Garden Update

One of the 2 types of green beans we planted have finally yielded a small crop.
These are GoldRush variety beans....

No, they are not ailing, they are suppose to be yellow-green in color. lol  I'll be cooking these tonight.

And in the bed out front we picked these over the weekend....

4 good sized squash. 
I grilled 1 last night for dinner(cut into slabs for Hubs and I)but have 3 left.   Tomorrow we'll have a fish fry and I'll fry up some slices of squash too.  It's like fried zucchini but yellow.

And speaking of zucchini(how can you avoid speaking of zucchini in the Summer?!)......here is what I made last week for dinner one night.....

We call it Lemon Chicken but the proper name is "Lena's Chicken".  This recipe comes to me by way of an old friend of my mother's.  The origins past there are unknown.

It's Chicken thighs dredged in flour and lemon pepper mixture(either the no salt variety or a mix of salt/no salt ones), then pan fried until the skin is browned, but not cooked all the way through.
The veggie is a mix of onions and zuke slices with a can of tomatoes(use crushed or whole) in the pan you browned the chicken in(after you pour the leftover oil out).  Put the chicken back in on top of the veggies and put a lid on the pan.  This simmers covered for 45 min. while you fix your rice separately.

Then eat it.  It is a mighty tasty way to get rid of all that zucchini if you are tired of fried zuke and zuke bread.

I need to thin out my Collard Greens soon.  I'll probably do that this weekend and use the thinnings to make a small batch of greens.  The young leaves will be more tender but they won't be as sweet as letting the first frost get to your collards before you pick them.

The tomatoes are quietly doing their growing thing.  The peppers and salad are not.  We are still waiting on the other variety of green beans, the Romano ones, to bloom.
It's been a very weird Summer in the garden.

Sluggy

Garden is In....Better Late Than Never Edition

We finally got the gardens planted about 10 days before the company started arriving last week. It was STILL May but just barely!
I am pretty worthless when it comes to digging and planting.  It's all I can do to harvest.
#1 Son wasn't here long enough to dig up my gardens this year and Hubs had been laid up with medical issues so we are late getting going this season.

I took this photo about a week ago.....

 It's green beans(vining)in the back row and radishes in the front row.
Hubs says the middle row is collards but I am not sure of that.  It's a 20 foot row and he planted it heavily.  I didn't think I had enough collard seed to have this much sprouting!lol

We'll see later on what he actually planted I guess.

No photo of the front yet but it's tomato plants, yellow squash and colorful bell peppers.

And here is what I've got going on the dog run.....

I've tried to get rid of this eyesore on Craigslist but no one seems to have the cash to take it off our hands right now.  Since the male beagle passed away, the female just doesn't want to be out there in the good weather.  So it sits unused taking up real estate in the backyard.
So I have hung gutters on it.

I'm copying my friend Brenda in Maine.....

These are the salad gutters hanging on her shed from a couple years ago.

I can't nail gutters onto my shed(besides, it doesn't get enough sunshine anyway), so I used the dog run and we wired them on.

And the greens are starting to come up now......

We've got a 3rd gutter piece to hang up yet and plant.  What's great about this is I can harvest without killing my back AND it keeps the resident yard rabbits out of my salad!
At least until they learn to scale chain link fencing....

So now we are keeping the dog run.
Might have to expand this gutter thing and hang some on the back end of the run too.

Sluggy

Garden Harvest....Picking Before the Hard Frost

I had Hubs go pick what was still left in the garden, except for the Collards on Sunday morning.  We experienced the first frost of the season this past week so all the plants(besides the collards and eggplant)are dead.
Here is our next to last harvest for the year.....

That's a mess of jalapenos, some green bell and Italian roasting peppers.
The vine holding our last lone butternut squash had a surprise baby squash on it.  The baby is only about 4 inches tall so we'll see if we actually get anything edible from it once it's peeled and all.lol

I had picked about 14 tomatoes, the last for the year, in between this harvest and the one mid-October.  I used some when I made a batch of fresh pasta sauce, but things got away from me here and I ended up letting some of them go bad, so back into the garden bed they went with the rest of the compost.  I'm not counting those in the garden totals, nor the ones that went into the sauce since I didn't think to weigh them first.

Update on the Eggplants....
The plants are still alive and kicking.  Since the temperatures have dropped significantly here in the last few days, I'm not sure how much more time I've bought those eggplants to grow but anything helps, right?

I'll be picking them in the coming week I think, along with the collard greens.
*Update*
I just went out to check on the eggplants and the temps. last night did the plants in so I had to pick them.  More on them in a day or so....

This Harvest----
56.4 oz.
TOTAL....3 lbs.  8.4 oz.

Garden Harvest Weight Total to date....91 lbs.  3.02 oz.

Sluggy