Welcome to the fifth week of Garden Life on NOH! I am thoroughly enjoying seeing all the progress in everyone’s gardens so far…and I’m hoping that some of you have been inspired to do a bit of gardening next year as well, even if it’s just a few pots on your patio. Heck, you can even do some gardening for fall. In fact, I need to check out my seed situation again and see what I want to plant for fall. Broccoli, carrots, lamb’s lettuce and spinach are just a few great cooler weather crops. And since our temps lately have only been in the 70’s, it’s starting to make me think that the summer we had back in April/May was it.
We are starting to harvest a few things right now. In fact, last night I made pizza with some of our fresh eggplants on it — SO good… might even make it again for lunch!
I’m pretty sure we’re going to have to do something with our jalapenos this weekend. We’re thinking about stuffing a few of them and throwing them on the grill…anyone have a recipe to share for that? Or for pickling jalapenos? We still have tons of homemade jalapeno hot sauce that we made two years ago, so I don’t really want to do that again just yet.
The onions are also coming along. I don’t think they will be huge, but they should be nice. And for our first year, I think we did ok considering we got them in the ground so late. Might try these in the back garden next year though.
The sunflowers are also about to make an appearance which I’m definitely looking forward to since we have lots of them.
And the wonderful, lovely tomatoes are finally starting to ripen…it’s what we’ve been waiting for since we moved here. And so far rarely gotten to eaten since we’ve always run into some sort of complications. Now we just have to figure out where we can grow even more tomatoes next year…the greenhouse in the new aquaponics bed will hopefully be an option.
In fact, we actually have a bunch of yellow tomatoes that are already ripe and several more on their way! I’m looking forward to trying these.
We also learned this past weekend that squash tend to root deeply and this is probably why the zucchini did nothing for us and the other plants started to mildew. Since they were just swallowing up our little beds in the courtyard anyway, I think we’ll try to find a safe place fro them in the back next year with plenty of eggshells around them to keep the slugs and snails off.
Although I forgot to take a photo of our huge grape vine that is just covered with grapes (which we have to figure out if we will juice, make wine from or something entirely different), our little Riesling vine has probably tripled in size since we put it in the ground a couple months ago. Now we just need to see about getting our supports up for it so it will stop trying to eat the Christmas tree.
Harvest list this week
- 0.6lb/265g jalapenos (with probably twice as much still on the plants, I just took the huge ones)
- One 222g bell pepper
- Two eggplants (624g)
- Yellow tomatoes (224g)
- Three cucumbers (1373g)
- Stevia leaves (26g)
What to join in the garden fun and link to your own blog or images online?
Here’s how this works:
PLEASE READ THESE GUIDELINES, especially if you have never linked up before!
- You are free to join the Garden Life link up at any time. You can also skip a few weeks and then come back. It’s entirely up to you.
- Please link directly to a post about your garden, a recipe, a tutorial for gardening, an inspirational idea, etc that relates to GARDENING — not your main blog URL.
- Please only link to your own blog or photos hosted online.
- You MUST link back to No Ordinary Homestead or a Garden Life link up post in your blog post. This way, if someone else wants to join the fun, they can. You can either link with text or using the Garden Life badge.
Below is a code for the badge above. Just copy and paste this code into your post or save and upload the image to your blog:
<a href=”https://www.noordinaryhomestead.com/garden-life-link-up/“><img title=”garden-life-300″ src=”https://www.noordinaryhomestead.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/garden-life-300.gif” alt=”garden link up” width=”301″ height=”301″ /></a> - I highly encourage you to visit other participants and leave comments. This is a great way to meet new friends and become inspired about your garden! I try to visit all the blog participating as well 🙂
That’s it! Share your garden with us by linking up below!
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1. Of course you know that I LOVE your pumpkin! 🙂 And yes, they do take a LOT of room.
2. What a harvest this week! Isn’t it fun to be able to actually pick stuff from your own yard?!
3. I’m not an eggplant fan, but those look great. Also, we have an OLD grapevine in our backyard that I think is as old (or older) than our house (70+ years). Last year was the first time in the 10.5 years that we’ve lived here that we actually got grapes off of it. It was very rewarding, but then we had no clue what to do with them. We ended up de-seeding them and cooking them down and freezing the goop that we ended up with – but it’s still in the freezer. Jam perhaps? Or a grape pie?
Grapes, too?! Wonderful! Your tomatoes are looking great; I look forward to pix of your sunflowers. (btw, your photos are looking lovelier all the time.)
We’ve had a lot of trouble with our grapes in the past, but I sprayed them a few times with natural fungicide this year and we had our helper cover them with nets so the birds will leave them alone. They’ll probably be ready in about 2 weeks. Also discovered that our peach trees are bursting with fruit as well — also a few weeks out.
Thanks so much for the lovely compliment. Photography really is a fun hobby for me! And you never know what you’ll catch in the garden.
Nice eggplant. Are you growing them in a greenhouse, or out in the open? One of my plants won’t set fruit, the other has one thumb-sized fruit that was thumb-sized a month ago too. But our weather’s been wet and cold and miserable, so I think it might be a lost cause.
Have you tried spraying the mildewed zukes and squash with milk? There are studies that show it works better than commercial fungicide, and I’ve gotten good results.
We’ve grown them in our greenhouse in the past but have them out in the open this year, in a location with lots of sun. You may need to hand pollinate them to get the fruit to set — we’ve had some trouble with that in the past. When the flowers open, take a male and rub the stamen and such of the male to your female blossoms. You can tell fairly easily which are what because the female have a larger bulb at the base of the flower. They like it quite warm and lots of sun, so that could be an issue. But this year we’ve got lots of nice fruit — but only have I started hand pollinating.
Haven’t tried the milk method. I did do a baking soda spray which seemed to help a little — but considering all the rain we’ve had lately, I just don’t know if it was that or the beds or what. At least we still managed to get a few gourds out of it.
Try again your famous Szechuan beef !
We love it and as we have quite some of jalapenos in our greenhouse, this dish is often on our menue !
Yesterday we harvested about 20 tomatoes and 2 nice cucumbers, many more to be ready soon !
We decided to throw a bunch of them on the grill to char, then peeled them. Ate them with our steaks. Turned out to be very tasty and firey! More szechuan s definitely in our future though. 🙂
Hi there. Just wanted to let you know that I’ve added your hop to my Blog Hop Library. Have a great day!
Tonya
Random Deals
Nice healthy looking plants. This year has been an odd one for our garden. I think it was the crazy weather. I’ll have to link up tomorrow when I get to my regular computer.