I admit that other than watering I hadn’t looked at it for a week. The garden is clearly on the wane. The corn was a bust, I picked what little there was and we ate that last weekend. My tomatoes on the counter are ripe and are in the canner as I type. I found lots of beans last night! They are taken care of and in the freezer. No more ripe squash and I see no zucchini even growing. Very sad, I have really enjoyed that this summer.

There will be more summer squash in a few days. I think I finally have 3 peppers out there. I do hope they get a little bit bigger. There will be lots more tomatoes and probably beans. I am still hoping to see a winter squash turn up somewhere. And brocolli! I’m glad I didn’t pull those unindentified plants. But I think I figured out that you are meant to pick it before it turns to flowers :p Ah well, I was hoping it was going to get bigger. I still see some hope for more goodies before we are done for the year, and I can’t call it a failure. Thus far only 4 quarts of tomatoes, 8 bags of beans and all that I got to enjoy all summer long.

I have pole beans growing everywhere! For all of that plant, I picked a small amount of beans a few days ago and promptly made potato soup like my mom used to make. Potatoes, fresh green beans, onions, milk, butter, salt and pepper. I love that soup and it’s a good thing because I just ate it for four days! Today I picked a few more and decided it was an adequate amount to freeze for just me. Probably enough for another batch of soup.

In the hopes of salvaging my tomatoes from all their afflictions (fungi and slugs) I am now bringing them in not quite ripe. They only seem to get bad at the very end so these look great. I did can two quarts of them last night but I had to cut a lot of bad off the tomatoes.

I watered again and I think I had let it all get too dry. My mom said you didn’t need to water later on like this but I’m thinking I should have been right along. I have new blossoms on my squash now so I’ll be more diligent about the watering. It’s been quite a dry summer except for very early on. I’m not liking to do the watering. My water bill was $20 higher last month and I clearly didn’t water enough.

My poor corn, I thought it was looking ripe but they are so small so today I checked one. It’s a beauty isn’t it? The cob is exactly 3 1/2 inches long. They are all like that and the stalks never got tall. So I am supposing that is also a lack of water. I’m just going to pick them and enjoy what little there is. When my kids come this weekend maybe I’ll serve them corn on the cob like they’ve never seen before 😉

I believe I might have found a winter squash plant, but I see no squash on it. It is a vine one and has run across and through the pole beans with no poles and into the tomatoes and beyond. I hope it grows some squash!

This garden hasn’t been a huge success produce wise so far but it has done wonders for me. I’m totally attached to it, it’s my baby 😉 It’s gotten me outside, given me a great project and really helped my mental health.

I’ve been doing some reading and I know what I’m going to do next year. No till gardening. It sounds so healthy for the soil, you don’t have to dig the garden up, controls weeds, adds lots of yummy nutrients to the soil. I’m not sure I have enough waste to make a good compost pile but there seems to be a place in town I can get that and mulch for free. I’m already looking forward to next year. I’m sure my garden will be tons better than this one was. Then I visited a friends blog with a new post about saving seeds. That hadn’t even crossed my mind so  I’m going to give that a go. She did promise an article on saving seeds for tomatoes, squash, cukes and peppers, all of which I have in my garden. I’m stoked about the idea of saving my own seeds, and hey, even more money saved if it works!

I feel like practically an expert by now. Last year I planted a few plants in very bad clay soil. This year I had a real garden spot and it’s the first time in my life that I have planted a real garden. So here is what I’ve learned.

• There are such things as pole beans.
• If you plant pole beans, you should have a pole.
• You probably only need one kind of summer squash.
• Tomatoes would be good with a support too so they don’t all grow on the ground.
• Slugs love tomatoes.
• Beer kills slugs.
• Tomatoes can get several different kinds of fungi, esp. if you water them with a sprinkler and they are growing on the ground.
• You should water the ground with a hose, not a sprinkler.
• Corn can fall over really easily, consider support for that.
• Keep your seed packets so you’ll remember what you planted.
• If you find a random radish that you didn’t plant, enjoy!
• Sunflowers can surprisingly end up growing in your garden.
• 7 foot tall sunflower plants can fall down in a heavy rain (unless of course it really was a big animal).
• Corn can fall down in a heavy rain (see above).
• Beans are really hard to find when the pole bean plants without the poles are wrapped around themselves and every surrounding plant they can reach.
• Sunflowers make excellent poles for pole beans (until they fall down).
• Tomatoes are really hard to find when they are overgrown with pole beans.
• Don’t plant asparagus in your garden that you will be digging up every year.
• Plant things farther apart, even with poles.

I’m sure I have more education coming but that’s all I can think of for the moment. Look how much I learned in one year! My disappointments this year, the cauliflower, winter squash and catnip never grew at all. Nor the asparagus but that’s okay.

How’s that for a title? Today is my birthday. I am now old 😉

In celebration I had a beautiful fresh tomato from my garden with cottage cheese.

We had a really nasty storm last night. I went to bed early because I pulled one of my 30 hours awake things again. The thunder was scary. When I got up this morning my computer was offline. Yes, I left it on, thank the gods it wasn’t fried! So I found that the cicuit breaker blew that the modem was on, then it was all good. Until I went out to go to group. The first thing I saw was that my corn was completely flattened. Then my garage door wouldn’t open. Back to the circuit breakers, yep, that one blew too.

After I got home I tried straightening the corn up with limited success. I think I’m going to need to pack dirt around every one of them but I didn’t finish. I worked until I got that whole hypoglycemia thing going that I always seem to get when I try to do anything. Really annoying. I hope they survive. It also toppled 2 sunflowers that are inexplicably in the middle of my garden. I don’t see any other wind or storm damage anywhere, it’s very strange. I would have thought a large animal ran through there.

On a positive note, yesterday I got 6 birthday cards. I think that’s a record. Okay, one was from my insurance carrier and I’m sure they’re happy I’m still alive 😉

I did get a birthday card from one of my kids. My baby seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. I guess I’ll have to call her to tell her she can now wish me happy birthday :p

Meaning my yard. I have successfully cut down 6 trees that were growing where they shouldn’t. Not to mention pulling a virtual forest of maple trees out of my garden. The sad part is I love maples. I’d like to ditch that ugly tree in my yard and have a maple instead. I’ve spent days (between the rains) weeding flower beds, garden, and that ugly area beside my garage. My dumpster is full with more piled waiting for trash day so I can fill it again.

I had to trim the neighbors tree that was hanging over my fence. Early on I told him not to because I liked it. I don’t know what kind it is but it has viney things which stretched across the walk and attached themselves to my back porch railing. I thought it was cool. But alas, I discovered when I got the mower out for a long overdo cutting that I couldn’t get it into the front yard! That tree grew a lot in the last 3 weeks. So now it’s all trimmed nicely, my grass is all mowed. I will be ignoring the fact that it was so long that now the whole yard needs raking.

Still a lot to be done, especially beside the garage, and the flower beds and garden STILL need more weeding. I feel like I made a lot of progress though so hopefully the rest won’t be such a chore.

My mood is greatly improved. It wasn’t the work, because I couldn’t get the ambition to tackle it when I felt that lousy. I think the worst was after mostly laying around for 5 days and barely eating (can you eat with a migraine?) that I was all shaky feeling and having low blood pressure issues. I felt like I lost any muscle I finally had managed to get back on. Well, maybe I did but I came back faster than the first time. Thank goodness because I need to do a lot more work outdoors. I won’t go into how the indoors looks :p

Spiders are good for your garden and your house too I reckon if you have little bugs bugging you. Hanna at This Garden Is Illegal has a great post about Wolf Spiders. I really don’t mind spiders but I really hate the hairy ones! Yes, that would be wolf spiders.

When I was in California, we had Black Widows all over the place. They didn’t bother me much except worrying that my kids might get bit. I was always cleaning them out of the patio in the backyard. I did find out that they can play dead and they can jump really well too!

These giant webs are the most bizarre though. This one was in Texas and contained 250 specimens in 12 families. Talk about a community, that’s going too far for me 😉 Have I given you the creepy crawly willies yet?