First Blueberry Harvest!

 Last week we had our first blueberry harvest which made us very happy!

Yes, it is a small bowl and there are not very many berries.  And yes, they are not as sweet as we hoped for BUT that is because in retrospect, they were not really ripe.  They just looked blue in comparison to the other berries.  We will check again later this week and hope for sweeter berries.

Cotton Ready To Go!

 Yesterday I had the privilege of making a long-ish drive through several counties.  One of the things I saw gave me joy: fields of cotton plants ready to be harvested.  Many fields had already been harvested.

This fluff in the field always catches my attention. I just love to see these cotton bolls ready to harvest. In fact, I would love to harvest some myself then turn them into cotton yarn.  So far I have not found a cotton grower to speak with to get permission to harvest a few plants.  I am not so silly as to think that I would be a great spinner-of-cotton-yarn.  After all, I am not a great spinner of wool yarn which is purported to be much easier than spinning cotton.

In the meantime, I love this photo!

We Have Begun Harvesting the 2020 Garden

There are some real advantages to living in the South.  Our daughter mentioned to me that we must like the long growing season.  Yes, we do!  We had been having kale right along until I ripped up the ones on the porch then moved them to the grow box in the lawn.  We used that spot where the kale had been for the lettuce seedlings we had started.

Also in the grow box we planted a large number of no-name kale plants, which are doing well and turn out not to be curly kale.  They seemed just right to harvest today so I went out and cut a bunch of them.  Also some basil.  ALSO four Sweet 100 tomatoes!

This was so nice to bring into the house.  The tomatoes went onto my breakfast salad and the kale was cooked to death in the Instant Pot for my supper.  Dear One is only a fan of kale chips, not kale any other way,  though if I put a teaspoon of cooked kale on his plate, he will eat it.  But he looks at me when he puts it in his mouth!!!

Last weekend we harvested the wax beans from the porch.  There may be three more beans there but we have had the major harvest from the porch.  They are not prolific producers, sadly.

We do have wax beans in the grow box with lots of blossoms. I hope they produce better.  Maybe two meals instead of one meal!

It is truly wonderful to eat things from your own garden.  You know everything that went into them.  You have total control over what you plant.  The only thing you cannot control is the weather.  When M mentioned how nice it was to have a long growing season, I had to point out that I have heard that many plants die a wretched death in the heat of the summer.  It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

If they all die, then we will plant again in September when things should be a little cooler.  We shall see.

The Great 2019 Garden!

The other morning the temperature dropped to 27 degrees F.  That took care of the basil.  And the tomato plant.

As you can see, the basil is pretty much done for this year.  Tomorrow I will clip off the dead stuff.  I am hoping the roots are still happy in the tub.  Basil was our most productive plant this year. I was so happy with them.  We used a LOT of basil, at least, compared to any other year of our gardening life.

The tomato harvest came in, too.  Or at least, I harvested our tomato crop to save it from further difficulties.  Sadly, one of the tomatoes had fallen on the deck.  I did not see it. I stepped on it.  That was the end of that one...

So...this is the entire tomato harvest.  I do not know if this gem will ripen in the house, but I hope so.

There is a big gardening summit online somewhere for the next few days.  I am hoping to watch some of the presentations to see if they can help us for next year. I just have to remember that here in South Carolina February is a great time to start gardening for the year.

Second Harvest!

On Saturday, 15 June 2013, we harvested three items:  red leaf lettuce, baby spinach leaves, and cilantro!  This is so exciting.

The original garden was put in on 3 May and only one or two spinach plants came up.  The harvested spinach came from those plants.  The red leaf lettuce was from transplants I found at Longacres and planted before the last frost but covered them.  The cilantro is from starts I found at Home Depot and also planted early.

This is very good news: harvesting.  The bad news is that A gave us three fingerling potato starts to plant which I set in the garden but did not get to put them into the ground.  They are now gone, as are a few of the wax bean leaves.  This gets my goat.  I should have planted them immediately.  Never mind the rain and the fatigue.  The only good potato news is that on Wednesday I was at the growbox in the field and found two of the ten potato plants I put in almost three weeks ago had come up.  Yay!

Disposition of today's harvest:  Dear One ate the lettuce and spinach with sugar sprinkled on top and said it was good.  The cilantro went into some salsa verde!  (Click on the link for the recipe...) It is pretty good, but not as good as the Herdez salsa verde we got in Mexico, you can't beat that, but for homemade with a YouTube video as guidance, I call it cilantro well spent!

Applesauce cooked in the pot

Applesauce after sugar and cinnamon added

 We were given some apples that needed to be used immediately and since I was rather tired I just peeled and cored the apples, threw them into a heavy saucepan with some water, covered them and put them on medium low heat.  I then went upstairs to some computer project, forgetting all about the apples until I came down again and could smell them, and hear the little valve on top of the pot jumping!  Fortunately, the medium low heat was just right.

The report on the applesauce is that it is "Good".  That is good news.

Now back to do the dishes.