Harvest 10/06/12

Here is a great harvest I picked this past Saturday. We have beets, chard, pumpkins, watermelon, bell peppers, tomatoes, jalapenos, spaghetti squash and butternut squash. The small red tomatoes are a variety bred to make sun dried tomatoes out of. A post of that process will be coming soon. We got some light frost last night, hopefully everything made it. I put some cardboard over a raised bed of lettuce to protect it. I realized I do not have any plastic for the rest of the garden. I will have to stop at the hardware store on the way home.

Harvest 09/18/12

Here is what I picked in the garden after work.

The Amish paste tomatoes are still producing heavily. Our bell pepper plants are full of peppers. I only picked a few because I want to give the rest a chance to change color. I know we have some red, yellow and orange bell peppers I just don't know which plant is which. =) The jalapeno peppers are going nuts. I picked a few and will get the rest in a week or so when they are big enough. We are still getting broccoli heads. I plan on making some salsa with the big tomatoes on the left, the black (red) hungarian peppers and some ground cherries when they come in.

The garden keeps giving

We are getting some monster tomatoes. Its almost impossible to pick them all before they are over ripe. 

These are black Hungarian peppers. They are usually a dark purple / black but if you let them go to long they turn red. They are still good they just get a little bit hotter. 

We are still getting broccoli in September!

This is the first year trying to grow celery. It is doing very well. I think we will plant a lot more next spring.

Here we have beets in the foreground, red chard on the left and yellow chard in the back. The chard is going crazy this time of year. 

This kale was planted the spring before this past spring. It over-wintered, went to seed and is still  producing greens. You can see the dried out top from when it bolted. 

These spaghetti squash will keep for up to 6 months in the right conditions. I don't think they will make it that far. We will be planting a dozen or so vines next year. 

Tomato pest or opportunistic scavenger? And a corn story

We have so many tomatoes coming in right now. We picked a couple hundred recently. But I found something strange on the Amish paste tomatoes. It is a good thing there are hundreds of them!

I have never seen or heard of a woodlouse eating a tomato before. So I was genuinely surprised to find this tomato being devoured by a bunch of tiny crustaceans. It always amazes me to think these little guys are more closely related to lobsters than ladybugs. This is the common rough woodlouse or Porcellio scaber. 

These are not typical tomato pest. From the research I have done it seems they will eat a tomato or strawberry after something else has bitten the fruit. It seems once they have a way in then they will gladly eat your tomatoes. A lot of people believe it is usually a slug that does the initial damage with the woodlice following since they share similar niches, shady wet areas. I am going to put out some beer slug traps and see if I get any slugs. I have been meaning to make more toad habitat so maybe this will motivate me.

So I learned a lesson in corn farming. It seems I should have known this since my father's family were corn and potato farmers, but I guess some skills and info didn't make it from my grandfathers generation to mine. One of the reason we are homesteading and doing the blog is to relearn these important skills so we can pass the information on to our children and grandchildren. This corn is a solid blue corn variety. I planted it next to our yellow and white sweet corn. The color yellow is dominate so if your blue corn gets cross-pollinated by your yellow corn this is what happens. I will only plant sweet corn next year. Lesson learned.  

Small Harvest

The garden is really starting to produce now despite the lack of rain. Soon our 50 + tomato plants will give us a crazy amount of produce. We really need to purchase our pressure canner soon!

Here we have chard, cabbage, tomatoes, summer squash, zucchini, green beans, purple beans and oregano.