trees.
Drat! NWS has expanded their frost advisory to include us, and then some. It looks like our 1st frost could be fairly severe and kill many plants. I’ll just have to try to cover what I can, bring in wifey’s tropical plants, etc. Her lemongrass should be ok under trees (which still have many leaves).
II we can get through tonight, our lows look to be in the 40’s and 50’s for a couple weeks. So, it’d sure be nice to “survive” the remaining plants tonight.
Of all things, those Asian squash have set a few small fruits, finally. What the heck???
Something has been getting into the garden and digging, so unfortunately, the 2nd biggest Asian Squash is kaput, broken off about 2” below ground level.... :-(
Time to set the live trap there for a couple nights instead of by the chicken houses, I guess. (There’s still a small foot trap near the chicken houses that I can set, but then I have to remember to disable or cover it if / when I let them out in the morning!)
“Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday so this year, I’ll have two!”
I’m hosting Thanksgiving this year, too. My favorite is Easter as I like making a big old HAM with a big old HAM BONE in it but a turkey carcass goes pretty far, too. ;)
Whenever Mom hosts a holiday, you never know who will be there. She invites every ‘stray cat’ who has nowhere else to go - which is very nice of her, and I would want someone to do that for me if I had nowhere to go!
I’m surprised that you had something ‘bad’ from Johnsonville! We love their brats and their ‘Beddar Cheddar’ smoked sausages are Da Bomb! I slice them on the diagonal and fry them up for breakfast sometimes.
But, too much salt isn’t good for anything, and since I’ve never tried it, now I won’t! :)
“But, when it comes to tomatoes, the breeders can’t seem to come up with good taste to put in the stores.”
When it comes to tomatoes you can have TASTE, or you can have Shelf Life & portability.
Pick one. :)
Eating from The Land, Your Hand or Your Garden:
Supper tonight is:
Brisket in the Crock Pot - all day - 8 hours! (Thanks, Chuck! - All Gave Some, Some Gave All)
Stuffing (I wasn’t in a ‘Potato Mood,’)
Green Beans from the garden (blanched, frozen)
Carrots and Onions - which were UNDER the Brisket for all of those 8 hours *DROOL*
The Brisket is sliced against the grain and served with Bob’s Bitchin’ BBQ Sauce (in Dodgeville, WI the ‘Big Town’ of 4K where I go for supplies) in the ‘Carolina’ flavor. Yum!
Their restaurant in Dodgeville is also my go-to place to meet up with friends. They will drive in for miles around to see me, no questions asked - the food is that good! :) (Maybe it ISN’T me they want to see? LOL!)
Slow Cooker Beef Brisket: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/8346498/slow-cooker-beef-brisket/
Bob’s Bitchin’ BBQ Sauce: https://www.bobsbitchinbbq.com/signature-sauces (They ship!)
P.S. Dodgeville is named after Governor Dodge, as is a local State Park. Beau’s Grandparents owned farms in what is now Governor Dodge State Park! We had a family gathering there summer before last and it was so COOL to see all of the old buildings that they left standing (barns, grain bins, etc) when they made that land into a park for all to enjoy and a BIG attraction is all the horse trails; you can go camping with your horse! There’s also a small lake, but Beau’s family didn’t own any ‘Lake Front Property.’
https://www.alltrails.com/parks/us/wisconsin/governor-dodge-state-park
Mail box post arrived today, a day early. It will be my Saturday afternoon project.
I got Christmas presents ordered for the kids today - hurrah! I also ordered some mini measuring spoons for 2 of my nieces- will tie them on a jelly jar as a little something extra. I have a set of these myself & love them - cute & useful:
1/4 teaspoon a Tad
1/8 teaspoon a Dash
1/16 teaspoon a Pinch
1/32 teaspoon a Smidgen
1/64 teaspoon a Drop
https://www.amazon.com/Measuring-Stainless-Tablespoon-Teaspoon-Ingredients/dp/B0C1V7LGF3
I haven’t driven the truck for a good while so I took it for a 30 - 40 minute drive in the beautiful countryside & got it on a battery minder when I got home. I am one battery minder short - have 2, need 3 (2 mowers & truck). Since Little Red’s battery is dead, put that minder on the truck. I’ll be taking a trip with the truck & trailer week after next & I don’t need a dead battery.
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