Larive Potager

What to do with a gloomy, rainy Sunday in October....also, how is it October? My apprentice and I spent most of the morning sorting seeds we have been saving in brown paper bags.  When it is busy during the summer, I just keep deadheading flowers and throwing them in bags to dry out.   Then when things slow down, I will sit down with some good music and break the flowers down.  Last year I just saved them in normal envelopes.  This year I have these artsy fartsy ones made of craft paper.  I bought a pack of 100 online for about four bucks.  And I just tape them shut once I am sure all the seeds inside are 100% dry - otherwise they mold. True to form, I may have gotten carried away. Then Ava and I headed to the garden.  We have drying scarlet runner beans on the vine, but I wanted to bring them in and let them finish drying inside. There were way more than I thought, so I currently have them drying in my delicate...

Don't get too excited. We try watermelon every year.  We fail miserably.  Every year. We have gotten lots of cute little baby watermelon that just stall out on the vine.  We have trellised them and moved them to different spots - to no avail.  This year, with the big trees cut down and the garden directly in the soil, we tried again.   Sucess!  Kinda ...we have a beautiful vine that is still growing lots of pretty tendrils and flowers.  And we have three pretty watermelons growing - all bigger than any we have had before. Here is a picture of the biggest one.... Isn't she pretty???  She is fooling you...look at her flipped over :( Blossom End Rot.  You devil, you.   Not going to lie, I was slightly heartbroken.  Two of the three have it.  So we chopped them off and hopefully the plant will spend all its good juju on the last remaining healthy one.  Fingers crossed.

The summer squash garden took a beating the last week and I had to whack out tons of diseased plants.   So, I couldn't bring myself to totally tear them out if they had fruit.  I just pruned them all the way up and we shall see. Then I put the kids to work weeding, poured some new mulch, and tonight we will plant the fall garden in all the open spots: peas, kale, and carrots out here. Another ugly.... These poor cucumbers are aphid infested - I pulled them all, cleaned it up, and replanted a fall crop of seeds.  Not sure how fall cukes do, this is our first year trying. Sunflowers are dying out, so Ava is collecting them in the drying rack with me to save seeds... And I rigged up some seed saving bags in the back entrance so I can dead head into them easily.  Ava helps me pull seeds out and save them in envelopes for next year. Even the ugly is fun.

I took an after-rainstorm walk this morning and my backyard garden beds have officially gone wild.   Scarlet runner beans are doing their job building me a living wall in the back yard.  Also, this year they are actually giving me beans!  Last year, they just flowered but never produced.  I am going to just let them all dry on the vine for seeds for next year. My ladder collection is doing beautifully hahaha...the winter squash is is back up in the air instead of choking out the peppers and we have lots of squash growing. The tomatoes are all started to ripen so I am going to freeze them for a few days until I am ready to do a canning day.  Ava helped me harvest yesterday - by crawling into the beds like a jungle explorer.  I should have got a picture, it was pretty cute. More scarlet beans....I love them. And these baby peas all sprouted from dried peas from our spring...

So part of my 40 yr old birthday decline was the discovery that I am allergic to most of nature.  And these allergies make my body literally attack itself.  Naturally, I am a gardener with cats.  Apparently right now there is a particularly nasty allergen floating around because I am pretty miserable and second guessing every symptom - allergy? Covid?  Allergy? Covid?  For the sake of my rapidly unraveling mental health, I should probably just go get tested. With that said, I wasn't going to do much garden walking if I could avoid it, but I was lured outside by this beautiful baby... She is our first-ever mature melon.  A Minnesota Midget Melon to be precise.  She was Ava and Emma's pet project this spring and it is super exciting to see her ready to pick!  So since I was out already....here is a peek at my watermelon, looking about halfway cooked. And these zucchini that didn't get the memo that they should be dying right ...

...you try lots and lots of different things.  So far this year we have roasted zucchini, grilled zucchini, pickled zucchini.  We have mandolin-ed it up and made cold summer salads.  We have sliced it and marinated it and dehydrated it for zucchini chips.  We have grated it and made it into cookies and saved it to make into bread in the fall.   Today I breaded and air fried it.... And I totally invented a make-as-I-go salad. I have two more on the counter and four more working in the garden.   This year I have been tracking my harvest.  Mainly to reassure myself that -while this isn't cost effective by any means- I am at least coming closer to breaking even every year.  But also, to see which varieties of things work best in the garden.  I have three variety of zucchini.  Fordhook and Black Beauty are in a dead heat with 14 a piece, but Fordhook has the edge heading into the weekend because B...