Posted on 10/09/2021 5:51:55 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
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Would love your popover recipe sometime. Hubby grew up eating them and I have never tried to make them. I just have a muffin tin but if that would work I could make six at a time. Plenty for us. Your recipe is probably great and after 42 years I should really make some.
Putting Sweet Potato and Lentil Stew in the rotation!
Oh, he’s getting Lime Jello, for sure - when he’s cranky, LOL!
Lol.........
Love that pumpkin spice! lol
Beautiful pictures.
Not much happened with my garden this year. After a late start and storm damage, my one remaining tomato plant started producing fall tomatoes just after Labor Day. Got about 2 dozen of the sweetest tasting cherry tomatoes ever! The snapdragons have been producing lots of beautiful flowers since early spring, and the coleus with the beautiful lime green color grew very large! The tuberous begonias never developed more than a few green leaves but nothing more. I have pulled up the tomato plant and the coleus. Next I’m going to the greenhouses to see what is left of the fall plants, hoping there are some pansies and decent looking mums left.
That caterpillar is as disgusting as tomato hornworms.



Picked and snapped another three gallons of pole beans. The vines have stopped blooming, so that will be the end of them for this season.
I'm not impressed with the late-planted okra. It was a short-season dwarf variety, the name of which escapes me at the moment. The plants are beautiful, a bit past knee-high, and it blooms like crazy, but the blossoms want to stick to the pods and that causes them to rot. I suppose it could be blossom blight, but this variety is supposed to be resistant, and I'm not seeing any signs of fungal infection. Anyway, next year I'll plant old reliable Clemson Spineless in June, and have okra running out of my ears for three months like it's supposed to do.
The lonely SuperSteak tomato is still giving up enough to keep us in BLTs a couple times a week. Fall-planted green salad is rocking. Carrot crop is rocking. Turnip and rutabaga are coming along nicely. Kale is lush. I need to prep a spot to plant garlic. It's almost time to get that stuff in the ground.
I placed the last of the cobble on the pond bank, and came in behind it with a layer of smaller stuff on the bare section of gully wash at the top of the pond. That should stop the erosion that's been occurring, and hopefully will help a bit with settling out some sediment during big rain events. I'm pondering clearing the brush off of this area and excavating a proper settling basin. 20'x30'-ish, and a couple feet deep should last for several years before it would need to be cleaned out.


Pumpkin Cornbread
This pumpkin cornbread is the perfect fall side dish – infused with real pumpkin, fall spices, and brown sugar, it's the perfect savory-sweet bread you crave. It will pair gorgeously with anything you serve it with. Top it with homemade honey cinnamon butter!
Ingredients
Pumpkin Cornbread 1 cup cornmeal 1 cup all purpose flour 2 teaspoons pumpkin spice 2 teaspoons baking powder 3/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1 cup pumpkin puree 1/2 cup sour cream 1/2 cup brown sugar 1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted 2 eggs
Honey Cinnamon Butter
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature 2 Tablespoons honey 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pumpkin spice
Instructions ..... Whisk cornmeal, flour, pumpkin spice, baking powder, salt, and baking soda. Then whisk pumpkin puree, sour cream, brown sugar, melted butter and eggs. Gently fold flour mixture into pumpkin mixture, mixing until just combined. Pour into sprayed 9" square pan, spread evenly. Bake 400 deg 20-30 min, til pick in center comes out clean. Cool in pan 10-15 minutes. Cut into squares and serve with honey cinnamon butter.
Honey Cinnamon Butter--combine room temperature butter, honey, salt, and pumpkin spice seasoning mix.
Store any leftovers in an airtight container for 1-3 days. You can leave it on the counter! Or store it in the fridge for longer, but it will harden up.
Everything (but the Okra) sounds wonderfully productive, Augie! :)
I think Okra is one of the most beautiful plants, too - reminds me of Hibiscus when it blooms. I grew some red this season, just for garden decor.
We are expecting rain and thunderstorms all day, so I just battened down the hatches on the greenhouse. ‘Flaps down’ as it were! ;)
11 Mistakes We Made Establishing a 5,000 Square Foot Garden ~ Rural Sprout Website
When my husband and I moved to our southwest Michigan homestead in the winter of 2018, one of the first priorities was establishing a massive garden.
We dreamed of freezers filled with greens, a pantry piled high with preserved tomatoes, and enough pumpkins and butternut squash to supply us in creamy soups throughout the year.
The first step was choosing a space on our 34-acre property that was close enough to the house for easy access without the risk of being shaded out by the tall maples that lined the drive.
We settled on an eastern patch of exhausted hay field, tilled it up, and bordered it with five-foot fencing.
In all, the space measures approximately 50 feet by 100 feet, for about 5,000 square feet of gardening space.
Now we are in our second growing season on the property.
In many ways, I’ve realized my dream of eating homegrown produce throughout the year, but it hasn’t been without some herculean effort—and a lot of failures along the way.
It turns out that setting up our own garden was a vastly different experience than growing for others on established organic farms, and I learned a lot about plant maintenance in the process.
Below, I’ll go through some of our biggest lessons from the past two years. Learn from our mistakes, and you’ll be that much closer to getting your garden into peak production mode.
1. Don’t Go Too Big Too Fast
When we first started planning out our garden, overenthusiasm got the best of us.
So many plant descriptions in seed catalogs were calling my name, and we purchased far more varieties than we could hope to master in a single season.
Compounding the problem, we were turning hardpacked hayfields into a garden space, which meant our first year was spent dealing with a dense mass of weedy roots that took the entire growing season to eliminate fully.
The end result?
We planted less than half of our available garden space the first year, and more than a quarter of our seed varieties never even made it into the ground. This means that we’ve struggled to reclaim the unused spaces from weeds this year because we didn’t bother to maintain them in the middle of last season.
Overextending ourselves at the beginning led to a lot of wasted seeds, tilling, and bed prepping last year with little to show for it in the long run. Our time would have been better spent cultivating a more modest growing space that we could have scaled up over time.
Author’s Website: https://firstrootsfarm.com/
Another good idea. Could also be soaked in some milk or cream for Beau’s comfort.
I made Popovers last night - he INSISTS that he can eat those, even if his jaw is wired shut, LOL! And he wants ORANGE Sherbet and nothing else. ;)
I had a friend that stayed with me when she was recovering from dental surgery and she DID have her jaw wired shut. I made her a LOT of smoothies for those weeks. She was a real trooper through it all, though!
Blender everything w/ liquid .....even meats......put it in a glass.....give him a straw.
Hibiscus doesn’t seem to like the soil in my part of the world. Mrs. Augie, being a cracker from Florida, plants it every year anyway.
Finally, a few days ago, one of them bloomed. First time since we moved out here in ‘08 that it’s happened. She put a flower bed on a spot that used to have a nectarine tree. I had added a mountain of compost there after I plucked the sick tree back in the spring. Maybe that’s the key?
We’re going to dig this one up, stick it in a pot, and bring it inside for the winter.
The surgery will be on the roof of his mouth - no sucking allowed, just noisy slurping. ;)

Hum. Not the usual Liz recipe! (This is how they fed meals to the solitary confinment prisoners in Alcatraz, in a glass!)
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