Monday, July 12, 2010

Sunday at the Farm & In the Garden

It was a beautiful day on Sunday so DH & I took a ride to a couple of farm stands I like.

I got....
6 ears of corn
6 pickling cukes
5 yellow squash
3 large tomatoes
2 bell peppers
2 zucchini
2 onions
1 patty pan squash
1 qt. of wax beans

I paid $12.55 for this local goodness.

Other than the corn which I grilled already for Sunday's dinner & the tomato I used for the BLTs at lunch, here are my plans for it all....
*make a batch of bread & butter pickles to eat off of all week
*make fried zucchini
*make squash casserole
*make stuffed peppers-I have half a leftover red bell pepper I'll stuff for my portion that night since I don't care for the green kind
*mix green beans with the wax beans for a simple side dish one night/blanch & freeze the rest of the wax beans
*not sure about the patty pan yet
*sliced tomato for Caprese Salad-it's not a roma tomato but it will have to do

That's a whole week's worth of side dishes and then some.

I talked to the woman who runs the small family farm nearby on Sunday.  She said the last week's heat spell and lack of rain is nothing but bad news for them.  Everything is drying out.  Her son dug down 4 feet and there is no moisture in the soil to that point.  Wells are drying up too.  I hope we get some good soaking rains soon!  I've got an order in for a bushel of beans, roma tomatoes, red peppers and dozens of ears of corn to put up for fall but this won't happen if the rains don't come soon. 8-(

I am getting very impatient with my own garden here.  I need to go harvest more collards and the lettuce is big enough to pick too but nothing else is ready to pick. 



The peppers & green beans are finally budding though....yah!

And we have golf ball sized maters now!!  No sign of the late blight so far.....crossing fingers this year!


I took some photos of the garden on the 2nd but I guess everyone is pretty bored with this kind of stuff so I won't share them.  But I do have to share these.....

This is the barrel by the back deck where I put kitchen compost-ables in the winter, when it's took bitter outside to walk all the way back to the compost pile.  About a month ago these 2 volunteer tomato plants shot up!lol  So I stopped dumping kitchen waste in there for now.  I just continued to put grass clippings in to act as a mulch, as things in containers tend to dry out so fast, and I don't want to have to water these constantly.
And over by the back deck fencing these volunteers starting growing.....
I had Morning Glories here last year.  When the vines died I just left them on the fencing until winter and pulled them down and threw them into the garden bed to compost.  I guess there were some seed pods left on that vine, huh?lol

I'd better get outside now and cut those collards before I have to go to pick up one of the doggies from the vet's office.

Sluggy

7 comments:

  1. I'm not bored with your garden!!! Don't stop!
    I love when we get fresh veggies from the stands around here. I haven't been able to get a good tomato though. No flavor at all.
    Have a great week!

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  2. Good haul at the farm stands. I love patty pan squash but haven't seen any in years. I wanted to plant it last year but couldn't find any seeds or plants. Ma-Maw and Pa-Paw used to grow it and Ma-Maw was an amazing cook. She sliced the patty pan squash and did an egg wash then corn meal--then she fried them. YUM!! Things are extremely brown and dry down here too--about half our trees look dead now too--hopefully they will be okay come next year.

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  3. Don't you just love the freebie plants that spring up unexpectedly like your tomatoes? That's great! And I'm not at all tired of the pics!!! I don't have a garden this year (except for the pot of basil on the front porch), so I'm gardening vicariously through the blogosphere :)

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  4. The produce looks delicious! I love going to local farms for produce. Well, we only go to one, but I love it. LOL!

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  5. Lovely garden pictures. I have been using coffee grounds around my tomatoes to try to control the blight. I can't remember where I read that but so far we have no signs of it. I had read that you had to go 3 years with no tomatoes after you have the blight in your garden. That is just not possible for us. ;)
    We had hundreds of baby tomatoe plants start up when we emptied the compost pile around the lilacs. They were thicker then our grass.

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  6. I never bore of seeing others gardens and talking about it, keep it coming!

    I love your idea about the barrell for compost during the winter. I have one right by my back door on deck I use for a little water garden. It's a pain and I let it dry up this year. Hubby keeps asking me what I'm going to do with it. Now I know. ;)

    Volunteer plants are the funnest! Last year I had three volunteer tomatoe plants that did better than any I had set out. lol

    This year there has been no signs of any volunteers except one lonely stalk of corn. lmao I even tried to pull it up (cause it's in my walk way of garden) and it just came back with more vigor.

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  7. Where's the butter? Not the beef!!!

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