Best & Worst of Fall Gardening

Zeke checks out the pea fence.



It's been a cool and rain filled September and much of my fall garden has been a bust.  The green beans were great despite the deer damage but only half the peas made anything and I had to plant them twice!  The lettuce has done very well and the pelleted seed I planted last weekend sprouted last night so I have hopes of lettuce into November. 

As of this morning however, all the broccoli and cabbage plants are gone.  What the worms didn't eat, the critters consumed. I was really  hoping for a good crop of fall cabbage and broccoli to freeze for the winter.  Ever since I read an article about a guy on Long Island who harvests big fields of broccoli in January I've been determined to have Cole crops in my fall garden.

Zeke looks for mice under the row covers. Little Joe waits patiently for some mouse action!

Next year (what a familiar refrain!)  I'll have to plant them under high hoops covered over with floating row cover if I want to remain organic. Otherwise I'll have to put up the electric fence around the garden - which is a pain to mow around, and dust the heck out of every thing with Sevin insecticide dust.  I keep Sevin around to dust the chickens for lice. It's the only time I use an insecticide and trust me, if you have ever been around a lice infested chicken house, you will loose all scruples against employing poison to kill the little blood suckers!

My three raspberry plants continue to give me a serving of luscious red raspberries every day. My brother gave me the plants last fall from his patch. I think they are the breed called Heritage. They are fall bearing on this year's canes and pretty easy care. So far the deer have left them alone. I'm placing an order this weekend for 25 more plants which I will split with my brother.  We both have visions of a raspberry cash crops in our futures.

Pipster is bored with the whole garden thing.

The sweet potatoes are coming along well. And the kale is looking super!! Now I have to decide how I'm going to eat the kale. I confess, I've never eaten kale in my life but it is suppose to be very, very good for you, so I'm going to learn to like it somehow.  Who knows, I might actually like it - I hope so anyway. I seem to remember kale in soup and something about fried kale crisps?  Any ideas out there?

Chloe Returns to the Chicken House

Chloe on the run

Chloe, my only Araucana chicken, had been missing on and off for a month.  She wasn't in the chicken house when I went to lock up one evening and I figured some coyote or Red Tail hawk had stolen her away.

Shortly after that, I was late letting the flock out of the house one morning and found Chloe waiting for me on the chicken house stoop.  That night, again she was not in the house at bed time, but the next morning when I arrived to feed the flock  she popped out from under the chicken house.  I decided she must have a nest under there.

Living under the chicken house, sitting on a nest of eggs is a very dangerous thing to do.   About three weeks ago I noticed green eggs - Chloe lays green eggs- spilling out from under the chicken house. Then last Friday morning I noticed green egg shells scattered on the ground in front of the chicken house.  I hadn't seen Chloe for at least two weeks and decided that she was probably dead by raccoon attack. Raccoons love chicken and eggs both and it looked like someone had had a feast.

But Monday evening when I went to close up the chicken house, Chloe was back on her roost.  She has rejoined the flock and seems to have given up on her nest. She's a very lucky little hen. Something obviously got her eggs, but luckily she escaped.

Araucanas are one of my favorite breeds of chickens.  They come from Peru originally and look a bit more like a hawk than a chicken.  They are very gentle, sweet natured birds and lay pastel blue, green and pink eggs which are said to be higher in Omega 3's and lower in cholesterol than other eggs.  If I decide to purchase chicks next spring as apposed to hatching some of the flock's eggs,  I'll probably order Araucanas. 

It's officially fall and I plant lettuce in celebration.

Here's the biggest of the fruit on the Cinderella pumpkin vine. If you look closely you can see the dark green beginning to change to a lighter color.  Hopefully in a week or so it will be orange!

We had an inch of rain last night so this morning was a perfect time to plant the lettuce seeds I'd just purchased from Cooks Garden's online catalog.  I purchased two red and green leaf lettuce mixes, one regular (what ever that means) and one Asian blend, both in a pelleted form.

Picture of Asian mix from Cooks Garden online.

I've never planted pelleted seeds before.  They came in a regular seed packet but inside was a little capped plastic tube with 20 yellow seeds about the size of a good sized tomato seed.  One package had exactly 20 seeds, the other had 24 seeds.  I planted them in two rows - one row for each package - in the 4 x 8 foot raised bed that had most recently grown green beans.

It's a beautiful fall day and I'm hopeful the seeds will germinate quickly and give me lettuce in about 35 to 40 days. Cooks suggests sewing the lettuce in large pots, like the picture above, or seeding directly into the garden and covering with floating row cover.  I've got plenty of row cover so I don't anticipate any problems other than deer. Last year I had good lettuce right up until Thanksgiving. That's the goal this year as well.



It's early morning so you get my shadow in the picture, but I wanted to show you the pretty flowers on the Siam basil. I think I will always grow this variety from now on. I love the flavor of this herb and I really like  its sturdy upright habit , It produces pretty flowers that are great in bouquets and very attractive to bees.

 

S'More Pie

S'More Pie

Last summer I was hungry for S'Mores, the graham crackers, Hershey bar, toasted marshmallow treats of summer out door grilling.  It was my turn to bring dessert to the family get together and I didn't think I wanted to have a bunch of adults standing around a gas grill trying to toast marshmallows, so I came up with a pie version of S'Mores.  It was a very big hit.  Last week, it was my turn for dessert again and my niece mentioned my S'More pie.  She had made me pecan pie the week before for my birthday, so I obliged her with S'More pie.

 

S'More  Pie

 

You start with a graham cracker crust which you can buy pre made, but its easy to make. 1 1/4 cups graham cracker crumbs, five tablespoons of butter and 1/4 cup sugar. Melt the butter. Put the crumbs and the sugar directly into a pie dish (the deepest one you have, at least 9 inches).  Pour the melted butter over the crumbs. Using a fork mix all together until the sugar and crumbs are all incorporated with the butter. Press the crumb mixture into the bottom and sides of the dish to form the crust. I use the bottom of a metal measuring cup to mold the crumbs.  Bake at 350 degrees for 6 to 8 minutes.  Remove the crust from the oven and layer it with miniature marshmallows and at least one bar of Hershey's milk chocolate divided into its little squares. Put the pie shell with the marshmallows and chocolate back in the oven for five minutes to soften and toast the marshmallows.

 

Marshmallow layer first, then chocolate.





 Now make chocolate pudding.  I make mine from scratch from my mother's recipe. It takes some time but it is the best chocolate pudding and pie filling you will ever eat. 

 

Pudding

3/4 cup sugar

3 heaping tablespoons all purpose white flour

3 level tablespoon Hershey cocoa

2 1/2 cups milk (I use 2 % and its just fine)

3 egg yolks

 

Meringue Top

3 egg whites

2 tablespoons sugar

Pinch  cream of tartar

 

Put all the  pudding ingredients in a heavy bottomed saucepan and whisk together.  Place over medium high heat and cook, stirring CONSTANTLY with the whisk, until the mixture comes to a boil.  Remove form the heat.  Beat the egg yolks slightly in a bowl.  Temper them with the hot chocolate mixture by swirling the whisk in the hot pudding and plunging it into the eggs and whisking them. Do this two or three times more to warm the eggs so they won't scramble.  Whisk the tempered egg yolks into the pudding mixture. Return to the heat and cook 3 minutes more. Remove from the heat and pour into the pie dish on top of the marshmallows and chocolate pieces.  You will have some left over.  You can pour it into a dish to serve as pudding or pour it into individual pudding cups. Refrigerate left over pudding. 

 

Now beat the egg whites with the remaining sugar and cream of tartar until they hold stiff peaks.  Top the pies with the meringue and return to a hot oven - 400 degrees or more - for about five minutes or until the meringue begins to brown. Remove from the oven, cool completely and refrigerate until time to eat.

Spread the meringue all the way to the edges of the pie as it will shrink when it baked.

 

Yum!

 





Cinderella Pumpkin

The great pumpkin vine

It's official.  The vine with the huge speckled leaves that sprouted from the compost pile is a pumpkin and one of my favorite to boot.  It's a Rouge vif D'Etampe, an heirloom variety from France more commonly known these days as Cinderella.  The nickname comes from the belief that this variety of pumpkin was the one the the fairy Godmother's used to make the coach that took Cinderella to the ball.

It is also reported to be the pumpkin the Pilgrims cultivated and served at the first Thanksgiving dinner, though I am skeptical of that. I thought the Native Americans taught the Pilgrims to grow pumpkins and that pumpkins are native to the Americas. Of course the New World had been discovered over 100 years before the Pilgrims landed so I suppose the French had time to develop this variety of pumpkin. Anyway, its a nice story. And this variety  is a good shape (sort of flat) to use as a soup tureen if you want to serve pumpkin soup. It's also a good pie pumpkin. As I said, one of my favorites.

The vine is now full of little round green pumpkins but the first one that came on is now big enough that its obviously a Rouge vif D'Etampes (although at this point it is a beautiful dark green). I am hopeful that at least this first one will ripen in time to save some seeds for next year!

I splurged and bought two packets of pelleted lettuce seed from Cook's Garden that are suppose to produce fall lettuce in 45 to 55 days. They arrived over the weekend and I've been so busy with work that I've not had time to do more than prepare a bed for them.  They are going into the bed that most recently held the first planting of green beans.  Last night I pulled out what was left of the beans after the deer had munched on them and tossed the vines to the cows. I tilled the bed with my spading fork and tonight I plan to sew the seeds. It's chilly right now, down in the forties but I'm hopefully of a warming trend in a few days so the seeds will sprout. I've never tried the pelleted seeds before. For what I paid for them they should be shrouded in gold!  

 

The Great Pumpkin

The pumpkin is getting bigger every day. It's about ten inches across now, which gives you some idea of the size of the leaves. Most of them are about 18 inches across!
 

I think it is  official. The plant that grew with elephant sized leaves out of the compost pile is a pumpkin.  It had set a small fruit about two weeks ago, but I wasn't really sure what it was until this week. Since the rains last week, the plant is setting fruit like crazy and there are little pumpkins about the size of good sized oranges all over it.  But this, the first and for a while, only pumpkin on the vines is growing best of all. It is now a good ten inches across and growing quickly.  I think its the only pumpkin on the vine that has a chance to mature before frost. I hope it makes it, I'd love to save some seeds.

Here's one of the new little pumpkins that have come on since the rain. The bigger pumpkin was this size two weeks ago.

Rain, Glorious Rain!

Pippi & Zeke look for mice from a dry perch.
 

I woke hearing rain!  It rained five hours straight.  I fed and watered chickens and calves in the rain and didn't care that I got wet.  The rain let up long enough for me to take a walk to check on the cows and open some gates to pastures, then more rain.  The garden loved it  - so did the weeds.

Deer chomped beans.  The leaves are mostly gone, revealing the beans underneath which is great for picking but means most of the blossoms that would produce more beans - about two weeks worth - are gone. Fortunately they didn't destroy the second patch and I was able to cover it with Remay. Still, in the last three days I've picked three gallons of beans.
 

The cats did not.  I've been picking green beans for three days and the cats can't figure it out.  For them, the garden is a great place to hunt.  I've been applauding the cats for keeping my garden safe from rabbits and such so was devastated to find all the lovely broccoli plants munched down to the ground. I lectured the cats on keeping the rabbits out of the garden and the next morning there was a full grown headless rabbit carcass on my back porch. Spooky! Did the cats really understand what I said to them?

Turns out it wasn't rabbits eating the broccoli, but deer.  They got one of the patches of green beans on Friday night.

The mystery vine that ate the compost pile.


 

Looks like it might be a pumpkin?  Time will tell.